In 1960, Yossele Schumacher, an eight-year-old boy living in Israel, was kidnapped by his ultra-Orthodox grandparents who feared his parents were giving him an insufficiently religious upbringing. The Israeli government, in its quest to return the boy to his parents, eventually enlisted the same team of Mossad operatives who had tracked down Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Two years later they found Yossele living in Brooklyn, but only after locating and interrogating the woman who had smuggled him out of the country. Shalom Goldman tells her story:
In what must have seemed to some Ḥaredim an act of divine intervention, a woman appeared on the ultra-Orthodox scene who would be willing and able to spirit Yossele to safety. This was Ruth Ben David, whose given name was Madeleine Feraille. She was a forty-year-old French woman, . . . [who] had served in the French Resistance. She later raised her son Claude on her own, had managed an import-export firm, and had attended graduate schools in both France and Switzerland. And in the early 1950s, after a long and arduous spiritual journey, she converted to Judaism.
Yet within a few years, Ben David became convinced that the political and cultural ideas dominant among Israeli Jews were a betrayal of the Jewish tradition. She described Zionism as “the thesis that nationalism should replace the Torah as the basis of the Jewish people” and condemned the Zionist movement as “a calamitous mistake.” Israel, in her eyes, was “a mundane, materialistic, secular culture.” . . .
But joining the [anti-Zionist] Ḥaredim as a single woman was not a very practical move. With no employment prospects before her, and with her son Uriel to support, Ben David was dependent on her new religious community. In France she had been an independent woman. Now she was joining a community in which women had little agency, power, or influence. . . .
Ben David’s mentor in Neturei Karta [an extreme anti-Zionist ḥaredi sect], Rabbi Abraham Elie Maizes, was keenly aware of Ben David’s dilemma—and of the ultra-Orthodox community’s dilemma in its face-off with the Israeli authorities [over the Schumacher affair]. He summoned her to his study in Jerusalem. Ben David was immediately brought into the community’s highest level of power and authority. Asked to participate in a conspiracy, one that seemed tailor-made for her, she was, in a sense, treated like a man, and a worldly, capable, man at that.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/192663/yossele-schumacher