U.S. deports archbishop for alleged Nazi link

Press, 16 August 1984, Page 11

U.S. deports archbishop for alleged Nazi link

NZPA-Reuter Washington After a nine-year legal battle, the United States has deported for alleged involvement in Nazi war crimes a Rumanian who became an archbishop of the Orthodox Church in America after World War n. The Justice Department said' Archbishop Valerian Trifa, aged 70, had been stripped of his United States citizenship and expelled. He left New York on Monday and officials said he was already in Portugal. Jewish sources said he has received permission to live there. The Attorney-General, William French Smith, said, “This persecutor of count-

less innocent Jews before and during World War II i cannot consider the United 1 States a haven. j “We have taken steps to i ensure that he»will not be < able to return.” I Archbishop Trifa, the ! spiritual leader of about « 35,000 members of the i Rumanian American Ortho- < dox Church based in Grass 1 Lake, Michigan, had belonged to the Iron Guard, a Rumanian Fascist group re- 1 sponsible for the massacre ! of Jews in Rumania during < the war. ' Leo Nevas, chairman of ! the International Commis- < sion of the American Jewish I Committee, welcomed the > news that Archbishop Trifa 1 had finally left the United j States. i

“Trifa, who was a commandant in the Fascist Rumanian Iron Guard, president of a Fascist student organisation and editor of a virulently antiSemitic newspaper, was responsible for the incitement of programmes in Bucharest that resulted in the death of thousands of Rumanian Jews,” he said.’ “We commend the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations for its unstinting resolve in pursuing this case to its conclu ; sion and for its determination to continue to investigate and prosecute other individuals in the United States suspected of lying about their past complicity in Nazi war crimes.”