Israelis Agonize Over Demjanjuk’s Acquittal : Courts: Holocaust survivors are in shock as he is found not to be ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ U.S. will not readmit him.

The shock, the horror spread through Rosa Pearlstein’s frail body as she heard the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision Thursday acquitting John Demjanjuk of charges that, as a Nazi guard called “Ivan the Terrible,” he had killed thousands of Jews at the Treblinka death camp.

“Demjanjuk is free! Ivan the Terrible is free!” Pearlstein cried as she stood amid the shouting crowd outside the court. “My God, my God, my God. How in the name of justice, how in the name of the Almighty, can this man be set free? My parents were murdered at Treblinka--Ivan the Terrible put them into the gas chamber there. How can this man go free?”

But Demjanjuk, although acquitted, did not walk out of the courtroom a free man. The bald, burly retired auto worker, now 73, was immediately rearrested by Israeli authorities, taken back to Ayalon Prison outside Tel Aviv and served with a deportation order--although he has no country to go to.

In his only sign of emotion, Demjanjuk told reporters before Chief Justice Meir Shamgar began reading the summary of the decision: “I miss my wife, I miss my family, I miss my grandchildren. I want to go home.”

In Washington, Justice Department officials said the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk will not be readmitted to the United States, where he had lived from 1952 until his extradition to Israel in 1986, without a presidential order. His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981 for lying about his wartime activities.

That was no solace for Pearlstein, 67, a retired optician, and many other survivors of the Holocaust. For them, the decision overturning Demjanjuk’s 1988 conviction as “Ivan the Terrible” was difficult to comprehend, almost impossible to accept.

“I wanted them to hang him,” said Yosef Czerny, a Treblinka survivor who had identified Demjanjuk at his trial and was also outside the courthouse. “This is the murderer, but the murderer is acquitted. How could such a thing be?”

For the survivors, Demjanjuk’s conviction five years ago had been the retributive justice they had needed to come to terms with the Holocaust: Where Adolf Eichmann was a remote figure, a planner of the program that killed 6 million Jews, “Ivan the Terrible” was the cruel face they saw arresting Jews, beating them, killing them.

“I have to accept it because it is the verdict of the courts in the Jewish state,” said Dov Shilansky, former Speaker of the Israeli Parliament, “but in my heart I am convinced he is Ivan the Terrible. . . . Seeing him go free tears me in two.”

Demjanjuk’s acquittal left Israelis grappling with the issues of a legal system that to many failed to do justice--and of a Jewish state whose power and sovereignty were not sufficient to punish a man who, evidence indicated, was a guard at a different Nazi death camp.

“What the Supreme Court did was to give a certificate of honesty to the many Nazi criminals who are to be found in Germany, America and Canada,” said Pinhasi Epstein, who had been at Treblinka for 11 months and testified at Demjanjuk’s trial. “Now they can come out in the open, hold their heads up and say, ‘I murdered people--now do something to me.’ ”

Author David Grossman, whose novels have dealt with the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society, said: “I am sure that every Israeli feels in his gut the tension between the moral sense that this man should have to pay for what he did and the fact that our strength lies in our behaving as a state with the rule of law.”

However, Demjanjuk’s son, 28-year-old John Jr., spoke of vindication: “After more than 16 years of being accused of being Ivan the Terrible, having the Israeli Supreme Court declare that he is not Ivan the Terrible is a tremendous victory, a really big boost.

“History will show that without a doubt this is probably the most tragic and worst case of mistaken identity that history has ever witnessed. We can begin to look toward the future again.”

But Demjanjuk’s past, not his future, was what concerned the five justices of Israel’s Supreme Court as they held lengthy hearings on Demjanjuk’s appeal--he had been sentenced to death--and spent a further year reviewing all the testimony and evidence in a case that is as complex as it is emotional.

The court, after examining new evidence from files in the former Soviet Union and reviewing the complex case for a year, had decided that it could not be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk had been at Treblinka, despite identification of him by five survivors from the camp.

Demjanjuk “is entitled to benefit from the doubt which has arisen,” the justices said in their unanimous decision. “Therefore, justice demands that he be acquitted.”

The court also considered whether he could be convicted of war crimes for service as a guard at Sobibor, another Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, and at two concentration camps, charges for which stronger evidence emerged from the appeal hearings.

But the justices concluded that Demjanjuk had not had a sufficient opportunity to defend himself against these charges because they were not in the original indictment and would require a new trial. They rejected that idea largely on grounds that it would also prove inconclusive.

Despite their pain at seeing Demjanjuk go free, most Israelis took pride in the way in which the court reached its decision, saying that it showed the independence and fairness of the judicial system and the strength of Israeli democracy.

“In Israel, in a Jewish context, one can hardly imagine a harder case than this one,” said Amos Shapira, former law dean at Tel Aviv University.

“There were questions at the outset whether a man accused of war crimes, of aiding the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust, could get a fair trial in Israel, in a Jewish court. The answer is that John Demjanjuk did.”

Times researchers Dianna M. Cahn and Emily L. Hauser contributed to this report.