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Yehudit Nessyahu

Yehudit Nessyahu was a former Mossad agent for Israel, who took part in the operation to find and kidnap Adolf Eichmann and to bring him back to Israel to stand trial. During the operation into Argentina, Nessyahu along with another Mossad agent named Yaakov Meidad were responsible for maintaining the apartments used by Mossad. Following the Eichmann operation, Nessyahu would later be involved in other high profile operations such as the Yossele Schumacher case and the Lillehammer Affair.

Early life and education

Yehudit Nessyahu was born in 1925, in Holland to a religious Zionist family. She was the daughter of Haim and Chana and the youngest sister of Ephraim Ben-Haim and Rachel. Nessyahu's family moved to Belgium when she was 3 years old, 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.

Nessyahu attended the Balfour School in Tel Aviv. While attending Balfour, she joined the Bnei Akiva youth movement. Later in her education, she went on to study philosophy and history at the Hebrew University. During her time at the Hebrew University, she was active in Yavneh, a religious student group. In 1948, the Arab-Israeli war (Israel's War of Independence) began causing Nessyahu to join the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). When the war had finished, she returned to her studies.

Early career

In 1956, through the urging of Baruch Duvdevani, the Jewish Agency's director of Aliyah, Nessyahu joined Misgeret, a clandestine organization that handled the immigration of Jews from Morocco. Nessyahu worked for two and a half years within Morocco to bring Jews to Israel. In Casablanca, she adopted the guise of a wealthy Dutchwoman from Indonesia, who had left the area 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 illusion of wealth for her character when she joined a travel agency as a silent partner. It was difficult to maintain the cover, mainly due to her devotion to her religion. Nessyahu often had to associated herself with non-Jews who ate pork. Sometimes, she would have to go for days only eating oranges and 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.

Near the end of the 1950s, it was decided that the Jewish Agency no longer needed to deal with bringing Jews to Israel from enemy states. The activities conducted by Misgeret were transferred to Mossad, and Nessyahu became a Mossad employee. She would later be designated an "operative intelligence officer" by former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, during his first meeting with Nessyahu in 1961.

Operation: Adolf Eichmann

In 1960, Nessyahu was chosen to be one of the members of the team assigned by Mossad to find and kidnap Adolf Eichmann. She had been a perfect candidate to be added to the team due to her ability to fluently speak a number of languages such as Dutch, German, and English. She arrived in Argentina that same year and met with Isser Harel in Buenos Aires, who told her what the operation was and who the man was the Mossad team had captured on May 11th, just before her arrival. Later that same day, she moved into the house where Eichmann was being held. Nessyahu and Mossad agent Yaakov Meidad were responsible for maintaining the apartments used by Mossad during the operation. She posed as the house wife of Meidad and was responsible for cooking and feeding her team as well as Eichmann. Nessyahu would also do the shopping, appear before the neighbors, take care of all the housekeeping and later help transport Eichmann to Israel.

On May 20, 1960, Eichmann was sedated by an Israeli doctor on the Mossad team and dressed as a flight attendant. He was smuggled out of Argentina aboard the same El Al Bristol Britannia aircraft that had carried Israel's delegation a few days earlier to the official 150th anniversary celebration of Argentina's independence from Spain. Nessyahu and her team arrived in Israel on May 22nd, and Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset the following afternoon.

On April 11, 1961, Eichmann's trial before a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court began. Nessyahu and her team received tickets for the opening day of the trial, on the condition that they didn't enter together, that they didn't sit together or talk to one another, so there would be no chance of them being identified as having been involved in the operation. Nessyahu and the group would be present for the first day of the trial.

Adolf Eichmann would be convicted on December 12, 1961 on 15 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organization. Three days after the verdict for Eichmann's trial was read, he would be sentenced to death by hanging. This sentence would be carried out on June 1, 1962 at a prison in Ramla.

Yossele Schumacher case

In 1962, Ben-Gurion tasked Mossad chief Harel to locate the missing boy, Yossele Schumacher. Nessyahu would be among dozens of other Mossad agents chosen to be involved in this operation. Mossad suspected that the boy had been smuggled to Europe and sent Nessyahu to infiltrate the Satmar community in Antwerp. Her cover story was that she was a religious young woman seeking a marriage match. She would be hosted by a respected member of the community and would pretended she didn't understand Flemish and only knew a little Yiddish. Nessyahu lived in their home for several months, and would sit around acting likely she was studying when she was really listening in on the family's conversations. From their conversations, she gathered that the child had been passed on to a woman who had disguised him as a girl and transferred him from Belgium to the United States.

Nessyahu would later arrange for her host family in Belgium to recommend her to the Satmar in New York, so she could gain entry there too. By the time she arrived there, it was more or less known which family the boy was being kept by. Schumacher would be located in July 1962 with the Gertners, a Satmar family in Brooklyn, and returned to his parents in Israel.

Late career

In 1962, Yehudit married Mordechai (Dukshi) Nessyahu, a former Mapam activist who had become a visionary of the Labor Party. Together the couple had a son named Haim (Haimie) in 1964, when Nessyahu was 39 years old. While she raised her son, Nessyahu continued to work her way up the Mossad's ranks until, in the 1970s, she was placed in charge of Mossad's personnel division. In this role, she would be the contact person for those arrested in the Lillehammer Affair in Norway in 1973 - when Mossad agents assassinated Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan-born waiter, mistaking him for Black September terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh.

In 1976, Nessyahu retired from Mossad. Following her retirement, attorney Shimron, a close and respected friend of her's, urged her to study law and would later have her intern in his office. In addition to law, Nessyahu also studied accounting and was appointed director-general of the Hebrew Writers' Association. Meanwhile, she also became politically active and together with her brother Ephraim, helped to found the Tehiya Party.

Late life

In 1994, Nessyahu joined her son and his girlfriend on a two-week trip to India. After she returned to Israel, Haimie, then 30, and his girlfriend continued on to Nepal. Haimie would pass away in Nepal after falling unconscious and failing to be resuscitated after finishing a trek through the mountains with his girlfriend. Three years after her son's death, her husband died of an illness. Six years later, in August 2003, Yehudit Nessyahu passed away at 78 years old.