Chapter Seven
Where Is Yossele?

While Isser, his agents, and the captive Eichmann were waiting in their Buenos Aires safe houses for the arrival of the Britannia “Whispering Giant” aircraft from Tel Aviv, the ramsad was busy with another project. Isser had decided to check the rumors that another Nazi criminal was hiding in the city: Dr. Josef Mengele, “the angel of death,” the monstrous doctor who would receive the trainloads of Jews on the Auschwitz platform and indifferently send the healthy-looking ones to work and the weaker, the women, children, and old people to the gas chambers. Mengele had become a symbol of the Third Reich’s cruelty and madness. After the war he vanished, quite possibly to Argentina.

Mengele came from a rich family. While he was in hiding, they continued to support him, funneling large sums of money to him. The money trail, followed by Mossad agents, led to Buenos Aires; yet so far they had failed in their efforts to find Mengele.

But this time they were lucky. In May 1960, shortly before the Britannia landed in Buenos Aires, Isser’s agents found Mengele’s address. The man was living in Buenos Aires under his real name! Apparently, he was sure he was well protected. Isser sent his best investigator, Zvi Aharoni, to check the address, but Mengele was not at home. His neighbors told Aharoni that the Mengele couple had left for a few days, but they would soon be back. Excited, Isser summoned Rafi Eitan. “Let’s watch and follow,” he said, “and when Mengele comes back, we’ll kidnap him, too, and bring him to Israel together with Eichmann.”

Rafi refused. The Eichmann operation is very complex, he said; we captured one man and we have a good chance of succeeding in getting him on the plane and bringing him to Israel. But another operation for the capture of a second man would increase the risks tremendously. It would be a serious mistake.

Isser gave in, and Rafi made him an alternative offer: “If you bring Eichmann to Israel and keep his capture secret for a week, I’ll bring you Mengele.”

“How will you do that?” Isser asked.

“We still have a few safe houses in Buenos Aires from the Eichmann operation, which nobody knows about. Let’s keep them. When you take off with Eichmann, on your way to Israel, I’ll fly with Zvi Malkin and Avraham Shalom to one of Argentina’s neighboring countries. You’ll arrive in Israel and keep Eichmann’s capture secret; nobody will know we did it, and nobody will look for us. We’ll return to Buenos Aires then, we’ll take Mengele. We’ll keep him in one of our safe houses and after a few days we’ll bring him to Israel.”

Isser agreed. When the Britannia, with Eichmann on board, took off for Israel, Eitan, Shalom, and Malkin flew to Santiago, the capital of neighboring Chile. They intended to return to Buenos Aires after a day or two, if Eichmann’s capture was kept secret, and to launch Operation Mengele.

But the following morning all the world’s media announced in their headlines the capture of Eichmann in Argentina by the Israelis. It was out of the question that some of the leading Mossad agents would return to Argentina and carry out another kidnapping. Rafi and his friends had to abandon their project and return to Israel.

Later, Isser Harel told Rafi that he had asked Ben-Gurion to keep Eichmann’s capture secret for a week, but the Old Man had refused. “Too many people know already that Eichmann is in our hands,” Ben-Gurion allegedly said to Isser. “We won’t be able to keep the secret any longer. I’ve decided to inform the Knesset of his capture, this afternoon.”

Eichmann’s capture was announced—and Israel lost its chance to bring to trial one of the most sadistic criminals in history.

Shortly after the Eichmann capture, Mengele felt the ground was burning under his feet. He moved to Paraguay and vanished until his death of a heart attack almost twenty years later, in February 1979.

 

In early March 1962, Isser Harel was summoned by Ben-Gurion. The Old Man greeted him warmly, chatting with him for a while about various subjects. What does he want? Isser wondered. He knew Ben-Gurion well, and was sure that he hadn’t invited Isser in for small talk. The two men liked each other, and were similar. They were both short, stubborn, and decisive, born leaders of men, dedicated to Israel’s security; they both weren’t ones to waste time and words. And since Eichmann’s capture they had become much closer.

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 cultural 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. Caroz, 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.

Meir succeeded in penetrating the circle of the rabbi’s followers and learned that during World War II they had acted as an anti-Nazi underground, and had saved many Jews from the Gestapo. After the war, the group continued using the same methods and experience they had acquired as an underground organization, to engage in business ventures throughout the world. The diamond merchants told Meir an extraordinary story about a blond, blue-eyed Frenchwoman, a Catholic, who had been part of their organization during the war, helping them to rescue Jews from Hitler’s grasp. The woman had been profoundly influenced by the rabbi’s charisma; she converted to Judaism and became devoutly Orthodox, and more so, a priceless asset for the group. Her years in the underground had taught her a lot; she was bright, daring, she knew how to cover her tracks, change disguises, and use her charm as a weapon. Besides, she had an instinct for business and a keen natural intelligence. She had traveled the world on missions for the Antwerp group with her French passport. “She’s a holy woman,” the Antwerp Jews told Meir. They also told him that she had visited Israel; her son from her first marriage, Claude, had also converted, and after studying in yeshivas in Switzerland and Aix-les-Bains, was now a student at a Talmudic school in Jerusalem. But even the Antwerp people didn’t know where the fabulous holy woman was now.

That story fired up Isser’s imagination. On the face of it, there was nothing in the report to connect the Frenchwoman to Yossele. But in Isser’s eyes, she appeared as a person with enormous potential, a woman with a thousand faces. She could be a real godsend for the Orthodox leaders, if they needed somebody to set out on secret missions concerning Yossele.

Isser decided to follow his intuition, abandon all other leads, and concentrate on the mysterious convert. He cabled to Israel all the details he knew, and instructed his service to find the son and his mother.

A few days later, the answer came. The son’s name was now Ariel and he was in Israel indeed. Yet nobody knew where his mother was. Her name was originally Madeleine Ferraille; in Israel, she was called Ruth Ben-David.

 

The reports streaming to Isser’s headquarters painted a more accurate picture of Madeleine Ferraille. The pretty young woman had studied history and geography at the Toulouse University and the Sorbonne in Paris. She had married her college sweetheart, Henri, and their son was born shortly after the outbreak of World War II. Madeleine had joined the Maquis Resistance during the war, and her underground activities had brought her into contact with French and Belgian Jews, among them the Antwerp group. At the war’s end, she even initiated joint import-export ventures with some of them.

In 1951 she divorced Henri, after falling in love with a young rabbi in a small Alsatian town. The rabbi, a fervent Zionist, wanted to emigrate to Israel, and the two lovers decided to marry there. Her conversion to Judaism, therefore, was not so much for love of the religion itself as for love of one of its adherents. The recently converted Ruth Ben-David tied a scarf on her blond hair, changed her elegant clothes for the shapeless vestments of an Orthodox Jewess, and followed her fiancé to the Holy Land. But in Israel the affair turned sour; the rabbi left her, and she remained alone, depressed and frustrated. Her personal crisis apparently motivated her to approach the most extremist circles in Jerusalem and their leader, Rabbi Meizish. She gained a lot of respect in the religious circles after using her French passport to cross into the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem and pray at the Wailing Wall.

In the early fifties, Ruth returned to France and started traveling extensively again. The Mossad agents found out that she often stayed in Aix-les-Bains, or in a religious women’s institution close to Paris. But she had no permanent address.

The immigration authorities informed Isser’s men that in the last few years Ruth had visited Israel twice. The second time, on June 21, 1960, she had left Israel with a little girl, who was recorded in her passport as her daughter. She had departed on an Alitalia flight, and her final destination was Zurich. But who was the small girl? Ben-David had no daughter. Isser felt that he was on the right track. “Find her!” he said to Yaacov Caroz.

Armed with a detailed description of the woman, Caroz and another agent set out for Aix-les-Bains. But as they drove into the small town, they saw something amazing: Ruth Ben-David—or, in this case, Madeleine Ferraille—elegantly dressed, stood by the road hitchhiking! They were startled. Elegant, refined Frenchwomen trying to thumb a ride on the roads of France were not a common sight, to say the least. The driver immediately made a U-turn and darted toward the lady, but another car stopped ahead of him and departed with the pretty woman.

The agents returned from Aix-les-Bains empty-handed; but from another source, they learned that Ruth Ben-David kept close ties with Joseph Domb, a rich London jewel merchant. She had been sighted sitting alone with Domb in an automobile, which was inappropriate for a Hassidic man. Isser knew of Domb; he was a staunch enemy of the State of Israel. He belonged to the Satmar Hassidic sect, was a close confidant of the Satmar rabbi in New York, and knew the major Satmar leaders in various communities in Europe. “If the Satmar rabbi in New York is the pope,” one expert told Isser, “then Domb is his archbishop.”

Isser realized that all the roads led to London. Here lived the two sons of old Shtarkes. Here was based an active community of the Satmar sect, led by Domb. Here he was seen with Ruth Ben-David, who might have smuggled Yossele out of Israel. Isser had no more doubts: it had to be the Satmar Hassidim in Israel and Europe who had orchestrated the kidnapping of the child. Domb had been in charge of the operation. Ruth Ben-David had been instrumental in the abduction, because of her talents, her experience, and her French passport; she might know where the child was hidden.

His suspicions were confirmed by a Shabak agent who intercepted several letters Ruth Ben-David had written to her son; they contained some veiled hints about Yossele Schuchmacher.

Yet Isser needed more information; he decided to penetrate the Satmar Hassidim. His men in London identified a mohel—a rabbi who specialized in the circumcision of newborn Jewish boys—named Freyer (not his real name). He was a chatterbox, a man with a taste for life’s pleasures under a cloak of righteousness, and—last but not least—a man who was close to Domb and claimed that he knew where Yossele was.

Isser launched a complicated operation, intended to bring Freyer to Paris: one of his men, posing as a Moroccan prince, came secretly to Freyer and told him he had fallen in love with a Jewish girl. They had married in secret, and kept the Jewish faith at home, in Morocco. Now his wife had given birth to a baby boy and he wanted him circumcised, but couldn’t do it in Morocco; his family would murder him if they only knew . . . His wife and child were in Paris, would Rabbi Freyer come to circumcise the baby? He would be handsomely rewarded.

Freyer readily agreed, and a few days later arrived in Paris. The moment he stepped into the apartment of “the Moroccan prince,” he was apprehended by Mossad agents. They escorted him to a bare room, where he was interrogated for hours by Victor Cohen, the head of the Shabak investigation department. The mohel was scared to death, offered no resistance, and was ready to talk. But when asked about Yossele, he raised his hands. “I am dreadfully sorry,” he said, “but I don’t know a thing.”

It turned out, indeed, that Freyer knew nothing about the abducted child, and all his braggadocio was just intended to impress his friends. Once again, Isser’s efforts hit a wall.

Surprisingly, another team of his men had struck gold. With the help of the French Secret Service, they had succeeded in intercepting several letters sent to Madeleine Ferraille, and in one of them they found the opportunity they were looking for. It was a reply to a newspaper ad offering for sale her country house in Orleans, a lovely city in “the Garden of France”—the Loire Valley. They dispatched a letter to the post office box given in the advertisement and offered Ferraille more than she was asking for her house; they claimed they were Austrian businessmen looking for a location for their vacations. Madeleine Ferraille answered, giving the address of her house; soon after, they wrote to her again, saying they had visited it and it suited their needs. They fixed an appointment for closing the deal on June 21, 1962, in the lobby of a big hotel in Paris.

A few days before the appointment, Isser’s men arrived in Paris one by one and engaged in feverish activity. They rented cars and safe houses in Paris and its suburbs, established escape routes, prepared documents and equipment, and brought from Israel experts in surveillance and interrogation.

Isser also decided that the best means to make Ruth Ben-David spill her secrets was through her son. Ariel studied in a yeshiva in Israel and apparently knew a lot about Yossele. Isser decided to arrest him simultaneously with his mother’s abduction in France. Ariel was Orthodox, but less fanatical than his mother. Isser established a system of communication that would enable the Mossad agents to synchronize the questioning of Ruth with that of her son in Israel, so they could use the answers of the son for the questioning of the mother.

And indeed, on the morning of June 21, a tall, elegant, strikingly beautiful woman walked into the hotel lobby. This was Madeleine Ferraille.

The charming Frenchwoman introduced herself to the two Austrians who were waiting for her. One of them was Herr Furber, the other Herr Schmidt. She spoke excellent English, and also had a good command of German. She never suspected the identity of her two buyers. They quickly reached an agreement about the sale of the house, but their lawyer was late. Furber called him from one of the hotel phone booths; when he came back, he said that the lawyer had profusely apologized. He had been detained at home, he said, by several urgent matters. He had asked if they could come to his house in the town of Chantilly, close to the city, and gave Furber the address and detailed directions. He would receive them immediately and they would sign all the papers on the spot.

“Shall we go?” Furber asked

Madeleine agreed. They got into the two Austrians’ rental car and drove to the lawyer’s villa. But the Frenchwoman’s charm almost caused the failure of the entire operation. Furber, the agent at the wheel, was so entranced by Madeleine that he went through a red light. The strident shriek of a whistle brought him back to reality. A fat, angry police officer was running toward him, blowing his whistle and pointing to the red light.

Furber stopped the car, fraught by ominous premonitions. What should he do? He was in a foreign country, with phony papers, driving a rented car with a woman who was about to disappear. He would get a traffic ticket, a procedure against him would be initiated by the police, and . . . But Madeleine Ferraille, who had caused all his troubles, was also the one who came to his rescue. She stuck her head out of the window, and flashed a charming smile at the police officer. “Monsieur l’agent,” she said sweetly, “this man is a tourist. He is in a foreign country, travels with a woman, and tries to amuse her with his stories . . . You certainly can understand that. Please forgive him . . .” The police officer, too, was entranced by the lady’s charm, and let the panic-stricken agents off without even writing a ticket.

Presently the car entered the beautiful town of Chantilly, where the “lawyer” lived. They entered the villa’s driveway and stopped before the main entrance. The two businessmen politely helped their guest out of the car, escorted her to the house, the door opened, and she walked in.

She was led to the “lawyer’s office.”

The part of the lawyer was played by Yaacov Caroz. “Madame,” he said in French, “you are not here to discuss your house in Orleans but another matter.”

“What? What’s going on?”

“I want to talk to you about the child Yossele Schuchmacher.”

At that moment, two other men materialized at her side. When she turned back, she realized that the two “businessmen” had vanished without a trace. She was struck with fear.

“I’ve fallen into a trap!” she hoarsely whispered in French.

“You’ve fallen in the hands of the Israeli services, Madame,” Caroz said.

At that very moment, police officers arrested Ariel Ben-David, the Frenchwoman’s son, in the town of Be’er Yaacov, in Israel.

 

In Chantilly, Caroz turned to Ruth Ben-David. “Madame, you are involved in the abduction of Yossele Schuchmacher. We want the child!”

“I know nothing and I’ll say nothing,” she answered firmly. After the initial shock, she had recovered quickly. Caroz had brought over his sister-in-law, a trained nurse, to stand by in case of emergency.

The Israelis understood that Ruth was their last hope. But they also assumed that this iron lady would not break easily, and that might take quite a while. She was handed over to Yehudith Nissiyahu, who had arrived from London. Nissiyahu treated her well, and took care of her needs as a religious woman. She provided her with prayer books and candles for the Sabbath; she cooked kosher food for her. The wing where she was kept was out of bounds for men. The nurse occupied the room next to hers.

The interrogation started. The convert spent hours facing the agents, mostly Yaacov Caroz and Victor Cohen, who addressed her in French. She was amazed to discover that the Israelis knew all about her; but she stubbornly refused to reveal any information about Yossele. “I’ll say nothing,” she kept repeating. She called Victor Cohen “flic,” which in French slang means “cop.” She stubbornly denied any connection with the abduction. “So I started to talk to her about all kinds of subjects,” Victor Cohen recalled later, “just to soften her. I wanted to understand how a Christian girl had become a fanatical Orthodox. These are two different worlds. At first, when we spoke, she insisted that there had to be another woman in the room with us. Later she agreed to sit alone with me, but the door had to remain open.”

One of her interrogators was charged with the unpleasant duty of throwing insulting accusations in her face, in order to make her lose her calm. The Mossad men hoped that she would react impulsively, and blurt out things she didn’t mean to say; they could be used in the simultaneous interrogation of her son in Israel.

And indeed, the interrogation of Ariel Ben-David started bearing fruit. The chief investigator in Israel was Avraham Hadar, a tough guy incongruously code-named “Pashosh” (Thrush). He told the young man that his mother had capitulated. “Your mother has confessed to everything,” he said. “Your lies will get you nowhere. Tell the truth!”

And after a while Ariel broke down. He said he knew what had happened to the child, and would talk “only if my mother and I get immunity.”

Pashosh told him, “You got it!” He immediately brought Ariel to Amos Manor, the head of the Shabak. As they entered, Manor yelled at Ariel: “Whatever Pashosh promised you—I agree. Now, where is the child?!” Ariel was shaken. He finally admitted that his mother had smuggled Yossele out of Israel, disguised as a little girl. She had forged her passport, where he had been registered under his former name, Claude. She had changed the name to Claudine, and also changed the birth date, so it could fit Yossele’s age. He knew that the child had been taken to Switzerland.

Ariel’s confession was rushed to Chantilly, and Ruth Ben-David’s interrogators confronted her with the new facts. “Ariel is in our hands,” Victor Cohen told her. “He is facing stiff punishment. He has confessed everything. Don’t you care what will happen to your son?”

“He is not my son anymore,” she muttered. She remained unbreakable. The interrogators couldn’t help admiring the tremendous strength of that woman.

Gradually, the situation became untenable. The solution seemed so close, and yet the interrogators felt that everything might end in total failure.

Finally, Isser decided, the time had come for him to take over.

 

In the bare, dark room, Isser Harel and Ruth Ben-David faced each other across the table. Some Mossad agents stood behind them; Cohen and Caroz served as interpreters.

Isser firmly believed that this fiercely determined woman would not yield to any threats. The only way, he thought, was to convince her with moral arguments. She was religious, indeed, but she would listen to logic. After all, she had not been an ultra-Orthodox Jewess all her life, and the fanaticism of former generations didn’t flow in her veins since her birth. She was an intelligent, shrewd woman, and she should be addressed as such.

“I represent the Israeli government,” Isser said, weighing every word. “Your son has told us everything, and we have a lot of other information about you. Most of your secrets are known to us. We are sorry that we had to bring you here by force. You converted to Judaism, and Judaism means Israel. Without Israel, Judaism would not survive. The abduction of Yossele has dealt a terrible blow to the religious community in Israel. It stirred feelings of fury against the Orthodox. You could be the cause of bloodshed and a civil war. If you don’t return the child, a blood libel may result. Just think what might happen to that child! He could get sick, even die. How could you and your accomplices face his parents then? That would haunt you for the rest of your lives. And you’ll never be absolved!

“You are a woman and a mother. If someone disapproved of the way you’re bringing up your son and took him away from you, how would you feel? Could you sleep at night?

“We are not fighting against religion. Our only purpose is to find the child. As soon as we have him in our hands, you’ll go free, your son will go free—and Israel will be united again.”

Isser watched as Ruth’s face began to show her inner conflict. She seemed torn by contradictory feelings. Ruth was in a state of high tension, fighting against herself as only a strong person can before an uncompromising dilemma.

The Mossad agents were motionless like statues. They, too, believed that the moment of truth had arrived.

Ruth raised her head. “How do I know that you are a genuine representative of the State of Israel? How can I trust you?”

Without a blink, Isser pulled out his diplomatic passport, issued in his real name, and handed it to Ruth Ben-David.

His men were dumbfounded. Has he gone mad? To give her his name and passport—that was a tremendous risk! Isser, however, felt that only if he showed her he was sincere and had confidence in her did he have a chance of success.

For a long moment Ruth gazed at the seal of Israel embossed on the passport. She bit her lips till drops of blood popped on her mouth. “I can’t take it anymore,” she murmured. “I am going to break down . . .”

Then, suddenly, she raised her head. “The child is with the Gertner family, one twenty-six Penn Street, Brooklyn, New York. They call him Yankele.”

Isser jumped to his feet. “As soon as we get the child, you’ll be free.”

He left the room.

 

A feverish exchange of telegrams alerted Jerusalem, then New York and Washington. Isser called Israel Gur-Arie, the security officer of the Israeli diplomatic missions in North America. Gur-Arie, who was based in New York, checked the Brooklyn address; he cabled back that the address was correct and that the Gertner family lived in a district largely populated by Satmar Hassidim. Jerusalem dispatched a cable to Avraham Harman, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, instructing him to contact the FBI and ask them to find the child and deliver him to Israel.

Gur-Arie himself called his counterpart at the FBI and gave him all the details—“what the child eats, what he wears,” et cetera. The FBI agent answered: “If you know so much about him, go get him yourself.” Gur-Arie replied: “Give me the authorization.” The FBI agent refused.

Disquieting telegrams began pouring into Isser’s headquarters. The Americans are hesitating, Gur-Arie and the Israeli ambassador reported. They ask, are you absolutely certain that the child is at that address? What would happen if we raided that house and didn’t find the child? The FBI hinted that their reticence was due to the upcoming congressional elections. The Satmar sect controlled almost one hundred thousand votes, and the administration didn’t want to risk alienating them.

In Chantilly, Isser was losing patience. At midnight, he picked up the phone. “Get me Harman in Washington,” he ordered.

When the connection was established, he was blunt. “Harman,” he said, “this is Isser Harel. I want you to get in touch with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, immediately, and tell him in my name that the FBI should get the boy at once.”

Harman was stunned. “Isser, how can you talk like that?” He hinted that the American services might be monitoring their conversation.

“So much the better,” Isser said. “I am not talking only to you.” He hoped that the Americans were listening in, and his firm stand would rouse them to action.

Harman kept hesitating and tried to warn Isser about possible diplomatic complications.

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” Isser snapped. “Tell them that if they don’t act immediately, they will be held responsible for anything that happens.”

A few hours later, Isser was called to the telephone. It was New York. The consulate officials informed him that Robert Kennedy had taken immediate action. A team of FBI agents, accompanied by the Israeli security officer, had gone to Brooklyn. The child was indeed found and taken to a safe place. It was Yossele.

A young reporter named Elie Wiesel (the future Nobel Prize winner) called Gur-Arie. “I heard that you found the child.” Gur-Arie, who had been sworn to secrecy, firmly denied. Wiesel didn’t forgive him for years.

 

The Fourth of July 1962 was a national holiday in Israel as well, as on that day the plane carrying Yossele home landed at Lod Airport. The press enthusiastically praised the dedicated efficiency of the secret service. Israel was fast becoming the only country in the world where that shadow organization was loved and admired by the whole nation. A well-known Israeli lawyer, Shlomo Cohen Zidon, wrote a letter of thanks to Ben-Gurion for finding the child. Ben-Gurion wrote back: “You should thank our secret services and mostly their head, who spent days and nights on that mission, and didn’t rest, even when his assistants almost gave up, till he found the child and pulled him out of his hideout, which was not easy either.”

While all of Israel was celebrating Yossele’s rescue, Isser was in Paris, where his men threw a modest party for him. One of the agents raised his glass “to the child returned to his fatherland, to the iron-willed man who found him, to the state that knows so well to protect its citizens.” Another agent presented Isser with a stuffed toy tiger cub as a souvenir of the operation; his colleagues shipped to his home in Tel Aviv “Yossele’s bed,” on which he had passed so many sleepless nights.

 

Now that the boy had been found, the whole truth came to light.

It had all started with a telegram.

In the spring of 1960, while Yossele was being clandestinely shuttled from one yeshiva to another in Israel, Ruth Ben-David received a telegram from her friend Rabbi Meizish: “Come immediately to Jerusalem, I have a good match for you.” When Ruth arrived, she found out that the “match” was actually a secret mission: to smuggle Yossele out of Israel.

Ruth returned to France, altered her passport, changing the name of her son from Claude to Claudine and his date of birth from 1945 to 1953. She then changed her clothes and her name, becoming Madeleine Ferraille. She flew to Genoa and bought a passage on a ship that sailed to Israel carrying passengers and new immigrants.

On Genoa’s dock she began to play, as if by chance, with the eight-year-old daughter of a family of immigrants. When the boarding begun and the immigrants were struggling with their packages and suitcases, the charming Madeleine took the little girl by the hand and led her up to the ship’s deck. The Italian immigration officers checked her passport and noted that she had got on board with her little girl. In Israel she repeated the same procedure and the Israeli immigration duly noted that she had come out of the boat with her little daughter.

A few days later, Madeleine Ferraille boarded a plane at Lod Airport with her “daughter Claudine,” who was none other than Yossele Schuchmacher, wearing a neat girl’s dress and patent-leather pumps.

Yossele spent almost two years in ultra-Orthodox boarding schools in Switzerland and France. But when the search for Yossele in Israel reached a larger scale, Madeleine showed up at the boarding school in Meaux, where the child was hidden now under the guise of “Menachem, an orphan of Swiss parentage.”

She dressed him in girl’s clothes once again and flew with him to America. There she was helped by the head of the Satmar sect, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, who directed a milkman named Gertner to take “Yankele” to his home and pass him off as a cousin from Argentina who had come for a long visit.

The Mossad experts realized that the ultra-Orthodox clandestine network spread all over America and Europe was comparable to the secret organizations of the world’s best intelligence services. And, most of all, they were amazed by Ruth Ben-David. She stuck to the rules of conspiracy: she never had a permanent address, carried all her important papers in her handbag, changed identities as easily as one changes one’s clothes. The lovely Frenchwoman was the Mata Hari of the Orthodox world.

But while all of Israel was rejoicing over the return of Yossele to his parents, Ruth Ben-David felt broken and vanquished. “I am guilty,” she said to her friends, sobbing. “I betrayed our cause. I can never forgive myself. I had a precious treasure entrusted to me, and I could not keep it.”

Yet Madeleine Ferraille/Ruth Ben-David—had so admirably demonstrated all the qualities necessary for a secret agent that Isser Harel decided to offer her a job at the Mossad. But he was too late. Ruth returned to Jerusalem and vanished in the ultra-Orthodox world; three years later, she married Rabbi Amram Blau, the seventy-two-year-old head of the most fanatical of all sects, Neturei Karta.

Isser Harel and Yossele Schuchmacher met only nine years later, when one of the authors of this book threw a party in Isser’s honor and invited Yossele. Yossele—now a private first class in a tank division—shook hands with Isser and declared: “I am deeply touched. Isser Harel has been the most important person in my life. Without him I would not be here among you.”