Tag Archives: Eichmann Trial

Jew of the Week: Isser Harel

Father of Israeli Intelligence

Israel “Isser” Halperin (1912-2003) was born in what is today Vitebsk, Belarus to a wealthy Jewish-Russian family. His father was a rabbi who had studied at the famed Volozhin Yeshiva, while his mother’s family ran a large vinegar factory. Following the Russian Revolution, they lost their business and the Communists confiscated all of their property. The family eventually fled to Latvia and were robbed along the way, arriving with absolutely nothing. Young Isser realized Jews would never be safe anywhere, and needed their own national home. He soon joined a Zionist youth group, and at 16 decided to make aliyah. The following year, he faked his age to get a British visa. Arriving in Israel, he joined a kibbutz and there met his soon-to-be wife. The couple later opened their own orange-packing company. In 1942, Isser changed his last name to the Hebrew Harel (“Mountain of God”), and joined the pre-IDF Haganah, which was working together with the British auxiliary forces to fight the Nazis. Harel took an officer’s course in intelligence, then joined the Haganah’s “Shai” intelligence unit. He eventually became the main aid to Shai’s chief, as well as the head of its Tel-Aviv office. With the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, Harel co-founded Shin Bet, Israel’s “FBI”, and built it from the ground up. In 1952, he became the director of Mossad, and over the next 11 years at its helm, turned it into one of the world’s most elite intelligence agencies. In 1955, he arranged meetings between Egypt’s Nasser and Ben-Gurion and nearly achieved a peace deal. Meanwhile, he convinced Morocco’s king to let 80,000 Moroccan Jews immigrate to Israel. It was Harel who obtained copies of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s critical 1956 “Secret Speech” denouncing his predecessor Stalin and marking an important shift in the USSR. He shared the speech with the CIA. Harel also exposed a number of Soviet agents. In 1960, Harel planned and led the successful mission to capture Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He later wrote an account of the mission, The House on Garibaldi Street, which became a bestseller and was adapted to a 1979 film of the same name. In 1963, Harel oversaw Operation Damocles which targeted German rocket scientists working for Egypt. When Mossad mail bombs killed innocent bystanders, Harel resigned from his position. He later joined Ben-Gurion’s new political party and was elected to the Knesset in 1969, serving until 1973. After retiring, he turned to writing and published ten popular books, both fiction and non-fiction. It has been said that “No one terrified Israel’s enemies like Isser Harel”.

Important Thoughts on Palestinian Refugees

Words of the Week

The best way to understand antisemitism is to see it as a virus. Viruses attack the human body, but the body itself has an immensely sophisticated defence, the human immune system. How, then, do viruses survive and flourish? By mutating. Antisemitism mutates, and in so doing defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred. There have been three such mutations in the past two thousand years, and we are living through the fourth.
– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Jew of the Week: Joel Brand

The Man Who Tried to Save a Million Jews

Jenő Yoel Brand (1906-1964) was born in what is now Romania to a family of traditional Hungarian Jews. He spent a part of his childhood in Germany, and then moved to New York when he was 19. He struggled to make a living, working difficult odd jobs, and eventually joined the International Communist Party, soon becoming one of their sailors and traveling across the Pacific. He returned to Germany in 1930, but when Hitler came to power Brand was arrested for being a communist. He was released the following year and returned to Hungary, joining the communist-Zionist Poale Zion organization, and then the Jewish National Fund. He started a clothing business with his wife, and the couple grew wealthy, employing over 100 people in their factory. The Brands were planning to make aliyah and join a kibbutz, but an influx of German Jews entering Hungary compelled them to stay and support the refugees. By 1943, they had set up the Aid and Rescue Committee, forging documents and running an underground network of safe houses. All in all, the committee saved about 25,000 Jews, at times collaborating with people like Oskar Schindler and Rudolf Kastner. In 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary, and notorious SS officer Adolf Eichmann requested a meeting with Brand. He offered 1 million Jews in exchange for supplies from the Allies to help German soldiers fighting the USSR. Eichmann called it the “blood for goods” deal, and wanted 1000 trucks full of supplies for every 100,000 Jews. After three meetings, he gave Brand several weeks to come back with an answer. Brand immediately got on a train to Istanbul, planning to meet up with future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann. When he arrived, it was a different “Chaim” waiting for him, offering no assistance. Brand felt betrayed by the Jewish Agency, who told him to now go to Aleppo and meet another future Israeli president, Moshe Sharett. On the way, Brand was stopped by the British and arrested, imprisoned in Egypt and brutally tortured. The British had no interest in saving Jews, nor bringing in anymore refugees into the Holy Land. (In fact, during the little-known 1943 Bermuda Conference, the British and Americans had already decided to do nothing about the Holocaust and resolved not to help the Jews of Europe.) Brand eventually went on a hunger strike, and was only released after 17 more days. By that point, most of the Jews he was trying to save were already murdered. Brand was not permitted to return to Hungary, and resettled in Israel. Not surprisingly, he joined the Stern Gang that fought passionately against the British to expel them from the Holy Land. Brand went on to testify at the 1954 Kastner trial, as well as the 1961 Eichmann trial, where the latter denied that he ever had the authority to stop the mass-killings. Some say the “blood for goods” deal was a Nazi ruse and only meant to confuse and split the Allies. Others say it was a legitimate offer made by desperate Nazis, and a million Jews could have been saved. Brand himself believed a bit of both. Shortly before his death, Brand told a reporter: “An accident of life placed the fate of one million human beings on my shoulders. I eat and sleep and think only of them.” Brand died, quite literally, of a broken heart, suffering a fatal heart attack at the young age of 58.

Short Animation: How the Ottoman Empire Was Carved Up

The KGB and Anti-Israel Propaganda

Words of the Week

The local population in Palestine is racially more closely related to the Jews than to any other people… It is quite probable that the fellahin in Palestine are direct descendants of the Jewish and Canaanite rural population, with a slight admixture of Arab blood… it is impossible to distinguish between a Sephardic porter and an Arab labourer…
Dov Ber Borochov (1881-1917)

Jew of the Week: Hannah Arendt

Greatest Political Philosopher of the 20th Century

Hannah Arendt in 1924

Johanna Cohn Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Germany to a wealthy family of secular Russian-German Jews. The family was anti-Zionist and assimilationist, desperately seeking acceptance into broader German society. Arendt was well-educated, and was already tackling heavy philosophical works as a teenager. At 15, after getting expelled from her school for organizing a boycott of an anti-Semitic teacher, she decided to go straight to the University of Berlin. Arendt then studied language, literature, and theology at the University of Marburg, where one of her teachers was the famed philosopher Heidegger (the two would go on to have a secret romantic relationship for many years). Arendt later became a towering figure in philosophy herself, writing on politics and sociology, Judaism and feminism (which she opposed, once writing, perhaps presciently: “what will we lose if we win?” Ironically, today Arendt is something of a feminist icon!) When Hitler came to power in 1933, Arendt operated an underground railroad for refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Realizing the flaws of her old assimilationist ways, she wrote that “Jewish assimilation must declare its bankruptcy.” Arendt immersed herself in Jewish study, while also vocally denouncing the Nazis, leading to her arrest by the Gestapo. After eight days in prison, the Gestapo let her go because they could not decipher her encoded diary. Arendt fled to Geneva, where she worked for the Jewish Agency to secure visas for Jewish refugees. From there, she settled in Paris and soon became the personal assistant of Germaine de Rothschild, taking care of distributing her generous charitable funds. In 1935, Arendt joined Youth Aliyah, eventually becoming its secretary-general. In 1938, she was put in charge of rescuing Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis occupied France, Arendt and her family managed to escape yet again, eventually finding their way to New York. In 1944, she was hired as executive director of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, cataloging and preserving Jewish assets in Europe, and reviving post-war Jewish life there. From 1951 onwards, she devoted herself to teaching and writing. Her most acclaimed books followed, including The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. Arendt taught at a number of American universities, including Yale and Stanford, and was the first female professor at Princeton. In 1961, she spent six weeks in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial for the The New Yorker. (During this time, she coined the phrase “banality of evil”, and her conclusions were immensely controversial.) All in all, Arendt wrote hundreds of penetrating essays, articles, and poems, and has been described as the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, as well as one its most enigmatic women. The Library of Congress estimates that at least 50 books have been written about her, along with over 1000 scholarly papers. There is a “Hannah Arendt Day” in Germany, as well as an international peer-reviewed journal called Arendt Studies, along with countless things named after her, including the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize.

Words of the Week

“If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”
– Hannah Arendt