Jossele Schumacher affair

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The Jossele Schumacher affair shook Israel and the relationship between Orthodox and secular Jews in the early 1960s.

Jossele Schumacher was born in the Soviet Union in 1952 and came to Israel with his parents in 1958, where they lived in a secular kibbutz . His Jewish Orthodox maternal grandfather, Rabbi Nachman Shtrakes (he belonged to a Hasidic sect that followed the direction of Rabbi Breslov), had taken him into care in 1958 when the Schumacher family was temporarily in financial difficulties. When the parents felt better after a few months, they asked for the child back. The grandparents refused because the child was supposed to be raised secularly by his parents. Initially it was hidden in various Hasidic communities in Israel. In 1960, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the return. The grandfather refused and was temporarily detained. The Israeli police searched intensively for the child, so the grandparents decided to smuggle him out of the country. That was taken over by Ruth Blau (then Ruth Ben David, nee Madeleine Ferraille) in 1960, who became part of the Hasidic community despite originally being a French converted who was in the Resistance during World War II. She had converted to Judaism in the early 1950s and was also a rather secular Zionist at the beginning before she turned to the Orthodox. In France she had raised a son Claude (later Uriel), who later helped with the kidnapping, and ran a single import-export company. She went with the child, whom she disguised as a girl and passed off as her daughter Claudine and who cooperated in the process, to Switzerland, and finally to Belgium and France. When she got wind of the search of the Mossad, which with 40 agents concentrated on Orthodox communities around Paris, she took the child to New York (Brooklyn) in March 1962 to live with an ultra-Orthodox family (member of the Satmar community in Williamsburg , Brooklyn).

The search in Israel has since been stepped up by the domestic intelligence service Shin Bet and members of the army, with agents from other missions also being withdrawn. The Orthodox (especially the radical Neturei Karta group) saw the search as an attempt by the Israeli state to break away from their beliefs and to secularize them. Prime Minister Ben Gurion and other secular Zionists also saw this as a matter of principle and a question of their authority and urged a search and return. Finally, the Mossad was also brought in under its leader Isser Harel . First they also looked in Israel, then in Europe and worldwide. The Mossad, however, had difficulty smuggling agents into the Orthodox Jews; they were usually quickly recognized and expelled from synagogues or assemblies. Mossad chief Isser Harel commented that it would have been easier to infiltrate the circle of old Nazis around Eichmann than the Orthodox Jewish communities. In the end, Ruth Blau was tracked down, who she tracked down during a stay in a suburb of Paris, where she wanted to sell her house, and who persuaded her to reveal her whereabouts. She refused for a long time and only gave in when her evidence was presented and she was led to believe that her son Uriel, who had since been drafted into the Israeli army, had disclosed her involvement. His mother finally picked him up there.

The case divided Israeli society and preoccupied the Israeli and worldwide Jewish public in the early 1960s. Orthodox Jews were outraged by the actions of the security forces and the searches (the officers were received disparagingly with the cry Where is Jossele ? , sung to a popular tune on a later occasion ). Even in the United States, Orthodox youth sang the song when the FBI, which the Mossad asked for help, searched their summer camps in the Catskills. Isser Harel has been accused of large-scale detracting agents from other duties, such as searching for Nazi criminals. The Mossad had just captured Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and brought him to Israel and was looking for more war criminals.

Ruth Blau, then 45 years old, married the head of the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta, Rabbi Amrun Blau, a then 68-year-old widower with ten grown children. The marriage was delayed by two years because of objections from some of the rabbi's children and some rabbi colleagues, some of whom had also asked for their hands beforehand. The rabbi died in 1974. Ruth Blau died in 2000 and published a book about the kidnapping.

Yossele Schumacher first lived with his parents in Holon and went first to a religious, then to a secular school. From 1970 he did his military service as an artillery officer and then worked for IBM . He married in 1979, had three children and lived in the Sha'arei Tikva settlement in the West Bank.

literature

  • Ruth Blau: Les Gardiens de la cité. Histoire d'une guerre sainte, Paris Flammarion 1978
  • Shalom Goldman: Jewish-Christian Difference and Modern Jewish Identity: Seven Twentieth Century Converts, Lexington Books, 2015.

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