Prime Minister Levi Eshkol today appointed a special commission to inquire into charges of police brutality against Hebrew University students who, last Thursday, staged a demonstration protesting the visit to the university by Dr. Konrad Adenauer, former chancellor of West Germany, now on a visit to Israel at the Government’s invitation.
The commission, to be headed by Y. Salomon, an attorney, of Haifa, was named by the Premier after the full Cabinet discussed the police-student clash, and a report on the events submitted by Dr. Eliahu Elath, president of the Hebrew University. In his report, compiled by a committee that he had appointed under the chairmanship of a university professor of law, Dr. Elath made the following charges:
One student was thrown off a roof, and was beaten while slipping down; another student was trampled under foot and clubbed by policemen at the same time; one woman student, who was pregnant, was slugged by the police; the police did not try to use persuasion to halt the demonstration but used “excessive force”; 12 students were injured as well as 10 policemen.
After the Cabinet’s decision to have an inquiry commission named, and the Premier’s action in appointing the body, student leaders at the university announced that their immediate demands had been met and that they would, as a result, return to classes tomorrow. They had declined to attend classes since the clash.
ADENAUER VISIT TO BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY CANCELLED; RIOT FEARED
A visit Dr. Adenauer had scheduled to make to Bar-Ilan University, at Ramat Gan, was cancelled for fear that students there might repeat the kind of demonstration that had greeted him at the Hebrew University.
Meanwhile, Dr. Adenauer today attended services at the Church of the Beatitude at Capernaum, and visited Christian shrines at Nazareth. Both at Capernaum and Nazareth, the ex-chancellor, a devout Catholic, was seen engaged in deep meditation and prayer. However, he told newsmen after the church services: “This is not a religious pilgrimage but mainly a political trip, aiming toward further improvement of relations between Israel and Germany.”
He was still wearing today the Remembrance Badge with which he was decorated last week when he visited the Yad Vashem, the shrine here to the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs of the Nazi holocaust. After the church services, Dr. Adenauer visited Kibbutz Afikim, and showed great interest in the life and activities of the Israeli settlers there. Last night, he spent at Tiberias. Tomorrow, he said, he would visit former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, at the latter’s home at Sde Boker.
Dr. Adenauer underwent more heckling in Israel yesterday. He visited the settlement of Nahalal, a smallholders’ cooperative, where the residents cheered him — but, at the same time, he was booed by other persons who had gathered outside that settlem There, police arrested five persons for the vigorous protest demonstration.
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.
