Israeli Asks 3 Judges to Disqualify Themselves : Demjanjuk Lawyer a Celebrity

An Israeli attorney who is fast becoming the second most talked-about figure in the John Demjanjuk war crimes trial here seized the limelight again Monday when he moved that the three judges hearing the case disqualify themselves as being biased.

Speaking as the proceedings against the retired Cleveland auto worker entered their sixth week, defense attorney Yoram Sheftel accused the judges of “incredible hostility,” which he said was proved by what he called unjustified interference in efforts by the defense to conduct its case.

The judges rejected his motion after two hours of deliberation and then overruled his request that the trial be stopped while he appeals their decision on his bias motion to Israel’s Supreme Court.

‘Court Has No Hostility’

“It is our unequivocal contention that there are no grounds for Mr. Sheftel’s claim,” Chief Judge Dov Levine said. “The court has no hostility toward the defense in general, toward Mr. Sheftel or toward the accused.”

It is almost unheard of here for judges to be replaced in the middle of a trial, and trial spokesman Yossi Hasin said he considers Sheftel’s move “tactical.”

But whatever the motive, it also served to place the Israeli attorney once more in the middle of the kind of controversy he has long seemed to relish.

Given the sensitivity of the case here, it was controversial simply for him to have accepted the job when Demjanjuk’s chief defense attorney, Mark O’Connor of Buffalo, N.Y., went looking for an Israeli co-counsel.

Most Lawyers Shied Away

Demjanjuk is accused of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a sadistic Ukrainian collaborator with the Nazis who worked as a guard at Adolf Hitler’s Treblinka death camp in Poland, where 850,000 Jews were exterminated in World War II. In a nation where a vast majority of the public already is convinced that the defendant is guilty, most attorneys wanted nothing to do with the defense.

“In order for justice to be seen, a case like this calls for an Israeli lawyer,” former Justice Minister Yitzhak Modai told reporters at the courtroom Monday. “The only question I have about Sheftel is whether he himself can sleep at night.”

“It’s a disgrace that a Jewish lawyer should be involved in this!” a spectator shouted at Sheftel as the trial opened Feb. 16, and he has heard variations of that remark many times since then. He has also received threatening telephone calls and letters, Sheftel said in a weekend interview.

Teaching a New Generation

The government frankly admits that this trial is aimed not only at determining Demjanjuk’s guilt but also at educating a new generation about the horrors of the Holocaust. Thus, Sheftel understandably invited controversy again when, on the second day of the proceedings, he compared them with the infamous Soviet “show trials” of the 1930s under dictator Josef Stalin.

While he was sternly admonished by Levin at the time, Sheftel has not changed his view that the days spent by the court receiving general testimony about Treblinka and the Holocaust are both a waste of time and prejudicial to his client.

He noted in the interview that the defense does not deny any of the atrocities attributed to Ivan the Terrible. It contends simply that John Demjanjuk is not that man, that he is a victim of mistaken identity. The court could have covered the central identity question in two weeks, he said.

The government has made a “show” out of the case to appease its conscience over the fact that the Jewish leadership of what was then Palestine “did nothing” at the time to help the 6 million Jews who perished in Nazi Europe, Sheftel charged.

‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’

Sheftel and O’Connor have divided the cross-examination of prosecution witnesses so far under a sort of “good-cop, bad-cop” system.

O’Connor, particularly in the early weeks of the trial, was so deferential to the court and to the witnesses that he bordered on the obsequious. Levin even advised the chief defense counsel at one point that it was not necessary for him to describe every Nazi whose name came up in cross examination as a “butcher.”

O’Connor’s rambling style of asking questions was central to Monday’s defense motion that the three judges disqualify themselves. Levin has increasingly cut O’Connor off during questions that he considers immaterial to the case, and Sheftel argued that this was one example of the court’s bias against the defense.

Sheftel, by contrast, tends to ask short, sharp, even blunt questions. That, he said, is one reason why O’Connor has done most of the cross-examining of five Treblinka survivors who appeared as prosecution witnesses, while Sheftel has concentrated on grilling police witnesses who worked with photo identification materials central to the prosecution’s case.

‘I Go for the Throat’

“The way I cross-examine is not fit for Treblinka survivors,” he said in the interview. “I’m too aggressive. I go for the throat immediately.”

His “bad cop” role in the trial reinforces the worst impressions of Sheftel’s many critics here, who are convinced that he took the case solely for personal gain.

“This will be worth a lot of money to him,” commented a prosecution attorney in the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sheftel conceded that he was attracted by the notoriety involved. “This is the kind of case a lawyer can have once in his life,” he said. But while “I’m getting paid nicely,” he denied that money was a central motive. “I didn’t come to this case a poor man, and I’ll not come out of it a millionaire.”

Sheftel said that his decision to take the case hinged on the issue of guilt or innocence--but in a pragmatic rather than a moral sense. He never claimed to be certain of Demjanjuk’s innocence.

“Only one person really knows if he’s Ivan the Terrible or not, and that’s John Demjanjuk,” he said.

Sees Good Chance to Win

However, he added, he is convinced that the prosecution’s case is so weak that there “is a good chance of having the accused declared not guilty.” He added that even if he was convinced of Demjanjuk’s innocence, he would not have taken on the case unless he had thought that there was a good chance of winning it.

He said that he is also acting out of disgust over the fact that the trial of Demjanjuk is only Israel’s second war-crimes trial (the first was that of Adolf Eichmann), in spite of the government’s long-held knowledge of thousands of others accused of war crimes.

Sheftel charged that the state has not pursued these other cases because it did not want to cause problems in its relations with friendly governments of the countries where such former Nazis have found refuge. It is hypocritical for this state now to throw its full powers against a Ukrainian “about whom there is a heavy question regarding his identity,” he commented.

Swinging Right-Winger

A 38-year-old bachelor, Sheftel has a reputation as a playboy and as a political right-winger--images he does little to counter.

“I consider myself not to be a square-minded person,” he said. “Generally speaking, I consider myself a right-winger, for example. But the way I dress, the pubs I go to, are anything but what you would expect of a right-wing person.”

As Sheftel spoke, he was sipping a bloody Mary in the artifact-filled living room of his small, three-room Tel Aviv apartment. He wore a white sweatshirt with a Japanese design on it plus jeans, tennis shoes and strings of white beads around his neck.

He drives a new white Porsche sports car and travels abroad whenever he can. His apartment is filled with carved wooden figures from Africa and Brazil, Thai dolls, Egyptian wall decorations and a large ship model. He said he has a girlfriend “that I do not intend to marry” but that if he ever does take a wife, he would consider buying a home on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River.

Trial Gives Him a Laugh

In a country where it is rare to hear anyone speak about anything connected with the Holocaust in anything other than reverential tones, Sheftel told his weekend interviewer with a laugh that he had gotten a letter from a woman offering to help his defense of Demjanjuk.

“I’m ready to come and testify that this is not Ivan the Terrible,” he quoted the woman as writing. “My husband is Ivan the Terrible. He’s been torturing me for 26 years, every day.”

The son of a chemical engineer, Sheftel had wanted to be a lawyer since he was in high school. “I realized the only thing I know how to do is chatter,” he told an Israeli interviewer recently.

He said that an autobiographical work by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin helped generate in him a deep revulsion against anything related to the Soviet Union, including people in Israel whom he considers “reds.”

Aided Alleged Mafioso

Sheftel had his first controversial client long before his university graduation. He was a first-year law student when he helped form a “Citizens for (Meyer) Lansky” group that lobbied to extend Israeli citizenship to the alleged Mafia financier, then facing efforts to extradite him back to the United States.

“It made me furious that the whole thing started because of U.S. pressure,” Sheftel said. “I saw this as another indication that the U.S. wanted to run this country.”

Lansky was ultimately forced to leave Israel and return to the United States.

Sheftel remained friendly with Lansky until he died in 1983, and he recalled fondly during the weekend interview several parties he attended in Florida, during which Lansky and some of his underworld friends watched a television series about gangsters. “It was like watching home movies,” the Israeli attorney said with a laugh.

Sheftel clearly has no misconceptions about the public attitude toward him. “There’s no question that most of the population of Israel dislikes me right now,” he said.

But his life goes on relatively normally. As the interview ended, he walked out to his car to drive to his mother’s home for a regular Sabbath meal--much like the one to which he once took Lansky.

His mother liked the reputed gangster, Sheftel recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t know who he is, but at my home he behaved like a real gentleman.’ ”