The assassination of Chaim Arlozorov

Arlozorov’s activities, his constant trips between Germany and Austria in order to promote the Haavara program, provoked serious opposition in the world and in Palestine itself. The mouthpiece of this opposition was the People’s Front newspaper, published by the radical wing of the revisionist movement. The rhetoric was extremely harsh: "The Union of Stalin-Hitler-Ben-Gurion."

On June 16, 1933, Chaim Arlozorov and his wife Sima were sitting on the balcony of Tel Aviv's Kete Dan Guesthouse (now the Dan Hotel).

Two days earlier, he returned from a trip to Nazi Germany , where he tried to save the property of German Jews . The couple sat on the lit porch and were soon spotted by the guests. The head waiter and the hostess of the hotel approached them to greet. After that, Dr. Pinchas Rosen , one of the leaders of German immigrants, and then the first Minister of Justice of Israel , went to their table and invited Arlozorov to dine at his table.

After lunch, the Arlozorovs went down the stairs leading from the terrace where they were sitting to the beach and went for a walk towards the Yarkon River. Sima noticed that they were being followed by two people, one tall, the other much lower, and told her husband about this. The persecutors overtook them, and one of them, not tall, shot Arlozorov in the stomach.

Hearing the shots and screams of Sima, several couples ran to the scene of the murder and carried Arlozorov to the nearest building. Sima ran to the Kete Dan Hotel to call from there and call an ambulance . The owner of the hotel, Kate Dan , personally called the hospital and, together with her wife Arlozorova, accompanied by the owner of the hotel, returned to the place of the assassination attempt. There they were told that the wounded had already been sent to the hospital. The women returned to the guesthouse, where they told the police officer what had happened.

Due to the large delay in providing medical care, Arlozorov could not be saved, and he died on the same day: when Sim Arlozorov was taken to the hospital, she found out that her husband had died in the operating room.

The murder of Arlozorov was a great shock to the entire Jewish community in Palestine . Suspicion fell on the followers of the revisionist movement, and two days after the murder, the main suspects were arrested: Abraham Stavsky and Zvi Rosenblatt .

On the identification of Sim Arlozorova recognized in them the murderers of her husband ^[1] . On July 8, 1934, Stavsky was convicted of the murder of Arlozorov and sentenced to death by hanging . The remaining defendants, including Rosenblit, were acquitted. On July 20, 1934, when examining the cassation appeal, Stavsky was also acquitted on the basis of the current British Witness Act, according to which the testimony of one witness is insufficient for the conviction.

Joseph Frederick, head of the British police department in Palestine, wrote later that the British administration knew from the very beginning that the revisionists were not involved in the murder of Arlozorov, and their arrest was made to calm public opinion ^[2] .

The murder of Arlozorov to this day remains unsolved. Many versions of the involvement of various circles in this crime were born.

Among them, the main versions of the murder are considered ^[1] :

• political killing based on rivalry between Zionist organizations,
• revenge of the British authorities for undermining the anti-German boycott,
• the reprisal of the agents of Hitler’s minister of propaganda Goebbels with a Jew, in whom his wife, Magda , was still in love. So thought, for example, Arlozorov’s sister ^[3] .
• Among historians, a theory has recently spread according to which the murder was committed by activists of the Communist Party of Palestine ^[4] .

Most members of the Zionist labor movement took Arlozorov’s murder as evidence of the existence of fascist tendencies in the revisionist party. However, the latter, along with other circles that did not adjoin the Zionist workers' movement, claimed that the process was fabricated by the enemies of the revisionists ^[5] .