In March 1971, readers of the United Israel Bulletin were confronted by a headline that left little room for ambiguity: “War Criminal Remains a Free Man in U.S.”

Its editor, veteran United Nations correspondent David Horowitz, opened with an accusation almost too startling to believe: “A murderer of thousands of Jews, a World War II criminal found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to hard labor for life, today walks the streets of a leading U.S. city as a free man, in the robe of a priest heading a religious body.”

Horowitz then posed the question at the heart of the scandal: How had such a man entered the United States, risen to prominence, and even been invited to offer the opening prayer before the United States Senate?

The man was Archbishop Valerian D. Trifa.

And Horowitz had decided that his past would remain buried no longer.

A Quest That Was Deeply Personal

For Horowitz, the pursuit of Nazi criminals was never simply another journalistic assignment. The Nazi atrocities had taken both his wife and his son. The Holocaust was not an abstraction to him, nor merely a chapter in history. It was a personal wound that gave moral urgency to his reporting.

By 1971, Horowitz had already achieved a unique place in international journalism. He had been the first Jewish correspondent accredited to the newly established United Nations and would become the longest-serving member of its press corps—the dean of U.N. correspondents.

When he encountered the Trifa case, he saw more than an unresolved immigration matter. He saw a test of whether memory, truth, and justice could survive the passage of time.

The Man Behind the Robes

To thousands of followers, Trifa was a respected religious leader. He headed the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in America, lived on a large church estate in Grass Lake, Michigan, and moved among influential religious and political figures. In 1955, he delivered the opening prayer before the United States Senate. He later served on the governing board of the National Council of Churches.

But the dignified robes concealed a darker history.

Before coming to America, Trifa had been associated with Romania’s Iron Guard, a violent fascist and antisemitic movement modeled in spirit upon the Nazi storm troopers.

On January 20, 1941, he delivered an inflammatory anti-Jewish speech during the Legionnaires’ Rebellion in Bucharest. Four days of terror followed. Jews were beaten, tortured, and murdered; homes, businesses, and synagogues were attacked. Hundreds........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)