Students at a New York yeshiva rallied Tuesday, demanding that two former concentration camp guards living in Queens be sent back to Ukraine. Jakiw Palij and Jaroslaw Bilaniuk, both 83 and born in Ukraine, remain in the United States despite their service as guards at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland. During the Tuesday afternoon protest in front of Ukraine’s U.N. mission in New York, students from the Rambam Mesivta school in Lawrence, N.Y., demanded that Ukraine accept the two men. “We see no reason why the Ukrainian government should drag their feet on this matter,” Rabbi Zev Friedman, the school’s dean, told JTA. Friedman said extradition is necessary since Palij, who has already been served with a deportation order and had his citizenship revoked, continues to “play the system” through legal maneuvers. Both men have been in the United States since 1949.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
