Jew Against Jew

In the four-month trial of Adolf Eichmann, one dark chapter of the Nazi holocaust was never fully brought out: the rule of Nazi-organized councils of Jewish elders in European ghettos. Backed by their own high-booted Jewish police, the councils compiled death lists of Jews and rounded up their own people for deportation to Nazi extermination camps. Refusal to help Eichmann's "transportation" experts would have meant immediate death, but always there was the agonizing moral dilemma: even under duress, was cooperation not betrayal? Last week Israeli Prosecutor David Libai gave the state's answer in the first trial of a Jewish policeman who served the Nazis. Its answer was yes.

In the dock of a tiny, drab Tel Aviv courtroom, head buried in his hands, sat the assistant conductor of the Israel National Opera. Hirsch Barenblat. 48, former commander of the Jewish police in Bedzin. Poland. For two years after he managed to get to Israel in 1958. Barenblat attracted no particular attention. Then, during introductions at a concert in a kibbutz, a member of the audience suddenly leaped up and shouted: "Barenblat, I remember you! You murdered Jews!" The concert broke up amidst angry confusion. In 1961, after a police investigation. Barenblat was arrested and charged under the Israeli law punishing Nazis and their collaborators who were members of "hostile organizations"--the same law under which Eichmann was tried as a Gestapo member, and which the government now wants extended to include the Jewish police. In Barenblat's case, the maximum penalty would be seven to ten years in prison on each of twelve specific accusations of persecution.

On the opening day of what looked to be a drawn-out trial, a Tel Aviv carpenter tearfully recalled that Barenblat's Jewish police once trooped back from a round-up in Bedzin "loudly singing, as if from a victorious engagement." described how they herded Jewish men. women and children into trucks headed for Auschwitz. "Even the streets wept." the witness said. Prosecutor Libai conceded that Barenblat saved "maybe ten or 20 Jews.'' but added: "This court will have to decide whether to save his own soul he was entitled to carry out the tasks of the Jewish police."

Defense Attorney Arieh Rosenblum. supporting Barenblat's plea of innocence, said that his conduct was justifiable, and argued that he was acquitted of collaborationist charges after the war,, by a " Polish court. "The Jewish police." Rosenblum said, "cannot be regarded as hostile to the Jewish people. Their intention was not hostility. They did not seek to exterminate Jews; they served what they deemed the best interests of the Jewish community under the worst possible circumstances."

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