Yossele Schumacher affair

Yossele Schuchmacher (Hebrew: יוסל'ה שוחמכר‎‎; born 1952) is an Israeli whose abduction as a child became a cause célèbre in Israel and led Mossad and its director Isser Harel on a worldwide search for his whereabouts.

Abduction

Schumacher was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel as a child with his parents. Due to financial difficulties, his parents requested that Yossele's Haredi grandparents, Nachman and Miriam Straks, take care of him. After a few months the father decided that he wanted to move back to Russia. Yossele's grandparents were aghast and were determined that Yossele not go back.

Fearing that the Schuchmachers might end up in Russia, the Orthodox community of Jerusalem took the boy from his grandparents and hid the boy in 1960. He was hidden in various places in Israel, including Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Safed, Rishon LeZion, and Komemiyut.

In the shadow of a court order for his return and a possible police search, the rabbis of the Jerusalem Orthodox community disguised Schuchmacher as a girl and placed him in the care of Ruth Blau (Ruth Ben David), a Frenchwoman convert to Judaism in 1950 who initially was Zionist but later on adopted Haredi anti-Zionist views and in 1965 married Amram Blau, founder of the anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta. She took him with her to Europe using the identity of her son "Claude" falsifying documents and crossing with the child through several European countries.^[1] Schuchmacher would spend two years total in France and Switzerland under her care.^[2]

By this time, authorities in Israel had increased their search efforts, leading Ruth Ben-David or Ruth Blau to again disguise Schumacher as a girl (new name "Claudine", then "Menahen Levy", etc.,) and smuggle him into the United States in March 1962. There he was hidden in the apartment of a Haredi woman named Mrs. Gertner at 126 Penn St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Subsequently the family changed Schuchmacher's name to Yankele Frenkel and kept him indoors, holding him from the time he arrived in March until August 1962.^[2]

Investigation

Following Schuchmacher's disappearance from Israel, Straks was imprisoned and police arrested the couple that had hidden the boy in Bnei Brak. Sometime later on, Ruth Ben David still in France, decided to sell her house and met a potential real estate agent named Mr. Faber in an attorney's office. The real estate agent was, in fact, Isser Harel, who placed Ben-David under interrogation with humiliating treatment. Though uncooperative at first, Ben-David began to talk after the Shin Bet told her that her son was cooperating with them.^[3]

By this point it was July 1962,^[4] and with Schuchmacher's location identified, two officials from Shin Bet came to the door of the Gertner's home in Brooklyn on a Saturday night and requested the immigration papers of Yankele Frenkel. No papers were presented, and the boy was removed from the house until his mother came to retrieve him several days later.^[2]

Controversy

The abduction of Schuchmacher caused enormous controversy in Israel between many Haredi Jews — who supported the grandparents and claimed that Schuchmacher's parents were communists who wished to bring the boy with them back to Russia — and secular Jews, some of whom reportedly yelled in Jerusalem, Epho Yossele? ("Where is Yossele?").^[2] The cry was also used by haredim to taunt police searching for Schumacher both in Israel and elsewhere.

The search was also an object of controversy, and Harel was criticized for his focus on this case at the expense of manhunts for Nazi officials, notably from then Aman director Major General Meir Amit and even from Israeli spy, Peter Malkin (who had caught Adolf Eichmann).^[5]

References

Other

Goldman, Shalom. "'Where is Yossele?' Trust Me, You Want to Know"' Tablet Magazine, Sept. 30, 2015.

Shlomo. "The Kidnapping of Yossele Schumacher -- A Domestic Quarrel that Divided Israel in the 1960s", Israeldocuments.blogspot, July 22, 2015.