Benjamin Halevy (Hebrew :בנימיןהלוי,6 May 1910 –7 August 1996) was an Israeli judge and politician.
Halevy was born Ernst Levi in Weissenfels,Germany [1] and educated at the Universities of Freiburg,Göttingen and Berlin. He immigrated to what was then British Mandatory Palestine in 1933 after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany,and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Halevy was a Magistrate Judge in Jerusalem during the Mandate period,from 1938 until Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. He served as a District Judge and the President of the Jerusalem District Court until 1963 when he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel.
Halevy was the sole judge in what became known as the "Kastner trial," a libel lawsuit against Malchiel Gruenwald,a hotelier,who accused Rudolf Kastner of having been a Nazi collaborator. Halevy allowed the scope of the trial to be expanded and ruled that Kastner had indeed,in his words,"sold his soul to the devil." Kastner was later assassinated and Halevy's ruling was mostly overturned by the Supreme Court. The manner in which he conducted the trial was criticized.
Halevy was the sole judge at the trial of the Kafr Qasim massacre's perpetrators,and in his decision famously wrote,"The distinguishing mark of a manifestly illegal order is that above such an order should fly,like a black flag,a warning saying:'Prohibited!'" He was later a judge at the trial of Adolf Eichmann,along with Yitzhak Raveh and Moshe Landau.
In 1969 Halevy resigned from the court in order to enter politics. He was elected to the Seventh Knesset for the Gahal (Herut-Liberal Bloc) list,and again to the Eighth Knesset in 1973 after Gahal had merged into Likud. He later left the party to sit as an independent MK. In the 1977 elections,he was returned to the Knesset on Dash's list,but the party split up after a year,and Halevy joined the Democratic Movement,before leaving to again sit as an independent. During the Ninth Knesset he also served as deputy speaker.
Today a street in his birthplace Weissenfels is named after him.
He was married for many years to Luba. They had a son and daughter. After Luba's death he married Michal Halevy.
Herut was the major conservative nationalist political party in Israel from 1948 until its formal merger into Likud in 1988. It was an adherent of Revisionist Zionism.
Gideon Max Hausner was an Israeli jurist and politician. Between 1960 and 1963,he served as Attorney General and was later elected to the Knesset and served in the cabinet. Hausner is most widely known for heading the team of prosecutors at the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.
RezsőKasztner,also known as Rudolf Israel Kastner,was a Hungarian-Israeli journalist and lawyer who became known for having helped a group of Jews escape from occupied Europe during the Holocaust on the Kastner train. After World War II,he was accused of having failed to inform the majority of Hungarian Jews about the reality of what awaited them in Auschwitz. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having "sold his soul to the devil," a charge that was overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel in 1958.
The Kastner train is the name usually given to a rescue operation which saved the lives of over 1,600 Jews from Hungary during World War II. It consisted of 35 cattle wagons that left Budapest on 30 June 1944,during the German occupation of Hungary,ultimately arriving safely in Switzerland after a large ransom was paid to the Nazis. The train was named after Rudolf Kastner,a Hungarian-Jewish lawyer and journalist,who was a founding member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee,a group that smuggled Jews out of occupied Europe during the Holocaust. Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann,the German SS officer in charge of deporting Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland,to allow over 1,600 Jews to escape in exchange for gold,diamonds,and cash. The deal was controversial and has been the subject of much debate and criticism,with some accusing Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis,while others argue that he made difficult choices to save lives.
Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was a mid-ranking SS commander who was Commissar of all German concentration camps,and Chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary during the German occupation in 1944. He is best known for having traded Jewish lives for money during the Holocaust.
Malchiel Gruenwald (1882–1968) was an Israeli hotelier,amateur journalist,and stamp collector,who came to public attention in 1953,when he accused an Israeli government employee,Rudolf Kastner,of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Micha Lindenstrauss was an Israeli judge and the State Comptroller of Israel between 2005 and 2012.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Israel. Capital punishment has only been imposed twice in the history of the state and is only to be handed out for treason,genocide,crimes against humanity,and crimes against the Jewish people during wartime. Israel is one of seven countries to have abolished capital punishment for "ordinary crimes only."
Zvi Henryk Zimmerman was a Zionist activist,jurist,and Israeli politician. He is also known for his cooperation with Henryk Sławik to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Haim Herman Cohn was an Israeli jurist and politician.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party,an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS),and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference,at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this,he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945,but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960,he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency,and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem,following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Moshe Landau was an Israeli judge. He served on the Supreme Court of Israel from 1953 until his retirement in 1982. Landau was the fifth President of the Supreme Court,from 1980 to 1982.
Yitzhak Raveh was a German-born Israeli judge who was one of the panel of three judges presiding over the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The other judges were Moshe Landau and Benjamin Halevi.
The Eichmann trial was the 1961 trial in Israel of major Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and brought to Israel to stand trial. Eichmann was a senior Nazi party member and served at the rank of Obersturmbenführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS,and was one of the people primarily responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution. He was responsible for the Nazis' train shipments from across Europe to the concentration camps,even managing the shipment to Hungary directly,where 564,000 Jews died. After World War II he fled to Argentina,living under the pseudonym "Ricardo Clement" until his capture in 1960 by Mossad.
Events in the year 1961 in Israel.
Events in the year 1960 in Israel.
The Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Malchiel Gruenwald,commonly known as the Kastner trial,was a libel case in Jerusalem,Israel. Hearings were held from 1 January to October 1954 in the District Court of Jerusalem before Judge Benjamin Halevi (1910–1996),who published his decision on 22 June 1955.
Gabriel Bach was a German-born Israeli jurist,who was a judge of the Supreme Court of Israel and was the deputy prosecutor in the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann.
The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law is a 1950 Israeli law passed by the First Knesset that provides a legal framework for the prosecution of crimes against Jews and other persecuted people committed in Nazi Germany,German-occupied Europe,or territory under the control of another Axis power between 1933 and 1945. The law's primary target was Jewish Holocaust survivors alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis,in particular prisoner functionaries ("kapos") and the Jewish Ghetto Police. It was motivated by the anger of survivors against perceived collaborators and a desire to "purify" the community.
Jerusalem District Court is an Israeli District Court located in the Jerusalem District. It was originally established by the Mandatory Palestine government and has continued its operations under the judicial system of the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948.
International | |
---|---|
National | |
Other |