Slovakia’s Jewish community called Wednesday for the extradition from Hungary of alleged Nazi-era war criminal Laszlo Csatary so that he can stand trial in Slovakia.

“We’re appealing to government authorities to do so since Csatary was already sentenced in absentia to death by hanging in 1948 by a court in then-Czechoslovakia,” Jaroslav Franek, spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities, told WSJ Emerging Europe.

Mr. Csatary, 97, remains under house arrest after he was detained in Hungary last week. Mr. Csatary, also known as Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s wanted list of surviving suspected Nazi war criminals.

The Wiesenthal Center says he is suspected of organizing the World War II deportations of at least 15,000 Jews between 1941-44 from the ghetto of Kosice in present-day eastern Slovakia. He denies the accusations.

“Court documents from 1948, including a copy of the verdict, are still valid, while Csatary has been evading justice all this time and should be tried here,” Mr. Franek said.

After the war, Mr. Csatary lived for years in Canada until he was stripped of his citizenship there in the 1990s. He then appeared in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, where he lived freely until the Simon Wiesenthal Center alerted Hungarian authorities last year.

Earlier in July, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun–which along with Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.–published an article on Mr. Csatary after confronting and photographing him in Budapest, focusing attention on the case.

“For now we seek the extradition of Mr. Csatary in the form of an appeal to Slovak authorities,” Mr. Franek said.

He said there were signs the Slovak foreign ministry might have begun exploring the case.
Ministry officials weren’t immediately available for comment on whether they intend to pursue extradition for a trial in Slovakia.

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