All of a sudden, in the middle of the conversation, Ben-Gurion turned to Isser. “Tell me, can you find the child?”
He didn’t say what child he was talking about, but Isser understood right away. For the last two years, one question kept popping up all over Israel, screaming from newspaper headlines, shouted from the Knesset podium, and angrily thrown in the faces of ultra-Orthodox Jews by secular youth: “Where is Yossele?”
Yossele was Yossele Schuchmacher, an eight-year-old boy from the city of Holon, who had been kidnapped by ultra-Orthodox Jews, headed by his grandfather. The old Hassid wanted to raise Yossele in the ultra-Orthodox tradition, and had snatched the child from his parents. Since then, the boy had vanished without a trace. Each day he remained missing, the dispute over the child grew, from a family affair to a national scandal to an increasingly violent confrontation between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. Some feared a civil war could erupt and tear the nation apart. As a last resort, Ben-Gurion turned to Isser.
“If you want me to, I’ll try,” Isser said. He drove back to his office and had an operational file opened. He called it Operation Tiger Cub.
Yossele was a good-looking, vivacious child. His only mistake, apparently, had been to choose the wrong parents. That was the opinion of his grandfather, Nahman Shtarkes. Old Shtarkes, skeletal, bearded, and bespectacled, was a fanatical Hassid, a man tough and stubborn. Nobody could break him, neither the KGB thugs, nor the Soviet labor camps in frozen Siberia, where he had spent a part of World War II. In Siberia he had lost an eye, and three toes from frostbite, but his morale had remained intact; his vicissitudes had only fueled his hatred for the Soviets, which peaked in 1951 when a gang of hoodlums stabbed his son to death. He consoled himself with his other two sons, Shalom and Ovadia, and his daughter, Ida, who was married to a tailor.
The young couple lived for a while in Shtarkeses’ old home in Lvov, where they had settled after wandering through Russia and Poland. There, in 1953, the second child in the Schuchmacher family was born: Yossele.
The boy was four years old when he immigrated to Israel with his parents. Grandfather and Grandmother Shtarkes, and one of their sons, Shalom, had arrived in Israel a few months earlier. Nahman Shtarkes, who belonged to the Breslau Hassidim sect, settled in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox sector of Jerusalem. It was another world, of men wearing long black coats or silk caftans, black hats or fur hats, bushy beards and long side-locks; women in long, prim dresses, covering their hair with wigs or scarves; a world of yeshivas, synagogues, courts of famous rabbis. Shalom joined a yeshiva; his other brother, Ovadia, moved to England.
Ida and Alter Schuchmacher settled in Holon. Eventually, Alter got a job in a textile factory in the Tel Aviv area; Ida was hired by a photographer. They bought a small apartment and struggled to make a living. They went deeply into debt. To make ends meet, they sent their daughter, Zina, to a religious institution at K’far Habad, and entrusted Yossele to his grandparents.
Rocked by hard times, Ida and Alter Schuchmacher wrote to friends in Russia that perhaps they shouldn’t have come to Israel. Some of the replies to the couple’s complaints fell in the hands of old Nahman Shtarkes. He concluded that the Schuchmachers intended to go back to Russia with their children. Seething with fury, he decided not to give Yossele back to his parents.
By the end of 1959, though, the Schuchmachers’ economic situation improved. They were better off now, and they decided to reunite their family. In December, Ida went to Jerusalem to pick up her child, but neither Yossele nor his grandfather was home. “Tomorrow your brother Shalom will bring the boy to you,” Ida’s mother said. “Right now he is with his grandfather at the synagogue, and you must not disturb them.”
On the following day, though, Shalom arrived in Holon alone, and told his sister that their father had decided not to give back Yossele. The distraught Ida rushed to Jerusalem with her husband. They spent the weekend at the Shtarkes house, and that time Yossele was there. On Saturday evening, when they were about to leave with the child, Ida’s mother objected. “It’s very cold outside,” she said. “Let the child sleep here, and tomorrow I’ll bring him back to you.” They agreed. Ida kissed her son, who curled up in his bed, and left with her husband. How could she know that years would pass before she saw her little boy again?
The following day, neither Yossele nor his grandmother showed up in Holon. Once again, Ida and Alter got on the road to Jerusalem. But to no avail. The child had vanished, and old Shtarkes bluntly refused to return him, despite Ida’s tears. Her son was gone.
After a few more trips, Ida and Alter realized that the old man wouldn’t give them back their child or disclose his whereabouts. In January 1960, they decided to turn to the courts. They lodged a complaint against Nahman Shtarkes at the Tel Aviv rabbinical court. Shtarkes didn’t answer. And their nightmare began . . .
January 15—Israel’s Supreme Court orders Nahman Shtarkes to return the child to his parents within thirty days and summons him to court. He replies two days later, “I cannot come because of my poor health.”
February 17—The family lodges a complaint with the police, and asks that Nahman Shtarkes be arrested and held in custody until he returns their son. The Supreme Court orders the police to find the child. Ten days later, the police open a file for Yossele and the search begins.
April 7—The police cannot find any trace of the boy and ask the Supreme Court to be relieved of the search.
May 12—Indignant, the Supreme Court orders the police to continue with the search and finally orders the arrest of Nahman Shtarkes. He is taken into custody the next day.
But if anyone had thought that a stay in jail would break old Shtarkes’s resolve, they were dead wrong. The tough old man didn’t say a word.
It became immediately evident that Shtarkes hadn’t hidden the child by himself, and had been helped by a network of ultra-Orthodox Jews who had deceived the police. They had all engaged in a sacrosanct mission: to thwart the devious plan of taking the child to Russia and converting him to Christianity—or so Shtarkes had told them. Even Rabbi Frank, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, published a ruling supporting old Shtarkes and urging the Orthodox community to help him in every way.
The question appeared on the Knesset agenda in May 1960 and the press had a field day. The first to realize the far-reaching implications of the affair were the representatives of the religious parties. Knesset member Shlomo Lorenz felt that the abduction of the child might ignite a religious war in Israel. He offered to Shtarkes and the Schuchmacher family his services as a go-between. He brought to Shtarkes, who was still in jail, a draft agreement saying that the parents promise to give the child an Orthodox education. Shtarkes agreed to sign the paper on one condition: that Rabbi Meizish, one of the most fanatical rabbis in Jerusalem, would order him to do so.
Lorenz hurried to Jerusalem and met with the rabbi. Meizish implied that he’d consent to the agreement only on condition that the abductors wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Now Lorenz went to the chief of police, Joseph Nahmias. “I agree,” Nahmias said. “Take my car and bring the child. You have parliamentary immunity, and no one would follow my car anyway, so the people involved will remain unknown.”
Overjoyed, Lorenz returned to Rabbi Meizish, but the rabbi changed his mind. Lorenz was back at square one. He knew that the child was probably hidden in one of the religious communities, Talmudic schools, or Orthodox villages. But impeded by a wall of silence, finding the child there was an impossible mission.
On April 12, 1961, Nahman Shtarkes was released from jail “for reasons of health,” after he had promised he’d try to find the little boy. But he didn’t keep his word, and the Supreme Court had him arrested again, stating that the abduction was “a shocking and despicable crime.” In August 1961, a National Committee for the Return of Yossele was created and it started distributing leaflets, organizing public meetings, alerting the media. Many thousands signed its petitions; the sinister shadow of a cult
ural war loomed on the horizon.
In August 1961, the police raided the Hassidic village Komemiut, only to find out that the bird had flown the coop. Yossele had been hidden in the village a year and a half before, in December 1959, when his uncle Shalom had brought him to the home of a Mr. Zalman Kot. The child was hidden under the name “Israel Hazak.”
In the meantime, though, the child had been whisked away, and Shalom Shtarkes had left the country and settled in the Hassidic community Golders Green in London. On the demand of the Israeli police, Shtarkes was arrested by the British; when his first child, Kalman, was born, his family brought the baby to the prison where the circumcision ritual was performed.
But Yossele was gone, without a trace. Some believed that he had been smuggled out of the country, or even got sick and died. The police became a laughingstock. Violent clashes erupted between secular and Orthodox Jews. Yeshiva students were caught and beaten in the street by passersby. Secular youngsters taunted Orthodox youths with the cries “Where is Yossele?”
The fury of the Israeli public reached its boiling point. Stormy debates shook the Knesset.
That’s when Ben-Gurion called Isser.
When Isser Harel agreed to assume the search for Yossele, he didn’t realize that he was accepting the most difficult and complicated assignment of his career. He never used to discuss operational matters with his wife, Rivka. But this time he told her: “The authority of the government is at stake.” One of his best agents, Avraham Shalom, had a different opinion: “Isser wanted to prove that he could succeed where the police had failed.”
The police were only too happy to palm off their unwanted task. Joseph Nahmias, the chief of police, asked Isser: “Do you really believe it is possible to find the child?” Amos Manor, the head of the Shabak and Isser’s close collaborator, was against the entire project. Many of the Mossad and the Shabak senior officers agreed. They all thought that this assignment was outside their duties; they were supposed to work for the security of Israel, and not chase a kid in Hassidic schools. Unlike Isser, they didn’t believe the secret service served to preserve the reputation of the Jewish state. Yet, once Isser had made up his mind, they didn’t contest his decision. His authority was absolute.
Isser and his assistants created a task force of about forty agents—the best Shabak investigators, members of the operational team, religious agents or people posing as such, and even civilians who volunteered for the operation. Most of the volunteers were members of the Orthodox community who realized the danger that Yossele’s abduction posed for the nation. But their first operations ended in dismal failure. They crudely tried to penetrate the ultra-Orthodox bastions and were immediately recognized, mocked, and rejected. “I felt as if I had landed on Mars,” said one of Isser’s agents, “and had to blend in among a crowd of little green men without being noticed.”
Isser patiently studied the file, reading and rereading each document. There was no trace of Yossele anywhere in Israel. Isser finally reached a conclusion: the child had been taken out of the country.
Out of the country, but where? A strange piece of news drew his attention. In mid-March 1962, a large group of Hassidic Jews had traveled to Israel from Switzerland. Scores of men, women, and children came to escort the coffin of their venerated rabbi and bury him in the Holy Land. Isser came to suspect that the funeral was just a cover story used to spirit Yossele out of the country when the group returned to Switzerland a few weeks later. Isser posted his men at the airport, and sent a small team of his men, headed by Avraham Shalom, to Zurich, to follow the Hassidim on their return. The Mossad agents even went to the children’s boarding school and snuck in to its courtyard at night to peek in the windows and scrutinize every child. “We reached this yeshiva in the middle of the forest,” Shalom recalled. “We stuck to the windows; we knew he might be disguised but we looked for a child that could be of the same age.” After a week of nightly adventures, he had to report to Isser that Yossele definitely was not among the Swiss children.
Isser decided to assume command of the operation. He placed all pending matters into the hands of his aides, settled in an improvised headquarters in Paris, and sent his men all over the world. They carried out investigations in France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, England, South America, the United States, and North Africa. Using different covers, they tried to penetrate Orthodox yeshivas and communities, in order to list the centers where the child could be hidden. A young Orthodox Jew from Jerusalem arrived in the famous yeshiva of Rabbi Soloweichik in Switzerland, posing as a scholar who came to study the Torah with the renowned master. A modest religious woman, pious and devout, arrived in London, carrying warm letters of recommendation from Shalom Shtarkes’s mother-in-law, whose trust she had won. She was invited by the Shtarkes family to stay with them as their houseguest. They didn’t know that the good woman was Yehudith Nissiyahu, Isser’s best female agent who had participated in Eichmann’s abduction.
Yehudith wasn’t the only Mossad agent operating in London these days. London was an important center of ultra-Orthodox Hassidim of the Satmar sect (named after the Romanian village Satu Mare, where the sect had originated). Isser sent another team of agents to the Hassidim residential neighborhoods in London. Another team rushed to Ireland. During the operations in England, Isser’s men had stumbled upon a young religious couple who had suddenly rented an isolated house in Ireland. The Mossad agents believed that the couple would use the house as the new hideout for Yossele, and prepared a detailed plan for the capture of the child. Hurriedly, they rented apartments and cars, smuggled equipment, prepared false documents. The operation was planned to the smallest detail.
And then the failures came.
The first to return home frustrated was the Ireland team. It turned out that the “religious couple” was indeed a religious couple. They had just decided to go on vacation to Ireland. Yehudith Nissiyahu also failed to obtain any information from the Shtarkes family, and the young man who went to study the Holy Scriptures in Switzerland returned enlightened but empty-handed. From all over the world, negative answers poured into Isser’s headquarters. The child had vanished.
The worst fate awaited the team that tried to penetrate the Satmar Hassidim in London. Some young, smart yeshiva students in the Stamford Hill neighborhood immediately made the uninvited guests and confronted them, shouting: “Here come the Zionists! Come, Yossele is here!” They even called the London police. Isser’s assistants had to work hard to spring their colleagues from Her Majesty’s jail.
One after another, Isser’s most devout supporters lost hope. They told him: “Isser, it won’t work. Call off the hunt. You’re looking for a needle in a haystack. We won’t find the child.”
But he didn’t give up. Stubborn as a bulldog, he waved off all the doubts and complaints, and continued, obsessed by the search and confident that even against all odds he would find the child.
In Paris, he summoned Yaacov Caroz, the head of the Mossad station. Caroz, born in Romania, had lost his parents in the Holocaust, and had been involved in espionage and security matters since his studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Slim, with a clear forehead, delicate features, and eyeglasses, Caroz had the outward appearance of an intellectual. He was the former head of Tevel (Universe), the Mossad department in charge of covert relations with foreign secret services, and had forged some of Israel’s most secret and unexpected alliances. He had helped build a “peripheral pact” between Israel and Iran, Ethiopia, Turkey, and even Sudan (all non-Arab countries on the periphery of the Middle East); he had established close cooperation with the heads of the French, British, and German secret services; he had struck an alliance with the formidable General Oufkir, Morocco’s dreaded minister of interior, and secretly visited Morocco’s King Hassan; he had even helped the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, crush an attempted coup by his closest aides. During an undercover mission in Algeria, he had fallen in love with a young woman, Juliette (Yael), who became his wife. C
aroz, soft-spoken and deceptively polite, was a master spy in a suit and tie who had never acted as a field agent; yet he was a man of the world who spoke fluent French and English, which made him a valuable asset for Isser.
Isser worked around the clock. He had rented a hotel room, but spent most of his days and nights in the apartment that he had turned into his operational headquarters. His assistants bought him a folding cot (they called it “Yossele’s bed”), and once in a while he would collapse on it for a short nap. That lasted for months. Most of the time he was busy checking reports, writing telegrams, and talking to his men, who were dispersed all over Europe. At dawn he would leave his office and go to his hotel, where he showered, freshened up, and returned to work. On the first night, as he returned to the hotel in the wee hours, the porter flashed him an appreciative smile. This little gentleman apparently enjoyed Paris’s nightlife to the full. The second night, the porter allowed himself to address a friendly wink to the gentleman. But when the nightly adventures continued in the third, and fourth, and fifth nights, the porter couldn’t keep his cool anymore. When Isser returned at dawn, his eyes red from lack of sleep, his face covered with stubble, his clothes ruffled, the porter theatrically removed his hat, bowed, and declared: “My respects, monsieur!”
Then, one April morning, a curious report reached the Mossad agents. It had been dispatched by a young Orthodox Jew named Meir, who had been sent to Antwerp, Belgium. There he had become acquainted with a group of religious diamond merchants who followed old Rabbi Itzikel and considered him to be a holy man. When they wanted to solve their business disputes, they didn’t seek help from the state courts, instead asked the rabbi to be the mediator and the judge—often for deals worth many millions. His word was law. Even in modern-day Europe, this particular group of merchants observed the customs of ancient times.
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