Talk:Rudolf Kastner

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1 Featured articles in Hebrew Wikipedia
2 More information
3 Other controversial assassinations of Jewish leaders in Israel's history
4 Spelling of his name
5 Judge Halevy's indictment
6 Keinermeize
7 Hannah Szenes

[edit] Featured articles in Hebrew Wikipedia

WikiProject Echo has identified Rudolf Kastner as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the Hebrew language Wikipedia.

[edit] More information

I added a huge amount of information. Flyerhell 07:44, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, the article needed it. I think we still need documentary sources for the facts in order to claim a neutral view on the controversy. --Hoziron 13:42, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

No problem. I really enjoyed reading and writing about Kasztner. I had never heard of him before I recieved a newsletter in my email box that mentioned him. I found it kind of hard to find sources, so I based the majority of what I wrote on that one reference than I posted. I agree that we need more information about the controversy. I tried being NPOV but with so little information it was difficult. There are a few gramatical errors in the article that I will fix and if I get a chance I will try to find some more information and post it. Flyerhell 21:31, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

I have a lot of high-quality sources on this topic and will contribute to the article when I find the time. The controversy is not completely accurate and also the libel trial and appeal is worth a longer description. --Zero 09:42, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Other controversial assassinations of Jewish leaders in Israel's history

Does this really belong in this article? Flyerhell 18:45, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't think so. It might be a topic for another article plus a link here, that's all. It is also doubtful that Kasztner was a "Jewish leader". Certainly he wasn't at the time he was assassinated. --Zero 19:16, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

In Budapest he elbowed his way to the top during the Holocaust. After the war he was given a prominent political post in Israel. The Kaszner trial was actually at insistance of his party which felt threatened by Malchiel Gruenwald's accusations against Kasztner. Thanks to Gruenwald's very talented and idealistic young defense lawyer, Shmuel Tamir (much later appointed Justice Minister), the trial led to Kasztner's conviction in the first trial. An excellent book about this affair is Ben Hecht's "Perfidy". LPfeffer May 18, 2006

Hecht's book is not unbiased. He had his own ax to grind. More importantly, it is not scholarly nor rigorous; much that is known about the events was not available when Hecht wrote Perfidy. While anyone interested in these events should read it, its tendentious tone mars many of its contributions. Although it too has flaws, Yehuda Bauer's Jews For Sale is far more authoritative and accurate. It was written many years later, with far more availability of primary source material for documentation. In any case, this is a subject which is only now drawing truly critical scholarly attention. As Hecht does argue, too many people from too many sides (Israeli politics, Hungarian and Jewish establishment figures, etc.) have have been able to distort the facts, and been allowed to present their version(s) of this chapter in Holocaust history without scholarly accountability. 66.108.4.183 16:05, 18 July 2006 (UTC) Allen Roth

The government of Israel certainly considered Kasztner to be a "Jewish leader". In the state-sponsored appeal against the original libel verdict, Attorney General Haim Cohen claimed "The man Kasztner does not stand here as a private individual. He was a recognized representative, official or non-official of the Jewish National Institutes in Palestine and of the Zionist Executive; and I come here in this court to defend the representative of our national institutions." (quoted in Ben Hecht, Perfidy, p. 268).RolandR 16:38, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling of his name

I could not find a discussion of "Kastner" versus "Kasztner", so I can't offer proof of either as being correct. It appears that "Kastner" is a moderately common German name and that "Kasztner" is the Hungarian variant. In Hungarian it would matter because "sz" is pronounced like English "s" whereas a lonely "s" is pronounced like "sh". Randolph Braham (author of the definitive study of the Holocaust in Hungary) uses "Kasztner", but Yehuda Bauer uses "Kastner". The Library of Congress catalogue lists a book of "Kasztner, Rezső Rudolf" titled "Der Kastner-Bericht über Eichmanns Menschenhandel in Ungarn", which has both spellings in the same bibliographic record. We should give both spellings in the header of the article. --Zero^talk 01:45, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

For the record, his original name was Kasztner, which he rendered in Hebrew using samech (corresponding to the Hungarian pronunciation of "sz"), which back-transliterates into English as "s". That explains how both versions arose. This is not important. --Zero^talk 06:54, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Judge Halevy's indictment

The article as it stands is very inaccurate on the matter of the first libel trial, only mentioning the Becher issue. That was about the least of the accusations, and Judge Halevy was mostly concerned with it only because Kasztner lied about it in his testimony. It is not why Halevy accused him of "selling his soul to the devil". Halevy actually made a vastly more serious accusation. Here is Halevy's explanation of the "sold his soul" remark in the court judgement:

The benefit that Kasztner gained from the contract with the Nazis was the rescue of the "camp of prominent Jews" and the price that he had to pay for this was a complete surrender of any attempts at real rescue steps benefiting the "camp of the people". The price the Nazis paid for this was to waive the extermination of the "camp of prominent people". With this contract to save the prominent Jews, the head of the Aid and Rescue Committee made a "concession" with the exterminator: in return for the rescue of the prominent Jews, Kasztner agreed to the extermination of the people and abandoned them to their fate.
-- Halevy, Attorney General vs. Gruenwald (1965), page 111; quoted in L. Bilsky, Transformative Justice - Israeli Identity on Trial, Univ. Michigan Press (2004) p47.

Bilsky discusses this over several pages and gives further examples of Halevy's words. It is clear that our article needs work on this issue. I propose to insert this quotation with some glue. --Zero^talk 06:54, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Keinermeize

Apparently the only information on Keinermeize is available in Ben Hecht's Perfidy. Kastner was responsible for the rescue of the wealthy and public figures only. Keinermeize (Meaning land of bread in Hungarian or German) was the place the Jews were fooled into thinking they would be sent. Kastner knew about this.

You can find more (and more accurate) information in Braham, Politics of Genocide. In Hungarian, the fictitious name is Kenyermezo (apologies: I have no facility for umlauts and other accents on my keyboard), meaning "meadow of bread" in Hungarian. 66.108.105.21 17:58, 1 December 2006 (UTC) Allen Roth