Nadene Goldfoot
1. Benjamin Halevy (Hebrew: בנימין הלוי, 6 May 1910 – 7 August 1996) was an Israeli judge and politician. Halevy was born Ernst Levi in Weißenfels, Germany 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.
2, Moshe Landau (Hebrew: משה לנדוי) (29 April 1912 – 1 May 2011) was an Israeli judge. He was the fifth President of the Supreme Court of Israel.Landau was born in Danzig, Germany (modern Gdańsk, Poland) to Dr. Isaac Landau and Betty née Eisenstädt.] His father was a leading member of the Jewish Community of Danzig, In 1930 he finished high school in the Free City of Danzig and in 1933 he graduated from the University of London School of Law. That year, he immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1937 he was admitted to the Bar of Palestine. In 1940 he was made judge in the Magistrate's Court of Haifa and was appointed to the District Court in 1948.
3. Yitzhak Raveh (Hebrew: יצחק רווה; 10 November 1906 – 8 November 1989) 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. Yitzhak Raveh was born in Aurich, Lower Saxony, Germany, the youngest of six children born to Heinrich and Selma Reuss. He was given the name Franz Reuss. His father was a teacher, Hebrew scholar and author. When he was two years old, his family moved to Berlin. Reuss grew up in an environment of both German and Jewish cultures. After completing his primary and secondary education at local German schools, he studied law at the University of Berlin, completing his degree in 1927. He earned a Doctorate of Law in 1929 at the University of Halle. After two years of private practice, Reuss was appointed as a Court Assessor, Assistant Judge, and Judge at the Court of First Instance at Charlottenburg, positions he held from 1931 until the spring of 1933. When the Nazi Party came to power that year, Reuss sensed an increasing animosity and competitiveness directed at him by his colleagues at the court, causing him to resign his post on March 31, 1933. The next day, all Jewish Judges who had been admitted to the Bar after 1 August 1914 were permanently removed from the bench. Within a month, Judge Reuss, with his young wife Batya, boarded a ship for the British mandate of Palestine.
Abraham Lewenson testifying at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Jerusalem, Israel, June 2, 1961. The Eichmann trial created international interest, bringing Nazi atrocities to the forefront of world news. Testimonies of Holocaust survivors generated interest in Jewish resistance. The trial prompted a new openness in Israel as the country confronted this traumatic chapter.
Israel had done the impossible; dare to hold Eichmann on trial and in Israel! From 1933 to 1945, the Jews in Europe faced systematic persecution and genocide at the hands of the Nazis in Germany and their collaborators in the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1945, this persecution increased as part of the Final Solution, a plan to murder all of the Jews in Europe, which resulted in the death of some six million Jews.
Eichmann played a major part in the execution of the Holocaust. He fled to Argentina at the end of the Second World War, but was abducted by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960, and transported to Jerusalem to stand trial. Eichmann was held at a fortified police station in Yagur in northern Israel for nine months prior to his trial.
The defence team consisted of German lawyer Robert Servatius, legal assistant Dieter Wechtenbruch, and Eichmann himself. As foreign lawyers had no right of audience before Israeli courts at the time of Eichmann's capture, Israeli law was modified to allow those facing capital charges to be represented by a non-Israeli lawyer. In an Israeli cabinet meeting shortly after Eichmann's capture, Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen stated, "I think that it will be impossible to find an Israeli lawyer, a Jew or an Arab, who will agree to defend him", and thus a foreign lawyer would be necessary.
The defence next engaged in a lengthy direct examination of Eichmann. Observers such as Moshe Pearlman and Hannah Arendt have remarked on Eichmann's ordinariness in appearance and flat affect. In his testimony throughout the trial, Eichmann insisted he had no choice but to follow orders, as he was bound by an oath of loyalty to Hitler – the same superior orders defence used by some defendants in the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trials. Eichmann asserted that the decisions had been made not by him, but by Müller, Heydrich, Himmler, and ultimately Hitler.
Within the subject of anti-Semitism is the Holocaust. Netflix has covered the subject of Adolf Eichmann's role with the movie, Operation Finale, which was about his capture and ending in Israel, based on the incredible true story.
A team of secret agents set out to track down the Nazi officer, Eichmann, who masterminded the Holocaust.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964. This trial was about a new type of crime which did not previously exist. A court had to define Eichmann as a man on trial for his deeds. It was not a system or an ideology that was on trial, only a man. But Eichmann was a man who renounced all qualities of personhood, thus showing that great evil is committed by "nobodies" without motives or intentions. This is what she calls "the banality of evil".
- During his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent no fewer than six psychologists to examine Eichmann. These psychologists found no trace of mental illness, including personality disorder. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person (pp. 25–6).
- This makes anti-Semitism even more serious in that his ability to be with people who ordered 6 million Jews to their death and he was sane, is frightening. That sane people can be as bad as Emperor Caligula was. Caligula's sources focus upon his cruelty, sadism, extravagance, and sexual perversion, presenting him as an insane tyrant.
Neither Chief Justice Olshan nor Landau himself explains in their memoirs why, of all the Supreme Court justices, Olshan chose Justice Landau to preside over the Eichmann trial. We can only conjecture. There can be no doubt that his fluency in German was a factor. Since he was but one of four native German speakers among the justices, however, this could not have been the only reason.
In all likelihood, one of Olshan's main considerations was Landau's unique talent for managing extremely complex proceedings. His ability to keep track of numerous documents and witnesses and oversee the accuracy of simultaneous translation, all while diligently applying the rules of criminal procedure, was necessary to prevent the trial from becoming a spectacle. Moreover, a consistent reading of the trial transcripts shows that Landau's command of the evidentiary material was impressive, as was his meticulousness in marking and recording the countless documents presented by the prosecution. His ability to locate quickly every detail from among the accumulating materials is striking. His experience in criminal proceedings was especially important as the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, had no such background.
Another likely consideration in the selection of Landau was his outstanding ability to control a large number of people (attorneys, witnesses, the audience). Many years later, Landau recalled his concerns in the days leading up to the trial that “it would be difficult to prevent the expected outburst of tempers due to the trial's arousal of memories of the Holocaust, which were still fresh in the hearts and minds of many people.” He also feared that in the wake of the public's euphoria over Eichmann's capture, the trial would become “a carnival.” He resolved to firmly prevent any disturbance in the courtroom, although he “understood perfectly well the intensity of the audience's emotions.”
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