No Verdict Yet

DEBRA NUSSBAUM COHEN
Special to The Jewish News

Debra Nussbaum Cohen writes for
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Fire Strikes
Ukraine Shul

Moscow (JTA) — A fire com-
pletely destroyed the grand hall-
way of the five-story Central
Choral Synagogue in Kharkov,
Ukraine. But the blaze, which is
believed to have been an arson
attack, did not -reach the build-
ing's sanctuary, according to the
synagogue's rabbi, Moshe
Moskovitz.
The damage caused by the
fire is estimated at about $1 mil-
lion. No one was injured.

N

ew York (JTA) — Is Jakob
Reimer a perpetrator of
horrors against Polish Jews
during the Holocaust or is
he a victim of time and place, a for-
mer prisoner of war who suffered at
the hands of Nazis?
In the first Nazi trial ever held in
Manhattan, the U.S. government
has sought to strip Reimer of his
U.S. citizenship as a preliminary
step toward deporting him because
he allegedly lied on his application
to enter the United States in 1952.
Judge Lawrence McKenna's ver-
dict in the trial, which concluded
two weeks ago, is not expected for
several months.
Prosecutors said during the trial
that he would have been denied
admission to the United States if he
had admitted then, as he did in
1992, that he had murdered a Jew in
a Nazi camp and that he was part of
a unit that was responsible for some
of the worst wartime atrocities in
Poland.
While the trial in Federal District
Court is, officially, a technical pro-
ceeding related.only to Reimer's citi-
zenship, the testimony offered by a
historian, several Holocaust sur-
vivors and Reimer himself have pre-
sented a dramatic re-creation of his-
tory.
A core issue in Reimer's trial has
been memory.
According to his attorney, Ramsey
Clark, the memories of Reimer and
the survivors who testified against
him are unreliable.
"With all these trials, we're seeing
testimony entered from the 1940s,
the '60s and the '80s. It varies
tremendously," Clark said in a brief
interview outside the courtroom.
"It's basically a product of human
memory."
As a result, the truth is impossible
to establish, Clark, a former U.S.
attorney general, said in his opening
argument.
Survivors who testified spoke of
the cruelty they had witnessed at
several ghettos in Poland, but none
could identify Reimer.

Global Digest

Polish Property
Issue Resolved

Trial of admitted Nazi
hinges on veracity of witness memory.

Reimer's memory held clear recol-
lections of the rose bushes outside
the houses in the small village where
he grew up in Ukraine, and of his
stopping to buy vodka on the way to
joining his regiment as an officer in
the Soviet army when World War II
broke out.
He was one of some 2,500
Ukrainian prisoners held by the
Germans who were made auxiliary
S.S. troops at the Trawniki training
camp near Lublin in eastern Poland.
He fondly remembered dinners
with his girlfriend's parents while his
unit was stationed in the Polish
town of Czestochowa beginning in

September 1942.
But while in Czestochowa, Lublin
and Warsaw, Reimer testified, he
knew nothing of the persecutions by
Trawniki men in those cities' ghet-
tos.
"I have no recollection of
screams," Reimer said while being
questioned by his attorney. "I never
saw the ghettoes. I never saw anyone
shot or pushed around. I never have
seen any cruelties in Czestochowa or
anyplace else."
Approximately 50,000 Jews were
confined in Czestochowa's ghetto

New York (JTA) — Poland's
Jewish community and interna -
tional Jewish groups resolved a
controversy on the return of
Jewish communal properties in
-
Poland.
The agreement, which pro-
vides for the return of 5,500
properties, marks the last major
deal on the . return of Jewish
communal property in Eastern
Europe.
Last year Jewish groups and
the Polish government agreed to
create a foundation to administer
the properties, but Polish Jewish
leaders later balked, saying that
only the nine existing Polish
Jewish communities had a right
to reclaim communal property.

Brazil To Get
Nazi Artworks

New York (JTA) — Four art-
works looted by the Nazis are
reportedly being turned over to
the Brazilian government. The
works, including paintings by
Pablo Picasso and Claude
Monet, are valued at nearly $6
million.
The paintings were sold to
wealthy Brazilian families after
Nazi officials fled to South
America with their plunder after
World War II.

VERDICT on page 40

9/11
1998

Detroit Jewish News

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