Tomorrow, exactly eight weeks after the commencement of their trial here before Judge Owen Cecil Corrie, Abraham Stavsky and Zwi Rosenblatt are expected to hear whether or not they have been judged guilty of the murder of Dr. Chaim Arlosoroff, brilliant young Zionist Labor Leader, at Tel Aviv on the night of June 16, 1933.
Horace Samuel, attorney for the defense of the accused, both of whom are Zionist Revisionists, announced that his summation speech, begun afternoon yesterday, would be brought to a close at eleven o’clock tomorrow. The verdict, it is believed, will be issued during the afternoon.
Sweating because of the unbearable heat in the courtroom, Samuel devoted his efforts today to an attempt to prove that the testimony given by Mrs. Sima Arlosoroff, wife of the murdered man who was with him when he was shot, is untrue in its entirety and that the evidence brought by the prosecution concerning the comparisons between footprints left by the murderers and those of Stavsky and Rosenblatt “collapses absolutely” because the trackers called as witnesses by the prosecution were incompetent.
The challenge against the veracity of Mrs. Arlosoroff’s statements on the witness stand was made by Samuel during today’s morning session of the trial, when he declared that in her first statements to the police Mrs. Arlosoroff had described both of the men who halted her and her husband as they strolled on the beach at Tel Aviv as Arabs.
Moreover, Samuel said, nine other witnesses testified she had told them the murderers were Arabs, one of them definitely so. Mrs. Arlosoroff was quite definite in her assertion that one of the men had an Arab accent, Samuel continued. If, as David Yellin, a linguistic expert, had testified, there is a marked difference between the accents characterizing the enunciation of Hebrew by an criental Jew and by a European, and if, as Mrs. Ariosoroff had said, the man who flashed the light in Dr. Arlosoroff’s face spoke Hebrew, that person could not have been Stavsky, for Stavsky is a European Jew who does not speak Hebrew, Samuel argued.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.