IT WAS A HOT SUMMER’S day in July 1949 when a group of young Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers stopped for refreshments at a small coffee shop in Ein Kerem, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem. They sat down at a table, and the shop owner, Joseph Paal, came over to take their order. At the sight of the one-eyed Joseph, one of the soldiers, Staff Sgt. Yerachmiel Yanovsky, became agitated. He recognized the owner: “Blinder [Blind] Max” had been his Blockältester (barracks elder) in Block 10 of the Jaworzno concentration camp, an auxiliary camp of Auschwitz, and had beaten and tortured Yanovsky and his fellow prisoners. Yanovsky confronted Paal, who insisted that he had never heard of Jaworzno or of “Blinder Max.” Paal’s wife of three years, whom he had married after the Nazis murdered his first wife and children, was also present. She told the soldiers that now, in their new country, it was time to forget the past.1
Some survivors, such as Paal’s wife, saw immigration to Israel as an opportunity to leave the past behind and start anew. But many survivors did not and could not forget their tormentors. A significant number of them believed that the new state should not be soiled by those who had collaborated with the Nazis—that it was a place for building a new and pure community.
The image of Blinder Max in Ein Kerem stuck in Yanovsky’s mind. Four months later, in October 1949, Yanovsky met with another former inmate from Block 10, David Levi, and told him that he had seen Blinder Max. At Levi’s prompting, the two went to a Jerusalem police station and filed a complaint. In February 1950, the police ordered Paal in for questioning. Paal remained adamant that he had never served as a Blockältester in Jaworzno.
The policeman called Yanovsky into the interrogation room and sat him across from Paal. When Paal continued to deny the accusations, Yanovsky screamed at him in Yiddish: “You don’t know me? You didn’t hit me? You don’t know that I was one of the inmates in Block 10 in Jaworzno? You dare tell me that you are not Blinder Max?” Paal paled and answered, “Yes, I was in Jaworzno, and if I was there, does that make me a criminal?” The police released Paal shortly afterward, but not because they believed he was innocent. They could not continue to hold him since in the newly established Jewish state no law applied to alleged collaborators.2
Paal was not the only alleged collaborator released by the Israel Police for want of a law. In February 1949, the morning newspaper Ha-Boker published an open letter from a reader named Dov to the minister of justice, Pinchas Rosen. Dov described how a few days earlier he had been sitting at his desk in the civil registry when, to his amazement, a new immigrant whom he knew as the “commander of Jewish forced labor camps in upper Silesia” came into his office. This person, Dov wrote, had “helped the occupier arrange for the annihilation of Jews.” Dov immediately filed a complaint, and two days later the police summoned both the accused and Dov himself.
The police questioned the suspect and decided to arrest him. At that moment, the man pulled out a document bearing a police letterhead and signed by Yerachmiel (Yaron) Lustig, head of the Israel Police Criminal Investigation Unit. The document stated that “one cannot prosecute a person in Israel for crimes conducted outside the State of Israel.” After seeing the suspect walk free, Dov turned to the Polish consulate in Tel Aviv and demanded that the Polish authorities submit an extradition request to the State of Israel to have the accused sent back to stand trial in Poland. Dov ended his open letter to the minister of justice with a rebuke: “We, the survivors of the camps, see our persecutors from these very camps walking around the country with equal rights each and every day. We are forced to demand justice from the courts of foreign countries.” It was time, Dov implied, that the State of Israel enact a law that would make it possible to prosecute these criminals in Israel.3
One Knesset member pointed out the “saddening and abnormal situation” that if “Goebbels and Göring, cursed be their names, were among us today, the hand of the law could not reach them.” How could the State of Israel criticize other nations for not trying their collaborators, he asked, if it avoided prosecuting its own “war criminals”?4
In the first two years of Israel’s existence as a state, 220,000 immigrants arrived from Europe, and the number of incidents involving former functionaries grew. The Rehovot police took into custody a woman whom residents at the new Kfar Bilu immigrants’ camp accused of the deaths of several women in a Czechoslovak concentration camp.5 A day laborer at Kibbutz Givat Brenner spotted a kapo from Auschwitz and summoned the police to arrest him.6 A survivor confronted an IDF soldier sipping coffee at the Eisen Café on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv and accused her of being a member of the SS.7 In Haifa, two police officers detained a Jew whom they identified as a functionary in the camps in Germany.8 In the new immigrants’ camp of Beit Lid the police arrested a twenty-nine-year-old woman, a former barracks commander in Auschwitz.9
“In the past two years there have been dozens and possibly even hundreds of such instances,” the journalist Yaakov Gal wrote in the popular afternoon daily Maariv. The police would arrest suspects and then release them again within twenty-four hours. “Indeed, it seems that in our country there is no law with which one can bring these kinds of war criminals to trial,” he wrote. His use of the phrase “war criminals” implied that he saw these Jewish functionaries and Axis war criminals as one and the same.
The term “war criminals” was commonly used in this period in reference to Jewish functionaries. But this usage ignored the difference between Jews and non-Jews under Nazi rule. Whereas Jews could not escape the Nazis’ ultimate goal of destroying every Jew, non-Jewish collaborators frequently joined the Nazis out of ideological affinity and with the hope that Germany’s victory would benefit them. Only after the Jungster trial (Chapter 6), which drew a distinction between Jews and non-Jews in relation to the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, did the use of the term “war criminal” in reference to Jewish functionaries cease for the most part.10
Applying the term “war criminal” to Jewish functionaries not only drew an equivalence between Jewish and non-Jewish collaborators but also pointed to a common goal in Israel and Europe of removing soiled elements from society. An opinion writer in the morning daily Davar complained that Israel was a safe haven for the “Jewish criminals and crooks whom foreign states have ejected.” The writer cited a man whom a foreign court had in absentia sentenced to death for murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews—and who was presently strolling Tel Aviv’s sunny streets and enjoying his new job and home. This kind of criminal, the writer pointed out, was liable to bring “disaster upon our country, violating state order and the general wellbeing of its society.” For this writer, as for others, the presence of these corrupt individuals threatened to blemish the new society, which strived to serve as a “light unto the nations.”11
To deal with the functionaries, the police needed a tool that would allow it to respond to complaints against former functionaries and resolve its inability to arrest the suspects. Police Inspector Joseph Gorski wrote to Yerachmiel (Yaron) Lustig, head of the Israel Police Criminal Investigation Unit, and to Israel Police commissioner Sahar Yechezkel:
Due to the lack of suitable laws in existing Israeli legislation, [criminals] are not being prosecuted here for crimes that they committed in Europe. On the contrary, the paradoxical situation is that many war criminals … are finding a safe haven in Israel. A large number of Jewish “kapos” and other “privileged” individuals are already in Israel, and the heads of security forces and the courts cannot prosecute them. I ask you, sirs, to take the necessary steps … to create suitable laws that will make it possible to bring these criminals to justice.12
In October 1949, the director-general of the Ministry of Police, Ram Salomon, replied to Gorski, saying, “I wish to inform you that the Ministry of Justice is preparing a bill related to war criminals and collaborators. It is hoped that this bill will be brought to the Knesset in its next parliamentary session.”13
Before the Ministry of Justice presented the “war criminals bill” to the Knesset, some survivors spotted a non-Jewish Slovak whom they identified as a collaborator. On December 17, 1949, the Israeli Hungarian-language paper Új Kelet (The New East) reported that new immigrants from Slovakia had sighted “a notorious leader of the Hlinka Guard who had actively participated in the destruction of the Slovakian Jewry.” An open letter from an unnamed reader to the minister of police, Bechor-Shalom Shitrit, described how this Slovak, Andrej Banik, had “participated in shoving Jews into train cars that took them to the death camps. He put my uncle and his family in a car and they never returned from that journey.” Banik and his wife, Julia Mandel, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, were in Israel en route to Canada, the reader wrote, where “they hope to hide from suspicious eyes and continue their good life without interference while enjoying the property that they stole from murdered Jews.” The letter writer ended with an appeal to the minister of police: “I ask your honor not to allow this murderer to continue fleeing the full weight of justice.” Although no law existed in Israel to try war criminals, the editors added, “It is the duty of the legal authorities to arrest Banik.… The attorney general will find the appropriate clause by which to put Banik in the dock to be tried.”14
The next day, in Beit Lid, a policeman named Tsvi Roth read the open letter in Új Kelet and inquired among the immigration camp inhabitants about Banik. They told him that Banik indeed lived in the immigration camp. On December 20, 1949, the police arrested him in tent 244 in the camp.15 That same day, at around 10 A.M., Yitzhak Freiman, a man in his forties who was dressed in work clothes and had a scar above his eye, entered the police station.16 Freiman told the commander, Sgt. Nathan Rabinowitz, and another policeman that in 1939 he had served as a translator in the 29th Battalion of the Hungarian army on the newly drawn border between Hungary and Slovakia, near Roznava. Banik, dressed in the uniform of the Hlinka Guard (Hlinkova garda), the Slovakian fascist militia, was patrolling the other side of the border.17 Freiman, dressed in a Hungarian military uniform marked with a yellow star, watched as Banik abused Jews being deported to Slovakia. In one instance, he saw him stop a sixty-five-year-old attorney, Lajos Grossman, strip him, and take his gold wedding ring. Banik then noticed Grossman’s gold teeth and pulled them out of his mouth. Freiman attempted to come to Grossman’s rescue, telling the Slovak that no law required the killing of people. In response to these words, Banik pulled out a dagger and slashed Freiman above the eye.
It took him six weeks to recuperate, Freiman stated. Once back at his post, he again observed Banik abusing Jews. This time, a Roznava Jew named Jacob Gutelon arrived at the border crossing with his three-year-old grandchild in tow. Banik eyed a small backpack that the child was carrying, threw the child to the ground, and pressed his boot on the child’s throat. The child choked to death. From the backpack Banik pulled out a small Torah scroll, two marriage certificates, and two death certificates. Freiman concluded his testimony by stating without further evidence that “I estimate that with his own hands Banik killed nearly 45 families.”18
Over the next two weeks the police investigated Banik, first at the Beit Lid police outpost and then at the police headquarters in Tel Aviv. First the investigator, Sgt. Shmuel Menlas, listened to the suspect’s account of his life. Banik said he had grown up in Lastovce, a small village near the Slovak-Hungarian border. Between September 1938 and March 1939 he had served in a Slovak militia, where he wrote propaganda pamphlets against the Hungarian forces and also served as a guard on the Slovakian border with Hungary. In words that seemed to indicate that he had indeed served as a member of the Hlinka Guard, Banik said, “Until March 1939 I worked on the border in civilian clothes, and I had a band with a special symbol. It was a blue band. [Following Slovak independence] in March we received military uniforms.” After Hungary occupied parts of southern Slovakia in March 1939, Banik escaped to Michalovce. “I was not in the army, but we received a uniform and instruction in the use of arms, and we received a salary for guarding the border.” A month later, after the redrawing of the border between Slovakia and Hungary, the army replaced them, and Banik quit his position in the militia. Then Banik joined the Hlinka political party as a clerk and eventually became a journalist.19
After Banik finished his account, the investigators questioned him. Had he been a member of the Slovakian fascist militia? “I was not a member of the Hlinka Guard,” he responded, seemingly contradicting his earlier statements about his work on the border. Yes, Banik admitted, his father had paid 300,000 korunas for a textile shop in Secovce previously owned by Willey Klein, a Jew. After the war his father had voluntarily compensated Klein for his losses.
The police learned that en route to Israel from Czechoslovakia by way of Italy, Banik and his wife had attempted to leave the convoy of new immigrants. The heads of the convoy, however, refused to return his passport, and Banik had no choice but to come to Israel. The police seem to have suspected that Banik had joined the group of Jews immigrating to Israel only as a means of escaping Czechoslovakia. Asked to explain his attempt to leave the convoy, Banik responded that his wife had just wanted to enjoy the Italian scenery before traveling to the Holy Land. The investigator then asked Banik to explain his reasons for coming to Israel. Banik replied that, as a Catholic, he wanted to see the sacred sites of the Holy Land. He had also heard about the heroism of the Israelis during the War of Independence and wanted to observe it for himself, he said, seemingly trying to flatter his investigators’ national pride.20
Banik was not the only non-Jewish suspect arrested by the Israeli police. Some survivors, betrayed in the past by their neighbors, suspected all non-Jews as having been collaborators. In one instance in November 1951, a new immigrant from Hungary identified Alfred Miller, a non-Jewish Hungarian waiter at the Passage Café in Tel Aviv, as the person who had handed him over to the Nazis. The police arrested Miller, who denied the accusations. Asked why he had come to the Jewish state, he answered that he wanted to live in a place where the land was not drenched in innocent blood. Members of the Tel Aviv–based association of Hungarian Jews came to his defense, testifying that Miller had in fact saved young children from the hands of the Nazis. Months later the police cleared his name.21
Rumors also circulated in the late 1940s that Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis had joined the Arab forces and were wandering the country. Another rumor held that Eichmann had mingled in the community of survivors “with a grown beard and payot [sidelocks], speaking with his victims in Yiddish or Hebrew.” These rumors, as well as the arrest of Banik, would help influence at least one Knesset member to call for passage of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law as a means not only to prosecute Jewish functionaries but also to prevent Nazis from coming to Israel.22
Two months after Banik’s questioning, the police decided to drop the case against him, and notified the Czechoslovak consulate to prepare for his deportation from Israel. Israel’s immigration minister, Moshe Shapira, signed the expulsion order.23 Then, for unknown reasons, the police shifted course and confiscated Banik’s passport. Despite strong suspicions, exacerbated by a report from “a friendly diplomatic source,” that Banik’s request to celebrate Christmas in a Jerusalem church with the Czechoslovak consul was a front for a planned escape across the border to Jordan, the police still had no legal basis to arrest him. But the police would not permit his exit from the country, either. Banik moved in with Salesian priests in Nazareth and worked in the church gardens.24
In March 1950, the Ministry of Justice introduced the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law in the Knesset.25 Just two days later the Knesset unanimously approved a related measure, the Crime of Genocide (Prevention and Punishment) Law, based on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide approved by the UN Assembly in December of 1948. While the two statutes in front of the Knesset were closely related and complemented each other, the Crime of Genocide (Prevention and Punishment) Law aimed to prevent future “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” whereas the bill addressing Nazis and Nazi collaborators was a retroactive and extraterritorial measure that would allow Israeli courts to try individuals for events that had taken place between 1933 and 1945 in Nazi-occupied lands.26
In early discussions of the bill, some Knesset members raised the question of what kind of court would try the defendants. “The criminals cannot be judged in an ordinary court, because the crime is not ordinary and so the procedure cannot be ordinary,” said Nahum Nir (Rafalkes), chair of the Knesset Law and Justice Committee. “I would suggest nominating five well-known people and giving them carte blanche, and I would tell them that they are not constrained by procedure and should judge according to their conscience, since this is not an ordinary trial.” Knesset member Yona Kesse agreed: “If we wish to be true to this tragic phenomenon in our history, we must establish a court of jurors.” Kesse added that the trials would have greater moral and symbolic significance if they were conducted in honor courts, as had been the procedure in the DP camps and in Jewish communities in Europe. In that view, moral judgment was more momentous than legal judgment.27
The minister of justice categorically rejected the idea of establishing a special court or a panel of jurors to try the collaborators. The existing state courts would hear the cases, Rosen determined. At a time when the government was laboring to move organizations from their fragmented pre-state status into a unified state system (mamlakhtiyut, “statism”)—for example, by uniting the militant underground movements into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or the divergent educational systems run each by a different political party into one national system—it was unthinkable to suggest splitting the justice system into parallel systems of criminal and honor courts.28 Also, members of the justice system, both policy-makers and prosecutors, seem to have sought harsh punishments. Honor courts and their social punishments did not suffice for the type of crime these functionaries had committed.29
While the name of the measure presented to the Knesset, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, implied that it targeted both Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Minister of Justice Pinchas Rosen, who introduced the bill, did not foresee any scenario in which a German perpetrator would face trial in Israel. “Nazi criminals who are guilty of the crimes listed in this law will not dare to come to Israel,” the minister said. For him and for the majority of Knesset members, the law addressed the German Nazis only symbolically, pointing to the Jewish state’s hostility to the regime that had annihilated millions of Jews. “In reality,” Rosen said, “the law will apply less to Nazis than to their Jewish collaborators who are here in the State of Israel.”30
A few Knesset members did, however, believe that Nazis might someday face trial in Israel. Knesset member Haim Rubin explained that while it was not currently feasible, it might be the case in the future that Israel would seek the extradition of Nazi criminals. Another Knesset member, Eri Jabotinsky, surmised that one day some Nazi might by chance fall into the hands of Israelis.31 Knesset member Mordechai Nurock, who had lost his wife and two sons in the Holocaust, thought that Nazis had already penetrated Israel. During a June 1949 discussion he bemoaned, “On a daily basis former residents of Nazi concentration camps encounter Nazis and Jewish traitors who aided in the annihilation of members of the Jewish people, and the authorities can do nothing against them.”32 Rumors of non-Jews searching for refuge in the Jewish state were bolstered with the arrest of Banik in December 1949, but the majority of Knesset members saw the law as only symbolically aimed at German Nazis; practically, it would be used only in the case of Jewish functionaries.33
Knesset members took to the podium to express their views on the new bill. Yakov Gil, a former chief rabbi in the Jewish Brigade, expressed his bewilderment (shared by many other Knesset members) that this bill, the first to touch on the death of a third of the nation, lacked the word “Jew.” The law seemed to adopt the spirit of the Nuremberg trials, which had almost completely avoided mentioning the unique fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. It was time, Gil said, for “the government of an independent Jewish state, after two thousand years of the absence of such a state, to assert itself and write: ‘against Israel and humanity.’ ”34
In further discussions on the formulation of the law, the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee decided to add to the law’s first paragraph, which already spoke of “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes,” the offense of “crimes against the Jewish people.” Deputy Attorney General Haim Wilkenfeld, who drafted the law, had based it on the wording of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, substituting the word “Jews” wherever the convention used the phrase “members of the group” in its first five subclauses, as for example in the first subclause, where he replaced “killing members of the group” with “killing Jews.” He also added to the offense of “crimes against the Jewish people” two new subclauses that focused on cultural genocide and anti-Semitism: “destroying or desecrating Jewish religious or cultural assets or values” and “inciting to hatred of Jews.” The Knesset committee adopted the new clause specifying “crimes against the Jewish people” and after a short discussion decided to put it first, followed by “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes.” The only justification for passing this unprecedented law, Knesset member Zerach Warhaftig reasoned, was that it pertained to Jewish victims, the prime target of the Nazi Final Solution.35
While the legislators agreed on specifying the unique offense of crimes against the Jewish people, which portrayed the Jews as victims, the majority refused to differentiate between a Jewish offender and a Nazi offender. The law speaks only of an offender as “a person,” making no distinction between a Nazi SS man and a Jewish kapo. Wilkenfeld explained this choice by asking how one could legally distinguish collaborators from Nazis: “If there was a Nazi in the concentration camp who beat the people in the camp, and at the same camp there was a Jewish kapo who did the exact same thing, how could we apply a different clause to each of them?” One should consider only the act itself, not the person committing the act, he insisted in the face of criticism. The principle of equal justice under the law demanded that one should not allow the distinguishing of one group from another, he held—a position that disregarded the different historical status of Germans and Jews in the context of Nazi rule, and the fact that Jewish lives were illegal within Nazi Germany.36
Responding to a suggestion to permit exempting a person from criminal responsibility for his actions if he acted under duress or in self-defense, Knesset member Israel Bar-Yehuda (Idelsohn) of Mapam—a mining engineer by background who despite his lack of legal training was, according to another Knesset member who studied law, a brilliant legal mind—argued that such circumstances were irrelevant to the question of guilt or innocence. If a person was found guilty of acts of collaboration, only then could the court consider the circumstances of those actions in deciding whether to reduce or commute the offender’s sentence.37
“I am opposed to … this kind of person being relieved [of legal responsibility] because he did what he did out of cowardice,” Bar-Yehuda asserted. He continued: “If a person was told that if he did not kill another person, his daughter would be raped and killed, and, to save his daughter, he killed someone else, he is not, to my mind, relieved of criminal responsibility, even if he did all he could to prevent it.”38
Behind this argument, in which Bar-Yehuda was joined by friends from his Mapam party, lay deeper cultural and political considerations. Mapam was closely associated with two of the youth movements, Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair and Dror, that had played pivotal roles in the rebellions instigated against the Nazis in occupied Europe, including the most famous of them, the Warsaw ghetto uprising. During the war, members of these two leftist youth movements were strongly opposed to the Jewish Councils and Jewish police and regarded all who joined them as traitors. In the cultural milieu of Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s, Mapam positioned itself as the representative of these rebels and took a strong position against any conciliatory approach toward those it considered to be collaborators. In their view, anyone who served in the Jewish Council or police, and certainly kapos, had crossed the line of loyalty and joined the enemy side.39
Knesset members from other parties, including the governing party, Mapai, objected fiercely. Using the case of members of the Jewish Councils, Zerach Warhaftig of the Ha-Poel Ha-Mizrachi party, who had labored to save Jews in Lithuania during the war, accused Bar-Yehuda of both lack of knowledge and falsification of facts:
There were instances in which a Jew accepted a position in the Jewish Council under duress after having been threatened, and there were instances in which individuals accepted such positions so as to do everything possible to lighten the burden on other Jews. It would be a crime on our part if we did not allow the court to relieve a person of criminal responsibility were it convinced that the defendant in question had accepted his appointment under duress and had done all he could have done to prevent the results of his actions.40
Knesset member Jacob Klivnov also rebuked Mapam members of the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee:
Whoever thinks of the situation of a Jew there, not with a biased perspective, but rather with a feeling of shared destiny, cannot but see that it was not betrayal, but often—and possibly in most cases—an act of courage and national loyalty on the part of those Jews who joined the Jewish Council. One could not have left those tens of thousands of Jews without any help or guidance. How can one say of a Jew who joined the Jewish Council that by his mere enlistment he became a collaborator with the Germans and cannot be forgiven? I protest against this view.41
The leader of Mapai, David Ben-Gurion, also refused to criticize Jews who had lived through the Holocaust, including members of the Jewish Councils. Furthermore, he opposed the view held by some, including members of Mapam, that failing to reprimand those who had served as members of the Jewish Councils would weaken Israeli society and especially its youth. In a letter sent in 1955 he wrote that “the young generation in the Land of Israel has grown up hearing the stories of the Shomer, the Haganah, and the IDF and there is no fear that the Jewish Councils … will influence our children.”42 To the contrary, members of Mapai feared that overstating the role of rebels in the Holocaust might overshadow the greater Zionist lesson to be gleaned from the Holocaust: namely, that the Jewish people in exile, unlike those in the Land of Israel, lived a passive life in which they could not defend themselves.43
In the end, the Knesset adopted a version of the law that allowed the court to exempt someone from criminal responsibility or reduce his sentence only in the rare instances in which that person acted under the immediate threat of death or, alternatively, “did or omitted to do the act with intent to avert consequences more serious than those that resulted from the act or omission, and actually averted them.”44
Before final passage of the bill, however, members of Mapai and Mapam engaged in a debate about the proper way to treat policemen, kapos, and members of the Jewish Councils. Mapam’s Bar-Yehuda thought the law should grant the court the authority to exempt from legal responsibility those who had been members of the underground as well as those who, through their actions, had sought to prevent more dire consequences.45
Joseph Lam, of the Mapai party, refused to accept the idea that only a representative of the underground or someone who acted to prevent more dire consequences would be exempted from legal responsibility. He, like the leader of his party, Ben-Gurion, took a conciliatory approach to European Jewry:
Knesset Members, do not forget that this paragraph [no. 10] speaks of a persecuted person. We should not demand from a persecuted person—for the sole purpose of proving to history that the Jewish people is clean and kosher—that he should have behaved in a different way from the way we all would have behaved. If I fight for the rights of that victim, it is because in him I see all of us—how we might have behaved under those circumstances; for I refute [the argument] that you and I would have behaved any differently from many of those persecuted.
Lam’s argument was supported by a majority of five committee members, and Bar-Yehuda’s provision was turned down.46
Despite some opposition, the view that anyone who held office under the Nazis was incriminated, dominated among the leaders of the legal system as well. This new law, Minister of Justice Rosen told the Knesset, would provide accused survivors an opportunity “to prove their innocence and integrity in front of an authorized court.” From this perspective, functionaries were guilty unless proven innocent. Rosen then cited a passage from the Hebrew Bible, “Therefore shall thy camp be holy” (Deut. 23:14), implying that the law would help purify Israeli society.47
With passage of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law on August 1, 1950, the police and prosecutors had in their hands a tool with which they could charge former functionaries. It was now time to try Paal, Siegel, and Banik, along with a dozen others.