Malchiel Gruenwald (; also written Grünwald, Gruenvald, and Greenwald) (1882–1958) was an Israeli hotelier, amateur journalist, and stamp collector, who came to public attention in 1953, when he accused an Israeli government employee, Rudolf Kastner, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Biography Gruenwald was born in Hungary, and lived there and in Vienna, working in a number of trades, including as a part-time journalist. In 1937, while in Vienna with his family, he was caught in a pogrom in which his teeth were smashed out, tongue slashed, arms and legs broken, and he was beaten unconscious and left for dead. In 1938, when he had recovered from his injuries, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine along with his wife, son Itzhak, and daughter Rina. There, he settled in Jerusalem, where, with his life savings, he bought the "Hotel Austria", a ten-room hotel on Zion Square that he ran with his wife. The Gruenwalds as a family were committed Zionists. After the White Paper of 1939, Malchiel and his two brothers assisted illegal immigration to Palestine, organizing immigrant runs, particularly of Jews trying to escape the Holocaust. His son joined the Irgun, and was killed in the battle for Mount Zion during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, after which Gruenwald renamed the hotel the "Mount Zion Hotel". His daughter meanwhile worked as a nurse in a Hadassah hospital by day, and at night tended to the Irgun's wounded. Shlomo Aronson, in his book Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews, claims that Gruenwald's personal file, released by Israeli Home Intelligence, provides a very different picture of Gruenwald's early activities. Gruenwald was a criminal in Hungary and Austria, he would inform on Labour Zionists, threaten Orthodox leaders, and swindle refugees. The file also accuses Gruenwald of asking British authorities to stop a ship carrying refugees, the SS Patria, from entering Palestine. Political pamphlets In the early 1950s, Gruenwald decided to devote his remaining years to journalism, but as Ben Hecht writes, no one was about to employ a 72-year-old man who wrote no Hebrew. Gruenwald therefore began self-publishing a more-or-less weekly three-page mimeographed pamphlet, which he would have translated from German into Hebrew before distributing up to 1,000 copies himself, by mail or by hand in local cafés, all free of charge. Titled Michtavim el haveray be'Mizrahi ("Letters to my Friends in Mizrahi"), the pamphlets consisted of attacks "on leaders who were