Holocaust Survivor Throws Acid at War Crimes Lawyer

A Holocaust survivor threw acid in the face of an Israeli defense attorney for convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk today, officials said, during a funeral for another Demjanjuk lawyer who died in what police called suicide.

The attack on attorney Yoram Sheftel injured one of his eyes, police and a hospital spokesman said. A woman standing nearby also was hurt, police said.

Police said they detained the assailant, a 70-year-old survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, immediately after the attack, which occurred at Sanhedria Cemetery during the funeral for Demjanjuk lawyer Dov Eitan.

Sheftel was rushed to Bikur Holim Hospital, where doctors washed the eye. His eye had “slightly blurred vision and was shut,” hospital spokesman Yehuda Kingslinger said.

The attorney was sent for further treatment to a special eye unit at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, Kingslinger and officials at Hadassah said.

Rafi Levy, Jerusalem police spokesman, said the attacker, identified as Yisrael Yehezkeli, “dumped acid” on Sheftel. He said some of the acid injured a woman nearby, who was treated and released at another hospital.

Eitan, a 53-year-old former judge, died Tuesday in a fall from a 15th-floor hotel window in Jerusalem. Police said the death was a suicide.

The death has delayed Demjanjuk’s appeal of a death sentence to Israel’s Supreme Court for six months. The appeal had been scheduled to begin Dec. 5.

Demjanjuk, a 68-year-old retired auto worker from Cleveland, was sentenced in April for committing crimes against humanity and the Jewish people as an operator of gas chambers at Treblinka Death Camp in Poland, where 850,000 Jews perished during World War II.