Unholy Vows: The Wolf in a Bishop’s Robe

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 of Jews and others died.

After the rebellion was crushed by Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, Trifa spent the remaining war years in Nazi Germany under privileged detention. Romanian authorities later tried him in absentia with other Iron Guard leaders and sentenced him to life imprisonment and hard labor.

Yet nine years later, he found his way to the United States.

A New Life in America

Trifa entered the country on July 17, 1950, under the Displaced Persons Immigration Act. The Italian weekly L’Espresso later reported that a high-ranking Italian Catholic prelate had assisted his admission.

Once in America, Trifa wrote for the Romanian-language newspaper Solia in Cleveland. In July 1951, a congress of the dissident Romanian Orthodox Church selected him as bishop. He soon moved to Grass Lake, Michigan, where the Episcopate maintained its headquarters.

His rise was swift—but so were the warnings.

Dr. Charles H. Kramer, president of the Romanian Jewish Federation of America, worked tirelessly to expose Trifa’s past. Romanian religious authorities, Jewish leaders, survivors, and representatives of the World Jewish Congress supplied evidence against him.

Prominent American journalists also sounded the alarm. Walter Winchell denounced Trifa in a 1951 broadcast, calling him a murderer and urging a Senate investigation. In 1952, Congressman Seymour Halpern of New York placed a detailed indictment of Trifa into the Congressional Record. Drew Pearson later reviewed the allegations in both his broadcast and syndicated newspaper column.

The accusations were public and serious—still, nothing happened.

Trifa remained free, protected by sympathetic friends, bureaucratic inertia, and the fading urgency of wartime memories. In 1957, he became an American citizen.

The case slipped toward oblivion.

Horowitz Reopens the File

Horowitz refused to accept that result. His March 1971 article was not a single protest. It was the beginning of a sustained five-year campaign. He examined the earlier reporting of Winchell and Pearson, reviewed evidence held by the Anti-Defamation League, and worked closely with Charles Kramer, whose long campaign against Trifa had often seemed like a voice crying in the wilderness.

Horowitz traveled to Romania to search government files and interview sources. He went to Israel to gather additional testimony from witnesses. He pursued records, made countless telephone calls, and reconstructed Trifa’s history across countries, languages, and decades.

Through the United Israel Bulletin and World Union Press, Horowitz published a series of detailed reports between 1971 and 1973. They included photographs, official documents, and testimony from Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses.

He also brought the case directly to members of Congress and to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Among those who responded was Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York. His words captured the moral argument behind the campaign: “It is important, even a generation after the conclusion of World War II, that war criminals continue to be pursued. There is no statute of limitations on murder.”

The Archbishop Strikes Back

A few months after Horowitz’s first exposé, Trifa sent him a two-page letter. He denied the accusations, charged Horowitz with libel, and demanded that his response receive the same publicity as the allegations made against him.

Horowitz agreed.

In the July 1971 issue of the United Israel Bulletin, he published Trifa’s letter in full. But he placed beside it something far more damaging: a dossier of official Romanian documents.
The evidence included an antisemitic manifesto bearing Trifa’s name, a warrant for his arrest, and the court decision sentencing him and other Iron Guard leaders to life imprisonment.

Trifa had been given his answer—Horowitz had given readers the record.

The Case Gains Momentum

The controversy spread.

In September 1971, Horowitz and Kramer appeared on New York radio station WNYC during a memorial broadcast honoring the victims of the 1941 pogroms in Jassy and Bucharest. Both spoke at length about the evidence against Trifa.

Then, in December 1973, The New York Times published the results of its own investigation. Its lengthy report substantially confirmed the charges Horowitz had been advancing. The case could no longer be dismissed as the work of a handful of determined accusers.

After years of delay, the federal government finally acted.

On July 5, 1975, the United States filed suit to revoke Trifa’s citizenship. The government charged that he had secured naturalization through false statements, including denials of his Iron Guard membership and his involvement in the violence of 1941.

The case rested not on whether an American court could try Trifa for murders committed in Romania, but on whether he had lied to enter the United States and later become a citizen. The strategy would become an important weapon in America’s pursuit of Nazi collaborators.

The Fall of the Archbishop

The legal battle continued for years. In 1980, Trifa voluntarily surrendered his American citizenship, apparently hoping that doing so would end the case.

It did not.

Federal authorities pressed forward. In 1982, while facing deportation proceedings before an immigration judge in Detroit, Trifa agreed to leave the United States. He claimed that the cost of the trial had become too great for his church.

Even then, his departure was delayed. For two years he searched for a country willing to accept him. Portugal finally admitted him in 1984. He settled in Estoril, near Cascais—far from the Michigan estate where he had lived as an honored American churchman.

On January 28, 1987, Archbishop Valerian D. Trifa died in a Portuguese hospital at the age of seventy-two. The man Horowitz had called “a wolf disguised in a bishop’s robe” died in exile, stripped of the citizenship he had obtained through concealment.

The Reporter Who Refused to Forget

The result did not undo the murders in Bucharest. It did not restore the wife and son Horowitz had lost to Nazi atrocities. Nor did it erase the decades during which Trifa had lived comfortably in the United States.

But the truth had finally overtaken him.

Charles R. Allen Jr., one of America’s foremost investigators of Nazi fugitives, later credited Horowitz with helping revive a case many had considered lost: “Mr. Horowitz’s investigative reporting aroused national interest in the case. Dr. Charles Kramer, who had made it a life task to publicize Trifa’s crimes, was a voice crying in the wilderness until the Horowitz exposés appeared.”

Years later, the case was featured in a January 2001 episode of the television documentary series “Forensic Files.” Appropriately, the episode was titled “Unholy Vows.”

But the enduring importance of the Trifa case lies beyond one television program or one legal proceeding—it is a story about memory and forgetting. Trifa relied upon distance, bureaucracy, influential supporters, and the hope that time would erase the past. Horowitz relied upon documents, witnesses, persistence, and the conviction that history must be confronted rather than buried.

Justice came late and in imperfect form. There was no murder trial, no prison sentence, and no restoration for the dead. There was only exposure, denaturalization, deportation, and exile. But because David Horowitz and Charles Kramer refused to stop asking questions, the wolf beneath the bishop’s robes was finally unmasked.

And a case nearly lost to history was brought back into the light.