Archbishop Valerian Trifa, the Rumanian-born cleric who was accused of being a Nazi collaborator and a rabid anti-Semite, died Wednesday in the town of Cascais, Portugal, at the age of 72. He reportedly suffered a heart attack recently.
Trifa was deported from the United States in 1984 after a prolonged campaign by Jewish Holocaust survivors, Jewish organizations and the U.S. Justice Department. He was ordered to leave the U.S. in 1982, but he was unable to find a country that would admit him until two years later, when Portugal accepted his request to settle there.
Trifa was accused of being a member of the Iron Guard, a Rumanian fascist group similar to the notorious Nazi storm troopers in Germany. One of the major charges against Trifa, who was until his deportation the spiritual leader of 35,000 members of the Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate in Grass Lake, Mich., was that he incited attacks against Jews in a speech on January 20, 1941 in Bucharest. His speech touched off four days of violent attacks in which 300 people, mostly Jews, were murdered.
The Justice Department began its proceedings against Trifa in 1975. He was deported on the ground that he concealed his past when he entered the United States in 1950. In 1980 Trifa voluntarily surrendered his citizenship, but the U.S. continued nonetheless in its efforts to deport him. The Archbishop agreed in 1982 to be deported, claiming that his trial was putting a heavy financial burden on his church.
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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.
