Ben Gurion And The Yossele Schumacher Affair

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

Yossele Schumacher (b. 1952) is a Soviet-born Israeli Jew whose controversial abduction as a child in 1960 became a cause célèbre within Jewish society in Israel and internationally when he was kidnapped by his Breslov chassidic maternal grandparents, Nachman and Miriam Shtarkes, to prevent him from being raised as a secular Jew by his parents, Alter and Ida. After an extensive worldwide search by the Mossad, he was found in the United States and returned to his parents’ custody. The Yossele Schumacher Affair further exacerbated the widening polarization and rift among charedi Jews, who broadly supported the abduction, and secular Jews, who determinedly opposed it.

Nachman and Miriam Shtarkes escaped Russia (Uman) and Soviet communism in 1958, when they made aliyah, settled in Meah Shearim, and became active members of the fanatically anti-Zionist Neturei Karta. Three months later, their daughter Ida, her husband Alter Schumacher, a tailor, and the two Schumacher children, ten-year-old Zena and six-year-old Yossele, were able to leave Russia, and they followed her parents to Israel, where the family settled on a secular kibbutz and began transitioning into secular Judaism. However, when they encountered financial difficulties as new olim, the Shtarkes agreed to look after the children – not an uncommon situation in Soviet culture, where grandparents often raised children while their parents went out to work. They sent Zena to a Chabad school and enrolled Yossele to receive a traditional charedi education in a cheder in Meah Shearim in Jerusalem.

When the financial situation of the Schumachers improved a few months later, they purchased a small apartment in a housing project in Holon and asked for the return of their son to their custody. The Shtarkes returned Zena but, determined to raise Yossele as a chassidic Jew, they refused to return him on the grounds that his parents would not raise him religiously. They further alleged – in extreme bad faith and lacking any basis – that the parents were planning to return to the Soviet Union, where they would raise their son as a secular Communist, with some in the charedi community even going so far as to claim that the Schumachers were planning to turn their son into a Christian. Yossele would later insist that his parents were never antireligious and that they had never intended to return to Russia; tellingly, the charedim never bothered to explain why, if the Schumachers were so intent on pursuing Communism, they had departed from the Soviet Union in the first instance, or why they purchased a home in Israel in which to raise their children, or why they chose an Orthodox-Zionist school in which to enroll their son.

After weeks of pleading with her parents to return Yossele, Ida went to the police and obtained an order for his release. Meanwhile, Nachman Shtarkes and his son, Shalom (Yossele’s uncle), had hidden the child in a series of secret places within charedi enclaves in Israel, including Jerusalem, Bnai Brak, Safed, Rishon L’Tzion, and Moshav Komemiyut in the Negev. The effort to hide Yossele in Israel was directed by Aryeh Schecter, who served as the personal aid to Rav Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, better known as the Steipler Gaon, one of the greatest charedi leaders in Israel. The Steipler, a rav outside the Neturei Karta who was deeply respected by the mainstream charedi establishment, recommended that Yossele undergo facial plastic surgery so as to further prevent his identification, and he provided a letter of support that was significant to promoting the cooperation of charedi rabbis in the Diaspora to help hide Yossele.

Another great religious leader who supported the kidnappers was Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem who, shortly before his death, released a letter in which he declared that Shtarkes is halachically required to prevent Yossele from being returned to his parents. However, there is substantive evidence that charedi supporters of the abduction pestered the ailing rav and misrepresented the facts to him, again including false allegations that Yossele’s parents were planning to return him to the Soviet Union. (Many historians and analysts argue that Rav Frank never would have issued the letter had he been presented with the true story.) Ben Gurion, who bitterly criticized the kidnapping (more on this below), was not only furious about Rav Frank’s letter in support of the abduction, but he also criticized Orthodox Zionist rabbis for failing to speak out against Rav Frank.

Israeli police launched a search operation to locate the child, but the charedi community, closing ranks behind the Shtarkes in perpetuating a conspiracy of silence, would insolently shout Epho Yossele? (“Where is Yossele?”) at the police to taunt them for their failure to locate the child. On February 10, 1960, Israel’s Supreme Court issued a habeas corpus order directing the grandparents to return him to his parents within five days, but they refused, even after Nachman Shtarkes and a charedi couple who had briefly hidden Yossele were incarcerated.

With heat from Israeli authorities and the police intensifying, the decision was made within the charedi community that Yossele could no longer be hidden in Israel. Seeking to find someone who could smuggle the child out without detection, they contacted Rabbi Abraham Eliyahu Maizes of the anti-Zionist Yeshiva Torah Vyirah (ironically, “Torah and Fear of G-d”). R. Maizes, who had lived in Slutsk (Belarus), suffered inconceivable persecution by the Communist authorities, including interrogations, beatings, and torture, but, after barely surviving a seven year exile in Siberia, he was able to escape Soviet Russia for France, where he taught at a yeshiva in Bailly near Paris before making aliyah in 1953. Becoming deeply involved with the Neturei Karta movement, he believed that the evil of Communism was no less than the evil of Zionism, which had to be defeated at all costs.

Rabbi Maizes asked one of his disciples, Ruth Ben-David (1920-2000), to smuggle the boy out of Israel. Born Madeline Ferraille to a Roman Catholic family in Calais, the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Ruth married at age 19, had a son, Claude, and divorced her husband a year later. During World War II, she served in the French Resistance, infiltrated the Gestapo and reported to the Resistance on its operations, and saved the lives of many people. After the war, she studied at the University of Toulouse and the Sorbonne and went on to establish a successful import-export business, but she twice ran into problems with the government: she was expelled from Switzerland in 1948 for engaging in fraudulent business practices and she served time in a French prison in 1952 for tax evasion.

Emotionally stirred by the establishment of Israel, she became a passionate Zionist, converted to Judaism in 1950 in a Reform ceremony, and assumed the name Ruth Ben-David (and her son Claude became Uriel). Returning to France after a memorable trip to Israel, she underwent a fully halachic conversion in 1951 and, in 1953, she made aliyah and enrolled Uriel in the school at the religiously observant Kibbutz Yavneh. Several years later, however, she returned to France, rejected Zionism, and sent Uriel to a Satmar yeshiva. R. Maizes believed that Ruth was the perfect person for the smuggling assignment: she spoke several European languages, was bright and sophisticated, had attended university and run a business, was committed to Orthodox Judaism, and had important and relevant experience in the French underground.

As for Ruth, she not only had great faith and trust in R. Maizes, but saving Yossele from his parents was consistent with the Roman Catholic milieu in which she had been raised. The greatest “mitzvah” for a Roman Catholic was to “redeem” Jewish children from their parents – recall, for example, how, after the Holocaust, the Church refused to return Jewish children to the few parents who had survived to reclaim their children – so Ruth was very comfortable with the idea of similarly “saving” Yossele.

With the assistance of Uriel, Ruth convinced Yossele that his parents did not want to raise him as a proper Jew and, with his cooperation – Ruth would later claim that Yossele was grateful for his kidnapping – she disguised the eight-year-old boy as a girl, forged a passport for him under a fake name, and, on June 21, 1960, took him out of Israel on a flight to Europe. Yossele spent the next two years living with Ruth in Lucerne, Switzerland, where she gave him the pseudonym “Menachem Levy” and enrolled him in a yeshiva run by Rav Moshe Soloveichik, a close friend of the Steipler and the Satmar Rebbe.

The Israeli government redoubled its efforts to locate the child – including enlisting the assistance of the IDF and the Shin Bet to search for him in religious neighborhoods, villages, and kibbutzim, but the charedi community vociferously opposed all efforts by the authorities to return him to his parents, now declaring that the Schumacher Affair was merely part of a government plot to secularize all Jewish children.

Prime Minister Ben Gurion, a passionate believer in mamlachiut (statism and governmental authority) had proven his mettle in June 1948 when he ordered the IDF to attack the Altalena and the Irgun in June 1948 and, although he almost caused a civil war in the nascent Jewish state, he decisively demonstrated that Israel was a state governed by law applicable to all. In the Yossele Schumacher Affair, the Neturei Karta and their charedi supporters presented no less a challenge to government authority; Ben Gurion considered the abduction of Yossele to be the greatest scandal since the birth of the modern Jewish state, and in March 1962 he ordered the Mossad to find the child. Yet, he defended the right of the Neturei Karta to free speech and their right to public protest, but only within the limits of the law. As such, he took no action to interfere with public protests arranged by the Neturei Karta to escalate its campaign against the Israeli government.

Mossad Director-General Isser Harel, who had led the effort to capture Adolf Eichmann, assembled a team of forty agents, but due to their unfamiliarity with charedi life, they were quickly unmasked, their attempts to infiltrate the charedi world failed, and their search for Yossele proved unsuccessful. Some incidents were utterly comical; for example, one group of agents who attended Shacharit services at an Orthodox shul were discovered when their fake beards became unglued; an agent asked a charedi woman for food, only to discover much to his chagrin that it was a Jewish fast day; other agents were quickly exposed because they did not speak Yiddish or know the proper prayers to recite. Many in the Mossad deeply resented being used to locate an abducted child when Israel faced so many greater intelligence and defensive threats that demanded their attention.

When Harel concluded that Yossele had almost certainly been smuggled abroad and was probably somewhere in Europe, the Mossad launched a European dragnet and searched for him internationally – a daunting task, certainly, but not an insurmountable one, given the relatively limited number of charedi communities across Europe. He sent agents to infiltrate charedi communities throughout France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, South America, and the United States, but their efforts to infiltrate these communities again proved challenging for the same language and culture reasons. Harel is reported to have commented that it was easier to infiltrate Nazi circles and to find Eichmann than it was to infiltrate charedi communities to find Yossele. One agent commented that he felt like he had landed on Mars and had to find a way to remain inconspicuous while surrounded by green aliens.

After learning that the Mossad was actively searching for Yossele in Switzerland, Ruth took him first to Brussels and then to Meaux, France (outside Paris), where for seven months she dressed him again as her daughter, “Claudine.” When the Mossad focused its search on the charedi community of Paris, she initially planned to take him to Morocco, but that plan was quickly abandoned because Yossele spoke only Yiddish and would have been quickly exposed. The decision was finally made to smuggle Yossele to the United States and, in March 1962, he was put on a flight to New York City, where he was hidden in the apartment of Mrs. Gertner, a charedi woman in Williamsburg, given the pseudonym “Yankele Frenkel,” and kept indoors for five months until August 1962. The Mossad, anticipating that Yossele might have been smuggled to the United States, asked the FBI for assistance, and FBI agents proceeded to search charedi summer camps in the Catskills for the kidnapped child.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Exhibited here is a rare June 27, 1962 correspondence from Ben Gurion to Naftali Herzl Rogol, who apparently criticized the Prime Minister for his position in the Yossele Schumacher Affair. Before taking his correspondent to task for defending the kidnappers in the alleged name of Torah, he provides some fascinating background on his father’s Zionism, his initial opposition to his making aliyah, and a letter he wrote to American schoolchildren to encourage them to make aliyah:

To Mr. Naftali Herzl Rogol, peace and blessings

Yashir kochacha [may your strength be fortified] for all you have done in defense of the IDF, and you are justifiably proud of these actions. There are many whose opinion on some matters differ from yours, and even they deserve respect and appreciation. I did not publish my letters to the schoolboys in America in the newspaper, but I do not regret the things I wrote for the youngsters. And I say this to every boy in Israel (this is said to boys after they finish their studies and reach the age of majority). I have done this as well. My late father was a lover of Zion even before there was a Zionist movement, and after this he was a passionate Zionist all his life, and when I told him that I had decided in my heart to make aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, it troubled him and he advised me to enter the university first, but knowing that I was stubborn – he did not stand his ground but, rather, provided me with my travel expenses. Some of my friends, who were children of anti-Zionist chassidim, fled their homes, without their parents’ knowledge and against their will, amongst them people such as Shlomo Tzemach and Shlomo Lavi (maybe you’ve heard of them) and they did well.

But this is the invention of a cheap evening newspaper, as I said to 12-year-old children who have fled their homes.

I will not discuss with you the kidnapping of the Yossele child. They do not feel the pain of the kidnapping and its disgrace – but the kidnappers must be brought to justice. And the fact is that the child was kidnapped from his parents and has not been returned to this day. I hope that the hand of justice and law will reach them. If you permit the kidnapping of a child – I will not argue with you. If the kidnappers of Yossele did what they did, according to you, for the sake of honoring the Torah – why don’t they listen to the council of elders of the Torah who say, according to you, that Yossele should be returned?

Attacking Jews (or even non-Jews) is a crime – and I do not understand why you hurt me in this matter. There are police and law in Israel, and is this the only crime that has been committed in the land? Are there no burglars, thieves, and robbers?

I am no less sorry for brotherly hatred than you, whether the haters are secular or religious.

I thank you for the sage advice of Chazal that you quote. Nothing is hindering you from living in accordance with your faith.

Your call for peace is good – but you should turn it toward yourself as well.

With great respect

(signed)

D. Ben Gurion

Shlomo Zemach (1886-1974) was an Israeli author, agriculturalist and early Zionist pioneer. A childhood and lifelong friend of Ben Gurion, they founded a Zionist youth association in Płońsk and, against his parents’ wishes, he became the first Zionist to make aliyah from Płońsk to Eretz Yisrael (1904), where he was one of the founders of the Hapoel Hatzair and later taught at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school. He was also a literary critic and edited the literary journal Maazanim.

Shlomo Lavi (1882-1963) was a Zionist activist and a top leader and ideologist of Israel’s Labor movement who co-founded Mapai and the Histadrut trade union and originated the idea of the kibbutz. He taught Bible lessons to poor and orphaned children with Ben Gurion’s father in Plonsk before making aliyah to Eretz Yisrael (1905), where he worked as an agricultural laborer in Petach-Tikva, in an olive oil factory in Haifa, and other positions. He helped to establish Hashomer, the Jewish defense organization, which he served as a watchman in the Galilee, in Chadera and Rehovot.

As the Mossad scrutinized potential suspects in the charedi world, its investigators found a potential lead in Ruth, whose investigation had discovered she had regularly visited Israel, where she visited with members of Neturei Karta; that her last visit to Israel coinciding with the time of the kidnapping; and that she had met Yossele’s grandfather on several occasions. Focusing their investigation on her, the agents traced Ruth, then still in France, to the outskirts of Paris.

At this time, Ruth had decided to sell her house, and she met with “Mr. Faber,” a prospective real estate agent – who was actually Harel, accompanied by a team of the same Mossad agents who had interrogated Adolf Eichmann. Though initially uncooperative through a two-week interrogation, Ruth ultimately admitted her involvement when Harel confronted her with evidence that she had smuggled Yossele out of Israel disguised as her daughter, but she continued her refusal to disclose his location until Harel advised her that her son, Uriel, a Zionist serving in the Israeli military, had incriminated her. (Ruth would later falsely claim that Uriel had been tortured by the Mossad, an allegation that Uriel himself denied.) Uriel had made a deal with Harel to protect his mother because the punishment in France for kidnapping was severe, but Ruth, feeling a deep sense of betrayal, had received a final proverbial punch in the stomach and she finally told Harel that Yossele was hidden at the Gertners. (Harel and the Israeli government kept their promise not to prosecute either Ruth or Uriel for their crimes in exchange for Ruth revealing where Yossele was hidden.)

After Harel advised U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that Yossele was living with a chassidic family in Brooklyn, RFK instructed the FBI to fully cooperate with Mossad. A team of FBI agents and Mossad operatives took Yossele into custody; his mother Ida and sister Zena flew to New York, where they were reunited with him on July 4, 1962; and Yossele rejoined his family at their apartment in Holon. Ben Gurion was relieved, if not exultant. The end of the Yossele Schumacher Affair, however, did not lessen the schism between the secular and charedi communities in Israel which, if anything, has only grown worse over the last half century.

After the Affair, the Neturei Karta lost much of its public support and it never again tried to kidnap Jewish children to “save them.” However, it continues to promote its anti-Zionist extremist theology, believing that the very existence of Israel is a heresy and an obstacle to the Messianic era, and it continues its disgusting alignment with the world’s greatest antisemites, including the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Yasser Arafat, and Louis Farrakhan.

Exhibited here is the front page of Yediot Acharonot reporting on the return of Yossele to his mother: “My mother! My Mother! Yossele shouted after an hour of reluctance and anguish… Our correspondent in the USA describes the dramatic meeting on the 14^th floor of the immigration building. The child is officially returned today… his passport is ready… The mother bursts into tears.”

In the wake of the Affair, Alter and Ida not only maintained a relationship with Nachman, their son’s kidnapper but, remarkably, they supported him financially when he took ill. At first, Yossele attended a religious school, but his parents later enrolled him in a secular school. In 1969, Yossele served as chairman of the Holon Youth Parliament and, after being conscripted in the IDF in 1970, he served as an officer in the Artillery Corps, graduated Hebrew University, worked for IBM for several years, and became a business consultant. In August 1979, he married Ita Horowitz in a wedding that drew media attention, and the couple lives in the Israeli settlement of Sha’arei Tikva with their three children.

Yossele shook hands with Harel, reconciled with the Gertners (in 2007, he visited New York and met with Mrs. Gertner, in whose home he had been hidden), and also forgave his grandparents. In 2020, he stated he had made peace with all that he had endured and that he had forgiven all those who took part in his kidnapping – except for Ruth. He demanded that Ruth apologize for her actions in the Affair, but she adamantly refused to do so to the end of her life.

Yossele’s Uncle Shalom had fled Israel and settled in the Chabad community in London, but the Israeli court had issued an order for his extradition. He was returned to Israel, tried, and on January 8, 1963, he was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to three years’ incarceration at Ayalon Prison in Ramla. However, in one of his first acts as president of Israel, Zalman Shazar pardoned Shalom, a move praised by the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Exhibited here is an addition to Maariv published on January 7, 1963 reporting on Shalom Shtarkes’ conviction:

Shalom Shtarkes was convicted this morning in Jerusalem District Court of unlawfully detaining the boy Yossele Schumacher in a commune three years ago. The court determined that the accused actually committed the aforementioned offense and is the only perpetrator of this offense…

The court convicted him of the two crimes he was accused of: the crime of stealing the child Yossele Schumacher and giving false testimony to the Supreme Court, where he claimed that he didn’t see Yossele after Chanukah 5576, even though on that date he brought Yossele to the communes.

Finally, Ruth’s story after the Affair was as strange and enigmatic as most her life to that point. Harel reportedly offered her a position with the Mossad, but she declined. Her son, Uriel, arranged for a matchmaker to set up a meeting between Ruth and 67-year-old R. Amram Blau, a venerated founder of the Neturei Karta. The couple decided to marry, which caused a sensational scandal in charedi circles because, even though Ruth, born a Roman Catholic, had an Orthodox conversion, the charedim deemed her to be beneath the station of the grand Rav Blau.

Ignoring the public uproar, the opposition of the Rabbinical Court of the Eida Ha-Chareidit (the supreme legal body of the Neturei Karta), and the disapproval of many of Blau’s ten children – and notwithstanding a $25,000 cash offer to Ruth by the Satmar Rebbe, R. Yoel Teitelbaum, not to marry Blau – they wed on September 2, 1965, and their marriage continued to generate great controversy for many years. Ruth died never apologizing for her role in the kidnapping or even acknowledging any wrongdoing.