Summary
Rudolf Israel (Rezho) Kasztner, as Lahav introduces him at the opening of Chapter 7: a Hungarian Zionist journalist from Kluz who became the chief negotiator with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest in 1944, secured the 1,685-person Bergen-Belsen transport to Switzerland, and in Israel rose in MAPAI to spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry by 1952 — while accusers held him a cynical opportunist who had sacrificed the multitude to save himself and his family (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1441-1470).
Details
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In Budapest from March 1944 Kasztner negotiated with Eichmann enjoying privileges that set him apart from other Jews: he kept his automobile, was allowed to travel, his telephone was not disconnected, and he was not required to wear the yellow Star of David (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1450-1462).
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The survivor list of the transport he negotiated included a disproportionate number of his friends and relations; by the time it left in summer 1944 most of Hungary’s rural Jews had been murdered, almost two-thirds of Hungarian Jewry in less than a year (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1455-1465).
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His post-war report to the Zionist Congress in Basel was one version among others; the congress’s committee of inquiry reached no conclusions (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1460-1468).
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His pamphleteer accuser Malchiel Gruenvald, seventy-one at the trial’s start, had lost fifty-two of fifty-eight immediate relatives in the Holocaust, on the figures given (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1463-1470).
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Halevy’s district court judgment of 22 June 1955 held he “had sold his soul to Satan”; the Supreme Court on appeal (Agranat writing) found Gruenvald had libelled him on three of four counts — he was not a Nazi collaborator, had not laid the groundwork for mass murder, and had not collaborated in Becher’s embezzlement — while the fourth count, that he tried to rescue Becher from justice after the war, was true (see Kasztner Trial) (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1471-1732).
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He was assassinated in March 1957, while the appeal was pending, by men linked to right-wing, ultra-nationalist LEHI circles who were convicted of his murder; Agranat’s opinion refrained from stating he was assassinated, referring to him as “having passed away”, and his widow sent Agranat a bouquet of roses after the judgment (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1500-1760).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Kasztner Trial, Simon Agranat Haim Cohn, Shmuel Tamir, Benjamin Halevy, Eichmann Trial