Demjanjuk’s Lawyer Insists His Client Will Return to U.S. : War crimes: Attorney says Ohio ruling clears way for release. But a spokeswoman counters that Israel is not bound by American court decisions.

JERUSALEM — John Demjanjuk’s lawyer said Wednesday that the retired Ohio auto worker, cleared last week of being the Nazi death camp guard “Ivan the Terrible,” will return home to Cleveland, now that a U.S. court has ruled that Israel should not try him on other war crimes charges.

Yoram Sheftel, the Tel Aviv lawyer who won Demjanjuk’s acquittal, said he expects Israel’s Supreme Court to order the government to permit the 73-year-old Demjanjuk’s immediate return to the United States despite demands that he be tried here anew.

“The (U.S.) ruling says clearly in about 10 different places that Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel only to face trial as the guard ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at the Treblinka death camp,” Sheftel asserted. “He was fully and finally acquitted of that charge by our Supreme Court. The two decisions thus reinforce each other.

“Demjanjuk is now being held in this country illegally--kidnaped even, we could say. However, I expect the Supreme Court to free him, to order his release, after the hearing next week. He should be home about 10 days from now. The gates to America have been opened, and they won’t be shut again.”

Demjanjuk’s son visited his father in his cell and told the Associated Press afterward that his father “was very happy” about the U.S. court ruling. “He is that much closer to going home,” said John Demjanjuk Jr.

But Etty Eshed, spokeswoman of the Israeli Justice Ministry, said that the ruling Tuesday by a U.S. Appeals Court in Cincinnati does not bind Israel legally or politically. “Israel is sovereign, and our courts do not answer to U.S. courts,” she said.

Eshed said the Israeli Supreme Court will proceed next Wednesday, as planned, with its hearing on two petitions. One is from a Holocaust survivor and the other from a right-wing, ultranationalist group asking that Demjanjuk be tried on charges arising from the court’s finding that while he was not at Treblinka, he was a guard at Sobibor, another Nazi death camp in Poland.

“The attorney general will announce his decision on retrying Demjanjuk or deporting him,” Eshed said. “The court will hear the arguments of others, of course, and then it will decide what it decides.”

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said it will join the call for Demjanjuk’s trial on the Sobibor charges.

“People have to understand Sobibor was not a summer camp, and those involved in its activities murdered 250,000 innocent men, women and children,” Zuroff said. “We will seek any legal redress to see this man punished for crimes he committed.”

Sheftel nevertheless predicted confidently, “The weekend after the hearing, Demjanjuk will be on a plane home to Cleveland.”

Israel has not prosecuted guards at Nazi concentration and death camps, Sheftel continued, with the exception of Demjanjuk, who was thought to have been “Ivan the Terrible,” the sadistic operator of the gas chamber at Treblinka, where 850,000 Jews were killed during World War II.

“Only if the case has good background for a show trial, Moscow style, is Israel ready to begin (judicial) proceedings--it wants just show trials, not efforts to bring Nazi criminals to trial,” Sheftel asserted.

He added that even with documentary evidence putting Demjanjuk in Sobibor instead of at Treblinka, neither Israeli nor U.S. investigators had found any witnesses able to testify to his activities there, reducing any case against him simply to allegations of service at a death camp.

In its ruling last week, the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted Demjanjuk of being “Ivan the Terrible” but also found that he had been a guard at Sobibor.

Declaring a new trial on these charges to be impractical, the court said the case was closed, and the attorney general agreed. Demjanjuk then obtained a visa to leave for Ukraine, his birthplace, from which he hoped to seek readmission to the United States.

But another panel of Supreme Court justices, acting on the two petitions, then held up Demjanjuk’s deportation to Ukraine last Sunday and ordered a hearing on the Sobibor charges.

Demjanjuk has insisted that he was never a guard at any Nazi camp, including Sobibor, and that he is a victim of mistaken identity.

On Tuesday, three judges of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a new trial on different charges, such as service at Sobibor, would violate the Israeli-American extradition treaty as well as international and Israeli law. The judges also said that Demjanjuk must be allowed to return to the United States while his extradition in 1986 is re-examined.

In Washington, a Justice Department spokeswoman said that once the 6th Circuit signs the order directing Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to let Demjanjuk enter the United States, “he can come in, unless we do something to set aside the order.” She said the Justice Department has not decided whether to try to challenge the order.