CONCORDIA UNIV LIBRARY

Title: The Case Of Archbishop Trifa Charged with a pro-Nazi past, he gives up U.S. citizenship. Time, 0040781X, 9/8/1980, Vol. 116, Issue 10 Database: Academic Search Complete

The Case Of Archbishop Trifa Charged with a pro-Nazi past, he gives up U.S. citizenship

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This, plainly, was no everyday immigrant. He had served on the governing boards of both the World Council of Churches and America's National Council of Churches. As His Eminence Valerian, he was head of the 40,000-member Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate of America. Yet one day last week in Detroit he quietly surrendered his certicate of naturalization, and will soon lose the U.S. citizenship he has held for 23 years. When he took this action, he was facing trial on a federal charge that he had lied in order to obtain his citizenship. Behind the dry legal charge stood a far more bloodcurdling allegation: that this bespectacled man of God was once Viorel Trifa, head of a pro-Nazi youth organization in Bucharest. Witnesses accuse him of delivering an anti-Semitic speech in January 1941 (sample: "A group of Jews and Jew-lovers are ruling everything") that helped to incite rioting during which hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Jews were slain. (The ofcial report listed 236 dead, half of them Gentiles.) Dedicated Nazi-hunters in the U.S. consider Trifa's court action a tacit admission of guilt not only on the technical charge but on all the rest, since all their accusations would have been aired during a long trial. But Valerian issued a prepared statement that his decision "is in no way to be considered an admission of the Government allegations." His lawyer, George E. Woods, a former U.S. Attorney in Detroit, denies that the 66-year-old archbishop caved in before a strong prosecution case. Valerian, he says, was ailing and simply tired of the legal ght that has already cost $100,000, supplied through donations of church members. Trifa rst came to the U.S. from Italy in 1950. Two years later, he led anti-Communist Rumanians in seizing control of their church headquarters from a rival group loyal to the Orthodox patriarchate in Rumania. Meanwhile Charles Kremer, a Rumanian-American dentist in

New York City and a Jew, learned that Trifa had come to the U.S. Kremer inundated the Government with documents to prevent Trifa from getting U.S. citizenship in 1957. The Immigration and Naturalization Service evidently paid him little heed. Kremer kept on trying. Largely through his efforts, the U.S. Government eventually reopened the le on Trifa. In 1975 it accused him of failing to disclose in his naturalization questionnaire that he had been a member of the dreaded pro-Nazi Iron Guard and that he had incited persecution of Jews. Attorney Woods charges that the Government had available to it all the accusations before granting Trifa citizenship and reopened the case simply because of political pressure. He does not deny that Trifa made anti-Semitic statements, was a wholehearted supporter of the pro-Nazi Legionary movement, and gave a speech on the eve of the 1941 riot. But he denies that Trifa was a Legionary leader, belonged to the Iron Guard, or intended to cause a pogrom. His client, he says, was forced to choose between the Soviets and Nazis, and chose the latter, adopting anti-Semitism that was rampant at the time. Archbishop Valerian remains head of his denomination, living in a 25-room house on its headquarters estate in Grass Lake, Mich. Once the Justice Department completes the steps to strip him of citizenship, it will have to begin the lengthy process of deporting him.

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