The Jerusalem District Court sentenced Yisrael Yehezkeli, a 71 year-old Holocaust survivor, to five years in jail, with two years suspended, for throwing acid in the face of the Israeli lawyer representing convicted war criminal John (Ivan the Terrible) Demjanjuk.
Yehezkeli was convicted March 13 of aggravated assault for tossing the acid at chief defense attorney Yoram Sheftel, severely injuring his eye.
The attack took place Dec. 1 at the funeral of another Demjanjuk attorney, Dov Eitan, who committed suicide jumping from the top floor of a Jerusalem hotel.
Yehezkeli himself is not a concentration camp survivor, having spent the war years in Russia, but his family was lost in Treblinka.
The court Wednesday also ordered Yehezkeli to pay Sheftel $6,000 (the bill of the Boston ophthalmologist who operated on his eye), plus $5,300 compensation for his suffering.
After the sentencing, Yehezkeli said he felt no regret for his attack, expressing his astonishment that in he would appeal, could have received a 20-year sentence.
Judge Ezra Hadaya, in his judgment, said that “the crime cries to high heaven.”
Demjanjuk, a 69-year-old Ohio autoworker born in the Ukraine, was sentenced to death April 25, 1988, for crimes against humanity, crimes against a persecuted people, war crimes and crimes against the Jewish people.
He was convicted a week earlier after the court firmly established his identity as “Ivan the Terrible,” the Nazi guard who operated the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp where some 800,000 Jews died.
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.
