Een lang maar mooi verhaal over een vrouw van Nederlands-Joodse afkomst die verschillende belangrijke posities in de Mossad had en betrokken was bij de ontvoering van Eichmann.
Voor het complete artikel zie: Mossad agent Yehudit Nessyahu - Woman of many faces (Uri Blau)
Een aangepaste, iets kortere versie hiervan staat op Israel News.
Wouter
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Woman of many faces
By Uri Blau
Haaretz, October 3, 2008
"When I left Israel, I didn't know what I was headed into. I was told that Isser Harel, the Mossad chief at the time, had asked that I be sent to South America for an operation that he himself was responsible for there. You didn't ask questions, and when I was told that Isser wanted me to come, I just asked when I had to leave."
Yehudit Nessyahu, the former Mossad agent who wrote those words, died five years ago at age 78. The plane she boarded in 1960 took her not just to Argentina, but into the history books, as the only woman to take part in one of the Mossad's most famous and most important operations: finding and kidnapping Adolf Eichmann to bring him to Israel to stand trial.
Nessyahu, whose final years were shrouded by personal tragedy, maintained a silence about her intelligence work until her dying day. She turned down numerous requests for interviews, never spoke publicly about the operations in which she participated and would not allow her picture to be published as long as she was alive. This is the first publication of the account she wrote 14 years ago. It is the only direct testimony left by the Mossad agent who cooked kosher food for Eichmann and, in another operation, blended into the Satmar community in Antwerp to help locate the kidnapped child Yossele Schumacher.
Yehudit Nessyahu, the former Mossad agent who wrote those words, died five years ago at age 78. The plane she boarded in 1960 took her not just to Argentina, but into the history books, as the only woman to take part in one of the Mossad's most famous and most important operations: finding and kidnapping Adolf Eichmann to bring him to Israel to stand trial.
Nessyahu, whose final years were shrouded by personal tragedy, maintained a silence about her intelligence work until her dying day. She turned down numerous requests for interviews, never spoke publicly about the operations in which she participated and would not allow her picture to be published as long as she was alive. This is the first publication of the account she wrote 14 years ago. It is the only direct testimony left by the Mossad agent who cooked kosher food for Eichmann and, in another operation, blended into the Satmar community in Antwerp to help locate the kidnapped child Yossele Schumacher.
She was a woman of many faces who lived in a shadowy male world. Religious and Zionist, she believed in the concept of Greater Israel and was a founder of the Tehiya Party. But she married a thoroughly secular man who was one of the authors of the Labor-Mapam platform. She was also the mother of an only son who died young.
A rich Dutchwoman in Casablanca
Last month, three of Nessyahu's nieces and her one nephew gathered at Kibbutz Givat Haim Meuhad. At the home of their father, 92-year-old Ephraim Ben-Haim, Yehudit Nessyahu's brother, her last remaining kin sat down to talk. Now, years after her death, they are ready to do what she would not allow in her lifetime. To tell what they know about her activities.
Nessyahu (nee Friedman) was born in Holland in 1925, to a religious Zionist family; she was the daughter of Haim and Chana and the younger sister of Ephraim and Rachel. When she was 3 years old, the family moved to Belgium, where her father was in charge of the distribution of "certificates" (immigration permits for Palestine), fund-raising and the purchase of arms for the Haganah, says Ruthie Ben-Haim, 55: "They arrived in Palestine in 1940, with the very last certificates."
Yehudit attended the Balfour School in Tel Aviv, joined the Bnei Akiva youth movement and went on to study philosophy and history at the Hebrew University. During her time there, she was active in Yavneh, a religious student group . During the War of Independence, she enlisted in the IDF, and when the war was over she returned to her studies. In 1956, at the urging of Baruch Duvdevani, the Jewish Agency's director of aliyah, she joined Misgeret, a clandestine organization that handled the immigration of Jews from Morocco.
"It all started because of my father, who was the first Jewish Agency emissary in North Africa for illegal aliyah in 1942," says Tirza Ben-Haim, 50. "He disguised himself as a French officer and began organizing the aliyah. When he came to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco for the first time, the people were living in cave-like dwellings. He asked to see the representatives of the village, went into a house with them and told them, 'I came here from Palestine to organize you. It won't happen now, but just know that I'm here to organize you.' They said, 'Fine,' and kept on with the conversation and when he walked out of there, the whole village was already waiting with their possessions on their backs, ready to go to Palestine. Of course, it took some more years until the people from that village came to Israel," she smiles.
"Yehudit basically traveled there to help him on behalf of the Jewish Aency." What was her motivation? Was she attracted to clandestine activity? "No," says Ruthie Ben-Haim emphatically. "Her drive was Zionism, pure and simple. The Land of Israel, the Jewish People and the need to bring here as many Jews as possible."
In Morocco, Nessyahu worked for about two and a half years to bring Jews to Israel. In conversations with her nephew, Ben Davis, when he was preparing a "roots" project for school, she said that she had been in contact with members of the Moroccan police, from whom she sometimes received documents that she had to copy and then return. She would place the documents in a large shopping basket, hidden under various grocery items.
In Casablanca, she adopted the guise of a wealthy Dutchwoman from Indonesia, who left there after the colony won independence and came to Morocco because she didn't want to go back to the cold Dutch climate. She created the appearance of wealth when she joined a travel agency as a silent partner. "She was a redhead and when she traveled she dyed her hair brown,' says Tirza Ben-Haim. "Often, she would appear as this very rich woman, with the air of someone a bit flighty and irresponsible, a little crazy or extreme, who was curious about everything. She always used to say, 'The best spy is someone who's seen all the time.' She said there were times when her cover wasn't good enough or secure enough, and then she would act even more extroverted, so people would think that someone this nervy and crazy couldn't possibly be a spy.
"In Morocco, she had a difficult problem because she wasn't supposed to be a Jew," continues Haim. "Her whole circle was non-Jews who ate pork and all kinds of treif. She was always religious and she said that sometimes, for days, since she couldn't eat anything else, she existed just on oranges, and that whenever one of the non-Jews took her out for a meal, she would say she was on a diet and could only eat salad. She was very strict about that."
But it wasn't always possible. "Sometimes you have to do things," says Ben-Haim. "When she needed to maintain her cover she would break a commandment. She didn't say exactly what she did, but when she had to, she ate pork. Everything was for the sake of the cause, for the Land of Israel and the Jewish People."
Eliezer Palmor of the Foreign Ministry, who met Nessyahu years later, remembered that she told him that "on one of her missions to Morocco she almost gave herself away. In Europe they peel an orange the way you peel an apple, and she started peeling an orange in the special Israeli way: She cut off the top of the peel and sliced down the sides. As she was doing it, she caught herself and said, 'Oops, that's not right.'"
"That's a famous story," laugh the Ben-Haim sisters, recalling another anecdote that their aunt told them. "Sometime in the late 1950s she was at the airport in Alexandria. Someone suddenly appeared who knew her, from the university apparently, and shouted, 'Yehudit! What are you doing here? How are you?' and she, a little in shock, said, 'Um - you must be mistaken.' She said it was one of the most dangerous moments she ever had."
A rich Dutchwoman in Casablanca
Last month, three of Nessyahu's nieces and her one nephew gathered at Kibbutz Givat Haim Meuhad. At the home of their father, 92-year-old Ephraim Ben-Haim, Yehudit Nessyahu's brother, her last remaining kin sat down to talk. Now, years after her death, they are ready to do what she would not allow in her lifetime. To tell what they know about her activities.
Nessyahu (nee Friedman) was born in Holland in 1925, to a religious Zionist family; she was the daughter of Haim and Chana and the younger sister of Ephraim and Rachel. When she was 3 years old, the family moved to Belgium, where her father was in charge of the distribution of "certificates" (immigration permits for Palestine), fund-raising and the purchase of arms for the Haganah, says Ruthie Ben-Haim, 55: "They arrived in Palestine in 1940, with the very last certificates."
Yehudit attended the Balfour School in Tel Aviv, joined the Bnei Akiva youth movement and went on to study philosophy and history at the Hebrew University. During her time there, she was active in Yavneh, a religious student group . During the War of Independence, she enlisted in the IDF, and when the war was over she returned to her studies. In 1956, at the urging of Baruch Duvdevani, the Jewish Agency's director of aliyah, she joined Misgeret, a clandestine organization that handled the immigration of Jews from Morocco.
"It all started because of my father, who was the first Jewish Agency emissary in North Africa for illegal aliyah in 1942," says Tirza Ben-Haim, 50. "He disguised himself as a French officer and began organizing the aliyah. When he came to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco for the first time, the people were living in cave-like dwellings. He asked to see the representatives of the village, went into a house with them and told them, 'I came here from Palestine to organize you. It won't happen now, but just know that I'm here to organize you.' They said, 'Fine,' and kept on with the conversation and when he walked out of there, the whole village was already waiting with their possessions on their backs, ready to go to Palestine. Of course, it took some more years until the people from that village came to Israel," she smiles.
"Yehudit basically traveled there to help him on behalf of the Jewish Aency." What was her motivation? Was she attracted to clandestine activity? "No," says Ruthie Ben-Haim emphatically. "Her drive was Zionism, pure and simple. The Land of Israel, the Jewish People and the need to bring here as many Jews as possible."
In Morocco, Nessyahu worked for about two and a half years to bring Jews to Israel. In conversations with her nephew, Ben Davis, when he was preparing a "roots" project for school, she said that she had been in contact with members of the Moroccan police, from whom she sometimes received documents that she had to copy and then return. She would place the documents in a large shopping basket, hidden under various grocery items.
In Casablanca, she adopted the guise of a wealthy Dutchwoman from Indonesia, who left there after the colony won independence and came to Morocco because she didn't want to go back to the cold Dutch climate. She created the appearance of wealth when she joined a travel agency as a silent partner. "She was a redhead and when she traveled she dyed her hair brown,' says Tirza Ben-Haim. "Often, she would appear as this very rich woman, with the air of someone a bit flighty and irresponsible, a little crazy or extreme, who was curious about everything. She always used to say, 'The best spy is someone who's seen all the time.' She said there were times when her cover wasn't good enough or secure enough, and then she would act even more extroverted, so people would think that someone this nervy and crazy couldn't possibly be a spy.
"In Morocco, she had a difficult problem because she wasn't supposed to be a Jew," continues Haim. "Her whole circle was non-Jews who ate pork and all kinds of treif. She was always religious and she said that sometimes, for days, since she couldn't eat anything else, she existed just on oranges, and that whenever one of the non-Jews took her out for a meal, she would say she was on a diet and could only eat salad. She was very strict about that."
But it wasn't always possible. "Sometimes you have to do things," says Ben-Haim. "When she needed to maintain her cover she would break a commandment. She didn't say exactly what she did, but when she had to, she ate pork. Everything was for the sake of the cause, for the Land of Israel and the Jewish People."
Eliezer Palmor of the Foreign Ministry, who met Nessyahu years later, remembered that she told him that "on one of her missions to Morocco she almost gave herself away. In Europe they peel an orange the way you peel an apple, and she started peeling an orange in the special Israeli way: She cut off the top of the peel and sliced down the sides. As she was doing it, she caught herself and said, 'Oops, that's not right.'"
"That's a famous story," laugh the Ben-Haim sisters, recalling another anecdote that their aunt told them. "Sometime in the late 1950s she was at the airport in Alexandria. Someone suddenly appeared who knew her, from the university apparently, and shouted, 'Yehudit! What are you doing here? How are you?' and she, a little in shock, said, 'Um - you must be mistaken.' She said it was one of the most dangerous moments she ever had."
For the rest of this story see: Mossad agent Yehudit Nessyahu - Woman of many faces (Uri Blau)
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