At midnight on March 4, 1957, Israel Kastner, returning to his home in Tel Aviv, was confronted by three strangers. Once he affirmed his identity, they shot him. Kastner died 10 days later — the first political assassination in the State of Israel. A few hours later the Israeli Security Service caught the murderers. They were Jewish and explained that they murdered Kastner following the libel trial that took place in 1954-1955, in which Kastner, a lawyer, journalist and eventually a civil servant in Israel, was accused of collaborating with the Nazis in Hungary, indirectly helping them eliminate Hungarian Jewry.

“Kastner sold his soul to the devil,” Benjamin Halevi, the judge presiding at the Tel Aviv district court, wrote in his decision on the high-profile case. A year after Kastner's death, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ruling and cleared him of collaboration with the Nazis.

But 62 years after the murder, Kastner's trial remains a point of agitation, with historians arguing passionately about whether Kastner was a hero or a villain of the Holocaust.

Rudolf Kastner, also known as Reszo Kastzner, was born in 1906 in the town of Cluj in Transylvania, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied law and then worked as a journalist, and was politically active and involved in Zionist activity. At the beginning of the 1940s Kastner was a member of the Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest that helped Jewish refugees who sought shelter in Hungary while fleeing the Nazis and, according to testimonies, he saved tens of thousands of lives.