Post by Moses on Jul 9, 2005 1:59:52 GMT -5
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 13:40 08/07/2005
The spy who came into the fold[/size]
By Yossi Kaufman
The way Eli Kaufman goes on about Shin Bet plots, one might think that he's been watching too many B-grade thrillers. But Kaufman hasn't seen a movie for over 15 years. However, he does have plenty of personal experience and knowledge of the Shin Bet. He says he was a paid agent for three years and has no regrets or pangs of conscience about it. He provided his handlers with information about radical leftist organizations and claims to have helped convict members of the Derekh Hanitzotz ("Way of the Spark") group who had joined the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Naif Hawatmeh. Of course, it is hard to know if he's telling the truth about this. The Shin Bet says it does not comment on the organization's work methods or answer questions about its employees or agents.
Sitting in Kaufman's ascetic third-floor (no elevator) apartment in Ramat Beit Shemesh and listening to his stories, it all sounds somewhat hallucinatory. But he insists that they are the absolute truth and happened just as he describes. All the upheavals and transitions in the 30 years of his adult life can be dizzying and hard to follow. He was a soccer player. He was active in the Moked movement. And in Sheli. Then he moved to the Trotskyite anti-Zionist Avant-Garde organization. He became a paid agent of the Shin Bet. He joined Charlie Biton's Black Panthers, in Hadash. Afterward, he became a member of Aharon Abu-Hatzeira and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer's Tami movement (the name is an acronym for the Movement for the Heritage of Israel), which aspired to represent the Mizrahi Jews. Later on, he got interested in religion and became close to Shas, and today he is ultra-Orthodox.
And now he's written a book: "Tzaddik Katamar Yifrah: `Al Harav Hatzaddik Shmelka Pinter, z"l" (a biography of Rabbi Shmelka Pinter, Atzmit Press, 556 pages, hardcover). Pinter was the chairman of Agudath Israel in Britain and a rabbi who was esteemed by Hasidic supporters in London's ultra-Orthodox Stamford Hill neighborhood. The synagogue where he served as rabbi was known as "Pinters." The book could be placed in the category of hagiography. Kaufman says that some of the rabbi's Hasids asked him to write the book, and since he, too, was among the rabbi's admirers, he decided to take on the task.
But he also had another reason. "Rabbi Pinter suffered terribly, and I wanted the public to know about his suffering." Rabbi Pinter's suffering had to do with the Shin Bet, Kaufman claims. In the 1960s, the London rabbi (who died six years ago) was suspected of being connected to a group of Hasids who kidnapped a boy named Yossele Shuchmacher. The case, which caused an uproar in Israel in 1961-62, is described from the ultra-Orthodox point of view in a long chapter in the book.
A bit of background: Three generations of the Shuchmacher family immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1958. Yossele's maternal grandfather, Nahman Shtarks, wanted his grandson to have a religious education, but the boy's parents decided to give him a secular education. Shalom Shtarks, the boy's uncle, helped arrange his kidnapping from his parents and was assisted in this by people from Agudath Israel and Neturei Karta activists. He also received the blessing of several rabbis.
According to Kaufman, Shuchmacher was first hidden in the haredi moshav of Komemiyut near Kiryat Gat. From there he was smuggled to France, then transferred to London for a few days, afterward to Switzerland for a longer period, and finally to New York. The Mossad, under Isser Harel, together with the Shin Bet, worked tirelessly to try to locate him. Harel, who sometimes had a tendency to see spies and subversives everywhere, apparently viewed the abduction as a strategic threat to Israeli democracy. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and many of his ministers must have seen the abduction as a manifestation of religious extremism that could potentially slide out of control and cause a rift in the nation. Otherwise, it's hard to understand today how Ben-Gurion and Harel could have brought all of the country's intelligence powers to bear on the search for one kidnapped boy.
As Harel saw it, the abduction was an affront to the honor, status and reputation of the prime minister, and he ordered that maximum resources and manpower be allotted to the search, even at the cost of canceling other important operations, including the search for Nazi criminal Dr. Josef Mengele. Eventually, the Shin Bet was able to trace the route by which the boy was smuggled. A central figure turned out to be a French convert named Ruth Ben-David, who was married to the Neturei Karta leader Rabbi Amram Blau. Her son Uriel, an overindulged young man who had entertained the idea of enlisting in the Shin Bet, was also in the searchers' sights.
In her own book, Ben-David wrote that the person who led the Shin Bet people to Shuchmacher's hiding place in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, was an Israeli yeshiva student named "Leibel Friedman." Eli Kaufman claims in his book that Ruth Ben-David's "Leibel Friedman" is actually none other than Aryeh Shechter, who is now a senior lecturer at Arakhim, the largest organization in Israel working to bring Jews back to religion (repeated attempts to reach Shechter by phone for his reaction went unanswered).
According to Kaufman, the kidnapping plot was supported by Agudath Israel figures who included then MKs Shlomo Lorentz and Menachem Porush, but that major rabbis like the Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum, and the Ger Rebbe, Yisrael Alter, were opposed. Kaufman quotes Teitelbaum as saying that bringing the boy back to Judaism from Zionist persecution did not have to be the focus of the fight against Zionism.
Kaufman also offers an original explanation, whose roots lie in a conspiracy theory, as to why Isser Harel ordered a worldwide hunt for the kidnapped boy. He asserts that Alter Shuchmacher, Yossele's father, was a Shin Bet agent, and that was why his comrades did their utmost to help him. According to this same conspiracy theory, his job was to infiltrate groups of Soviet immigrants in order to identify any planted spies or potential subversives among them. And how does Kaufman know this? He heard it from the late Communist MK Meir Wilner. And how did Wilner know about this? According to Kaufman, from his connections in the Soviet Union, where they figured out that the kidnapped boy's father was in the Shin Bet.
Shin Bet veterans who took part in the operation laugh at Kaufman's explanation. Today they acknowledge that the decision to activate the Shin Bet in order to locate the child was mistaken, but they say it must be understood against the background of the period and especially in light of Harel's obsession with serving Ben-Gurion's government. Yosef Shuchmacher is now an organizational consultant. "I don't know where Kaufman got all these stories about my parents and me," he says. "Kaufman called me not long ago and sent me the book. He apparently felt a need, maybe a psychological one, to explain to me what he'd written. I talked with him and he started stammering and trying to justify himself. I'm not the only one he has conspiracy theories about.
"The facts are that I was never in my life transferred to London," he continues. "Unlike what he wrote, my parents were never religious people who had abandoned religion. Only my grandfather was ultra-Orthodox. And of course my parents were not Shin Bet agents and didn't work for the Shin Bet. I had countless conversations with Isser Harel, when he wrote his book, `Mivtza Yossele' (`Operation Yossele'), and he told me all about the background to the decision to search for me. Harel told me that there were many rumors about my case, but they all remained just that. The truth of my story is known and clear and Kaufman's version is far from it. Naturally, the chapter about me in his book annoys me. Some people advised me to sue him, but I decided not to. That's just what he's looking for - more publicity. And anyway - go prove that you don't have a sister."
Incidentally, Shuchmacher was surprised to read in the ultra-Orthodox press about another report related to him. About two weeks ago, the weekly Hashavua published an interview with Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, currently one of the leaders of Zaka (the Ultra-orthodox organization that retrieves body parts after terror attacks), in which he claimed to have come into possession of "Shuchmacher's diary," from which the Haredi paper quoted extensively. Shuchmacher says he never kept a diary. "In his book, Harel quotes things I said, based on interviews he did with me and with my mother, but I never wrote a diary. Not then, when I was kidnapped, and not afterward either. In the [Meshi-Zahav] interview, I can identify things that I said to the police after they freed me. I'm a bit astonished about Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. I thought he was a little more serious than Kaufman."
Meshi-Zahav is currently in South America; his spokesman says there is no way to contact him for a response.
An unusual child
Eli Kaufman was born in the town of Hushi in northern Romania in 1958. His mother was a housewife and his father worked in a winery. During World War II, his father was imprisoned in a labor camp. After the war, he was locked up by the Communist government on the charge of possessing private property; a Communist cousin had informed on him. When Eli was six, he and his parents sailed for Israel - symbolically, for someone who is now an avowed anti-Zionist, on a ship called the Theodor Herzl. "My parents were not Zionists. My mother just wanted to get away from Romania," he says.
The family settled in the Ramat Eliahu neighborhood of Rishon Letzion and the father found work in a winery. "I wanted to be like the sabras, to be Israeli like them," says Eli Kaufman. "But I was also an unusual child. From a young age, I searched for ideologies that would match my desire to live in a better and more just country. That's how I got to the socialist idea."
He went to high school in Ramle, where he was active in the student council and discovered his propensity for involvement in public life. In 1975, he and some friends from Rishon Letzion founded a youth section of the Moked movement; Moked was an organization of the Zionist left, and subsequently became a main component of the Sheli movement. On the table in his Ramat Beit Shemesh living room are a smattering of press clippings and several photographs from his personal album documenting those days. In one of the pictures, he appears as a slender, handsome, bearded young man, sitting among a group of people all clearly older than he.
"This was one of Moked's first conventions," says Kaufman. Two years later, his friends - the other nine founders of the Moked youth section, were drafted into the Israel Defense Forces. They joined a Nahal group on Kibbutz Yad Hannah, the only Communist kibbutz in Israel. Kaufman says all nine preceded him in moving toward religion, and joined the Bratslav Hasidim. "In retrospect, I see it as a sign, of course," he says. "But at the time I saw them as weak, brainwashed people."
As you surely must have seemed to people who knew you when you followed in their footsteps?
"Right. But it took me a few more years before I became religious."
Yishai Shuster, a Yad Hannah old-timer, was the group's counselor. "It was an independent group with, I think, 14 members," he says. "Good guys from good homes in Jerusalem and Rishon Letzion. Mapainik homes. I really liked them. After their year on the kibbutz they became soldiers and did basic training. I was out of the country for three months and when I got back I went to visit them at the base. And then people told me - This one's in the synagogue, that one's putting on tefillin. In short, I understood that they were on their way to becoming religious. Though I heard that one of them has since given up religion - Sharon Rotbart, who recently wrote the book `White City, Black City' about Tel Aviv."
A security risk
Unlike his friends, Eli Kaufman served in the signal corps. Among other places, he was stationed at the Ba'al Hatzor base in the West Bank, not far from Ramallah. The base, on one of the high peaks of the Judean hills, was used by then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres as part of a deceptive exercise in his efforts to assist the settlement program of Gush Emunim. Under the guise of being a "work camp," the place eventually evolved into the Ofra settlement.
At a certain point, Kaufman got into trouble with the base commander, a junior officer. "A new officer arrived and made life miserable for him. In order to get rid of me, he complained that I was from the radical left, from Matzpen. Not long after that I was transferred from the base, which was considered secret and sensitive. They claimed that I was a security risk and transferred me to Tzrifin. There, for a month, they didn't know what to do with me. I decided to send a letter to Chief of Staff Raful [Rafael Eitan]. I wrote to him that I was an outstanding Zionist and had been treated unjustly."
The letter worked, and Kaufman was given a role in a sergeant-major's course. Soon after that, one Friday afternoon at the end of 1978, there was a knock on the door of his parents' home in Ramat Eliahu. It was a young man in his late twenties who said he worked for the defense establishment. He asked the surprised soldier to report that Sunday to a certain office at the Kirya, the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv. The young man also told him that it was for a "national mission."
Two days later, an excited Kaufman arrived at the office. "I already figured that it was the Shin Bet." His intuition didn't let him down. A man who introduced himself as "Avi" offered him a slice of cake and began with some polite conversation. "The conversation quickly turned to a political discussion. He asked about my views and also started to tell me details about my past in Moked that made it quite clear to me that they already knew everything about me. At the end, he proposed that I become an agent of theirs in an organization called Avant-Garde. I hadn't heard of it. I actually wanted them to send me to work for them in Rakah (the New Communist List). But in the end I agreed."
You didn't have any problem becoming an agent - which essentially meant being an informant, a rat?
"No. I didn't have any problem with it because I saw them as a non-Zionist radical left that sought to subvert the state. I was a Zionist. And therefore I also didn't see myself as a rat. I saw it as a contribution to security. At least for a while, I felt a sense of self-importance, as if I was saving the world."
Were you paid for your services?
"Yes. I received a monthly salary in liras - the equivalent of about 500 dollars today, as well as reimbursement for expenses like bus trips, food and so on."
