Back in Israel of the 1950s — when Rudolph Kasztner took the witness stand to defend himself against allegations of collusion with Adolf Eichmann in facilitating the mass murder of Hungary’s Jews — the heroes, the villains, and collaborators all seemed so obvious. But 70 years after his rescue transport pulled out of Budapest carrying 1,684 Jews to freedom, the only thing that’s obvious is that — whoever he was or wasn’t — what once seemed so black and white has with time morphed into many shades of gray

In June of 1944 year-old Jacob Jungreis, together with 87 members of his family and all the remaining Jews in the Hungarian town of Szeged where his father was the rav, were herded into boxcars and deported to Budapest — the roundup point for Auschwitz and almost certain death.

“My aunt Elsa ran an orphanage in Budapest, right next to the office of the Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee, known as the Vaada,” Rabbi Jungreis remembers. “One day Rudolph Kasztner, one of the Vaada heads, came up to her and told her he could save an entire transport of Jews and she should give him names.” Jacob Jungreis was one of the lucky ones. He, his parents, his brother, his sister (Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis), and his aunt with her orphans got on the list. The rest of his family was murdered — along with 437,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz between March and August 1944, most of whom were killed upon arrival.

Rudolph Israel Kasztner — who Rabbi Jungreis credits with saving his life — was a jurist, journalist, and Zionist activist from Cluj (Klausenberg), Transylvania, who arrived in Budapest in 1940 after Transylvania was annexed by neighboring Hungary. Brilliant, arrogant, and gifted with nerves of steel, Kasztner — in his capacity as one of the leaders of the Zionist-affiliated Vaada — engaged in negotiations with Adolf Eichmann for the ransom of a certain number of Hungarian Jews after Germany invaded Hungary in 1944.

Kasztner, however, wasn’t the first to negotiate with the Nazis. Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl, together with his Working Group in Slovakia, had been bribing Nazi officers since 1942, which succeeded in pushing off the Slovakian deportations for two years. Realizing Nazis were indeed bribable, Rav Weissmandl and his group began negotiations for the ill-fated “Europa Plan” which might have saved a million Jews for a ransom of three million dollars, had it not been thwarted by what Rav Weissmandl claimed were strong-arm tacticians within the Zionist leadership who moved in on the talks. In his book Min Hameitzar, Rav Weissmandl bemoaned the Zionist takeover of the negotiations, claiming the movement was not primarily interested in rescuing Europe’s Jews, but in saving their own leaders and like-minded activists who would go to Palestine and help build the Jewish state.

When the Europa Plan failed, Kasztner — who was involved in those talks and, having learned the art of bribery while still in Cluj in order to help Jewish refugees, moved freely within Nazi circles — pursued his own negotiations with Eichmann and the SS to save family, friends, and Zionist leaders. But while that group took up a little over 300 places, Kasztner opened his rescue train to what he later called a “Noah’s Ark” of Hungarian Jewry. Kasztner’s transport came to include those who would pay well for their places, orphans and others who would get on the transport for free, plus a contingent of rabbanim and many others whose places had been secured for a small fortune from the Orthodox  community — including the Satmar Rebbe, Hungary’s chief dayan Rav Yonasan Steiff, and the Debrecener Rav Shlomo Tzvi Strasser.

Seventy years after the Kasztner train pulled out of Budapest carrying 1,684 Jews to eventual freedom (the refugees were rerouted to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp until more ransom funds were forthcoming, before reaching neutral Switzerland — 318 were released in August and the rest months later in December), Rabbi Jungreis — who today lives in Flatbush and for many years ran a shul and a yeshivah in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn — considers Kasztner his savior, despite the latter’s questionable Nazi affiliations. [Kasztner was later accused of collaboration with Nazi operative Kurt Becher, who assisted him in organizing the rescue train (on condition that 50 of Becher’s own people escape on it as well) and delaying the deportations, which were actually stopped in August. In return, Kasztner promised Becher that he would testify on his behalf at the Nuremberg trials. Keeping that promise played a part in Kasztner’s eventual downfall.].

“Although he wasn’t a religious man, to this day I see him as a tzaddik, saving Yavneh v’chachameha,” Rabbi Jungreis tells Mishpacha. “He was a practical person with ahavas Yisrael who tried to save what he could, a cross section of the nation so it could be rebuilt.”

Perhaps that’s how the train’s 1,684 survivors — those who are still living and the children and grandchildren of the others — would always remember Kasztner, and the transport might have become another footnote in Holocaust rescue missions.

Perhaps — if not for an elderly right-wing eccentric named Malkiel Grunwald, who cranked his mimeographed newsletters for anyone willing to pay attention. In 1953, Grunwald printed a series of  newsletters accusing Kasztner of being a Nazi collaborator and of bargaining the transport as a prize for keeping quiet about the imminent annihilation of Hungarian Jewry.

After the war, Kasztner moved to Israel and was active in the Mapai party, becoming a spokesman for a government ministry under the old-guard secular Zionist leadership. Yet he couldn’t put his Nazi connections — however noble his intentions may have been — behind him. Because Kasztner was a government official, the attorney general — much to Kasztner’s dismay — decided to bring a libel suit against Grunwald and squelch what was considered a smear to Mapai. But the suit backfired. Lawyer Shmuel Tamir, a leader in the opposition Herut party and Mapai’s bitter enemy, saw the case as an opportunity to deal a lethal blow to Mapai, and spun it from a libel suit into a year-long trial which became an indictment of Kasztner, the entire Mapai apparatus, and the Zionist leadership of the state’s founding fathers.

Jews of Exile

Why Grunwald’s claims were taken so seriously is really the story of Israeli society of the 1950s. When Holocaust survivors began flooding Eretz Yisrael after the war, the Zionist settlement felt itself in danger of losing its hard-won image as a proud, independent, uncompromising, and idealistic people claiming the Land through love and labor — unlike the frightened, beaten survivors, death-camp refugees who had been herded into ghettos and concentration camps without a fight. Warsaw-born Israeli iconic novelist Yehudit Hendel was still promoting that idea years later on Israeli television when she said, “The basest think it’s not the Exile but the Jew who came from there.”

The meanest insult to these hapless, suffering refugees was the slang term coined for them — “sabon (soap)” — referring to the alleged Nazi practice of making soap out of their victims’ boiled bodies. Furthermore, the pre-state quasi-governmental Jewish Agency was not especially interested in immigration for the sake of the survivors; rather, according to future prime minister David Ben Gurion, it wanted “people from the ages of 18 to 35” to help win the war and build the country. To be a survivor meant shame, and so people quickly learned to sublimate their horrifying Holocaust experiences and “get with the program.”

So when 31-year-old maverick lawyer Shmuel Tamir decided to defend Malkiel Grunwald, he knew Grunwald didn’t have the means to pay, but agreed to take it on pro bono on condition that it would become “the trial of Jewish leadership during the period of the Holocaust,” as he wrote in his memoir. While Tamir disdained survivors almost as much as Ben-Gurion did and took pride that he was “one who was never in the Exile,” he hated the Mapai ruling party even more. To him, there were three enemies: the Germans who murdered the Jews, the British who controlled the borders of Palestine, and the Mapainiks, who negotiated with both and sold out the Jews of Europe. At the trial which opened in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s court in January 1954, Tamir was going to bring down Kasztner and the Mapai together.

Treasonable Doubt

Those of us who read (and reread) Perfidy — a book written in 1961 by playwright Ben Hecht based on that trial — in our younger, idealistic years might remember all the evil, condemning details against both Kasztner and the Yishuv (that is, if one could get a hold of the book. After its second printing in the 1970s, the book disappeared — rumor was that the Israeli government bought up all the copies and had it banned, at least in Israel). According to Hecht, based on Tamir’s accusation, Adolf Eichmann allowed Kasztner to organize a rescue train for a few in return for Kasztner’s keeping the rest of Hungarian Jewry in the dark about their grisly fate, lulling them instead into a complacency that they would be “resettled” instead of murdered.

By May 1944, Kasztner and other Jewish leaders in Hungary had received the Vrba-Wetzler report, compiled by two escapees from Auschwitz, warning of the imminent Nazi plan to deport the entire Hungarian Jewish population to the death camps. Yet Kasztner allegedly buried the report, and it was his Jewish Agency rival Moshe Krausz who later that summer sent the report to Switzerland for publication. The resulting international outcry persuaded the Hungarians to stop the deportations — but by then 437,000 Hungarian Jews had already been shipped off to Auschwitz. When Kasztner traveled back to his home town of Cluj that June, he pacified the Jews and assured them they’d be safe. For some of those Jews — including Kasztner’s father-in-law, Jewish community head Joseph Fischer, plus the entourage of the Satmar Rebbe who had crossed into Cluj when the Nazis stormed Hungary — his promise of safety was fulfilled. These Jews were put on the transport Kasztner negotiated. All the others were deported the following week, most meeting their deaths soon after the trains entered the extermination camp.

Perhaps most damaging of all was that Kasztner testified on behalf of Nazi officer Kurt Becher at Nuremberg. Becher helped Kasztner secure the rescue train and negotiate to halt further deportations even as he took part in the genocide of Hungarian Jewry; in the eyes of the new Israeli of the 1950s, this was comparable to treason.

But Kasztner, claimed Tamir, was just a small cog in an even greater treachery. The entire Mapai leadership was part of an enormous betrayal. Even after Rav Weissmandl’s Europa Plan failed, the Nazis again offered to spare up to a million Jews in exchange for a thousand tons of tea, a thousand tons of coffee, and ten thousand trucks. But Moshe Sharett, Yitzchak Greenbaum, and other Zionist leaders decided it wouldn’t be wise to invest such efforts to save these Jews, because negotiating with the Nazis would antagonize their British allies on the one hand, and an influx of helpless refugees would interfere with their plans for the creation of a young, strong, pioneering Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, populated by the “new Jew.”