David Ben Gurion, printed letter, signed in his handwriting, on official stationary of The State of Israel. Sent to the Chief Rabbi, Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog, and to the Rishon Letzion (Sephardi Chief Rabbi), Yitzchak Nissim. April 18, 1955.
Response to a letter that he received from mothers whose children were arrested: "I must immediately make you aware of one untruth in the letter signed by the mothers (and we can assume that it was written and edited by a lawyer or one of the associates of the terrorist organization to whom the sentenced belong) […] In the letter it says that the prisoners were adjudicated according to the emergency regulations from the days of the British Mandate. This is not true. They were adjudicated according to the law that was legislated in The State of Israel by the Provisional State Council…".
Possibly, Ben Gurion means the Tzrifin underground ("Malchut Israel"), which operated on a religious and national background in the beginning of the 1950's. The Tzrifin people, mostly young men, burned non-kosher stores, threw a grenade at the Czechoslovakian embassy and hid a bomb in the Russian consulate. In 1953, the government announced that the Tzrifin underground is a terrorist organization, a term coined in the "Ordinance for Terror Prevention, 1948". The underground members were caught by the Israel (General) Security Agency, and its leaders were sentenced to many years imprisonment. On April, 1955, they were released by the recommendation of the Head of the Israel Security Agency and the Prime Minister. The "anonymous" lawyer mentioned by Ben Gurion is apparently Attorney Shmuel Tamir, who formally was an Etzel (Irgun) fighter, and later defended many anti-institute organizations in those days, including the people of the Tzrifin underground.
[1] leaf, 28 cm. Good condition.