8—THE BULLETIN—Thursday, July 31, 1975
Life sentence for gestapo chief
HAMBURG—Ludwig Hahn, 66, the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) chief in Warsaw during the Second World War, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the deportation and murder of more than 230,000 Warsaw Jews in 1942.
He was found guilty of sharing responsibility for transporting 300,000 Jews and Poles to Treb-linka concentration camp between June and October, 1942. The victims either died on the way or in the camp gas chambers.
He was also held jointly responsible for the shooting of 5,000 Jews by the Gestapo in Warsaw.
Hahn's plea that he did not know why the victims were sent to Treblinka was dismissed by the court as "unbelievable". The evidence showed that Hahn was fully informed, the court ruled.
The judgement noted that Hahn's former superior officer and some of his subordinates had described him as a "special Jew-hater."
The trial was deferred several times on the ground of Hahn's ill health.
LUDWIG HAHN
Hahn is already serving a 12 year jail sentence passed in 1973 for complicity in the murder of thousands of Jews and Polish prisoners in Warsaw.
Three of Hahn's subordinates, Hans Baecker, 61, Helmut Orf, 58, and Herbert Hundt, 62, have been charged with selecting Jews for the gas chambers in the Warsaw Ghetto and with torturing and killing many Jews on their way
JCNS.
to the railway station.
CJC MfErS WITH OUlf OIL
MONTREAL — A Canadian Jewish Congress delegation led by Sydney M. Harris, president CJC, made representations to Jerry McAfee, president of Gulf Oil Canada Limited and senior .officers of the company. The meeting was held in connection with the $50,000 contribution made by the U.S. Gulf Oil Corporation to a public relations firm in Lebanon for futhering Arab propaganda in the United States.
The Gulf contribution to the Arab propaganda cause was recently revealed by B. R. Dorsey, chairman of Gulf Oil Corporation, to the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Foreign Relations.
McAfee pointed out that the Canadian company is autonomous and is not involved in any way with the political donation made by the U.S. Gulf Oil Corporation. The officers and management of Gulf Oil Canada Limited at all levels are independent of the U.S. company. The testimony given to the Senate Sub-Committee on Foreign Relations by U.S. Gulf Oil's Chairman had no application whatsoever to Canada.
Following a lengthy discussion with McAfee, it was agreed that Gulf Oil Canada would issue a future statement.
Toronto woman murdered husband
TORONTO — An Ontario Supreme Court jury has found Rywa Regina Wertman and Manfred Baron, one of her lovers, guilty of conspiring together and with others to murder her husband, 52-year-old Isaac Wertman, between August, 1973 and May 15, 1974,
The two were remanded for sentence. The maximum sentence for conspiracy for murder is 14 years.
Neither Baron, who is 23, nor Mrs, Wertman, who is in her forties, showed any emotion when the jury of 10 men and 2 women announced its verdict.
Crown counsel Robert McGee told the jury that the case involved the classic motives of love and money. The long, bizarre and violent story had begun in 1945, when the Wertmans were married in Poland, he said.
Both had been in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Their marriage, which lasted nearly 29 years, had been uneasy and restless, and Isaac Wertman finally left their home on December 25, 1973, after many Quarrels.
Mrs. Wertman became involved with one lover named Max Gold-
stein. Manfred Baron, the Canadian-born son of German immigrants to Canada, met her shortly afterwards when he became her pupil in a dancing instruction class, later taking personal instruction at her home.
The relationship between the two in the words of Justice Edson Haines' instruction to the jury, "changed from the vertical to the horizontal" and the 22-year-old youth became the lover of the much older woman.
The remains of Isaac Wert-man's truncated and incinerated body were found and identified in May, 1974.
Reject JDL
NEW YORK—The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, the umbrella organization of American national and local Jewish defence agencies and community councils, has rejected an application for membership by the Jewish Defence League.
Membership application was rejected because of the JDL's "history of encouraging and, indeed, undertaking acts of violence," which were "harmful to our cause and morally unacceptable." JCNS.
Activist Marie Azbel asics for 'pardon' to go to Israel
NEW YORK-Declaring that "on the occasion of great celebrations even criminals a re given pardon," Moscow physicist activist Mark Azbel has appealed to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Soviet Academy of Sciences president M. Keldysh "to grant me a pardon on the 250th anniversary celebration of the Academy" to occur in October, "to enable me to go tb Israel to join my son," the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry has learned.
In the "almost 2 1/2 years since I first asked for my exit-visa," Azbel stated, "my life has been made a hell.
"Imagine that every word you say to your wife, daughter or friend is being heard by strange
Hebrew U. awards Riga protester
and hostile ears, that your every movement is being followed by KGB agents, that acquaintances try not to meet with you fearing the consequences, that detentions and visits by police to your apartment are made at any time of the day or night threatening to itry you for crimes you did net commit-that all this has become routine for you.
"These years of waiting have made me at the age of 43 a ^^chronically sick man, have destroyed'my Wife's health and are threatening the health of my five-year-old daughter.
"1 therefore appeal personally to each scientist to telegram Leonid Brezhnev and Soviet Academy of Sciences president M. Keldysh.
"If every scientist will do so I hope that the voices of thousands will be heard and my family will have—at last—a normal life."
Prof. Azbel, the SSSJ said, is one of the organizers of the Moscow scientists' sentinar and was recently held in Odessa for several weeks and not permitted to return home.
Now he is being threatened with both an army reserve cailup and trial if he continues the seminars.
Meanwhile, the SSSJ has learned, Prisoners of Conscience Yakov Suslensky and Yosef Mish-ner have been transferred to the notorious Vladimir Prison.
SENDER LEVINSON, of Bendery in Soviet Moldavia, with his wife Tsilla and their son. Levinson, who wants to settle in Israel, has been sentenced to six years for "speculation." JCNS
American doctors appeal for Stern
JERUSALEM-The Hebrew University's 50th anniversary celebrations reached a climax recently with a convocation in the Mount Scopus amphitheatre where the opening ceremonies were held in 1925. The event consisted of a world conference of Friends of the university in many countries.
A highlight of the convocation was the first presentation of the Aharon Katzir prize to Eliyahu (Ilya) Ripps, 28, the former Riga mathematics student who set him-
self alight in 1969 in protest against anti-Jewish pressure in the Soviet Union and Soviet emigration restrictions to Israel.
Ripps who was confined to a mental institution for some two years after his Riga suicide attempt, arrived in Israel with his mother in January, 1972.
Nine internationally known scholars and public servants were awarded honorary doctorates at the convocation.
ATLANTIC CITY - The American Physicians Fellowship urged freedom for Dr. Mikhail Stern, the imprisoned Soviet-Jewish physician, and denounced the World Health Organization's recent condemnation of Israel in resolutions adopted at the closing session of its four-day meeting here.
The APF, an organization of 8,700 dues-paying Jewish physicians of the United States and Canada, held its meeting as part of the American Medical Asso-
ciation's annual convention.
Its resolution on Dr. Stern charged that the trial and imprisonment of the 55-year-old endocrinologist from Vinnitsa, Ukraine was "an act of persecution and vindictiveness following Dr. Stern's approval of the Israeli immigration of his two sons."
The resolution appealed "to the members of the Medical Workers Union in Russia and the Council of the USSR Scientific Medical Society, , , to mobilize and exert their influence so that the Soviet
authorities will understand that fundamental justice and concern for human rights demand the freedom of Dr, Stern."
The resolution on the WHO accused that United Nations agency of "political perversion" in its recent resolution condemning Israel for its medical treatment of the Arab inhabitants of the administered territories "despite the fact that the WHO investigator unconditionally ap-' proved Israel's health services in those areas."
»«:r"A«'"''^^^^^^    TORONTO LIBRARY
ACCUSED OF BIAS
NEW YORK-A Torah scroll taken by vandals from the Ark of the Yeshiva and Mestifta Zichron Melech in the East Flat-bush section of Brooklyn was later found torn and splattered with paint in a near-by playground.
This is the same yeshiva, then known as the Yeshiva of Eastern Parkway, which was set^afire six years ago, resulting in the'destruction of seven Torah scrolls. The scrolls were interred after a funeral service attended by hundreds of mourners.
The latest act of vandalism is the climax of a long list of anti-Semitic attacks on the school.
REJECT CHARTER BAN
JERUSALEM —Transportation Minister Gad Yaacobi has flatly rejected recommendation by a firm of American experts that Israel lift its ban on charter flights in order to boost its sagging tourist trade.
TORONTO — A rabbi whose family perished in the Holocaust has accused the Toronto public library system of discrimination and censorship in rejecting his book about the persecution of Jews,
However, the chief librarian, Henry Campbell, said he was sure that he could persuade Rabbi David Kirshenbaum of London, Ontario, that it was only a misunderstanding.
Rabbi Kirshenbaum said he had offered the book, entitled: Religion: Love or Hate? for sale to 25 North American libraries and had received acceptance letters from all except Toronto's,
From Toronto, he said, he got only an ^iinsi^ed rejection and
was told later that the book, his tenth, "attempted to inflame hatred of all Christians," partir cularly Germans and Poles.
The rabbi admitted that his account of persecution over the centuries was controversial, but argued thatToronto libraries have many anti-Semitic books, including Adolf Hiter's Mein Kampf,
Campbell said: "The main reason is that we didn't require it in our branch system. We already have many books that go into the whole subject quite thoroughly,
"And frankly, in some instances the staff members who analysed it felt it could have been slightly inaccurate in its presentation of some parts."
AUSTRIANS URGE BAN ON HITLER PUBLICATIONS
VIENNA — A group of Austrians of different political affiliations demanded banning of a series of the last days of Hitler published in a Vienna tabloid,
In'^ letter to the government, the signers protested the publication of the series, "The Catacomb," by Uwe Bahnsen and James O'Connell in the mass circulation paper "Kronenzei-tung."
They said the series minimized the inhuman regime of the Nazis and showed Hitler as a man "who was not so bad."
The personality of Hitler was completely falsified in the series, according to the group.
The "Kronenzeitung," which has a cii:culation of more than one million and is Austria's biggest newspaper, last year interrupted
a series on Jews in Austria after wide protest against its anti-Seraitirorientation.
lOins Germon army
BONN — The chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Werner Nachmann, 50, is off on four weeks military training.
Nachmann, who was recently awarded West Germany's Order of Merit by President Walter Scheel, says his decision to do voluntary military training is to demonstrate the closeness of German Jews to the new West German State.
Under present laws, Jews are not obliged to do military service in the Bundeswehr,