The Traitor's Secret

13 Iyar 5784 (May 21, 2024)

What motivates some religious, supposedly G-d-fearing Jews, to support the destruction of Israel and the calamities which would inevitably befall on their Jewish brothers and sisters living there? What motivates them to march in the streets alongside Islamist fanatics who openly celebrate the murder of Jewish men, the raping of Jewish women, and the kidnapping of Jewish children?

Most Jews seem to be under the impression that Neturei Karta, a rejected sect that flamboyantly parades Haredi dress along with Palestinian flags and colors, do so out of religious fundamentalism and zeal. That’s certainly what Neturei Karta would like you to believe. Dubbing themselves “Real Torah Jews,” Neturei Karta claims that Zionism is a direct affront to Judaism. 

Their religious arguments cite the Talmud’s discussion of the “Three Oaths” in Mesechet Ketuvot 110b. Their wicked interpretation of this section (which is explicitly not Jewish law) leads them to believe that Jews are not allowed to settle in the Land of Israel until G-d formally returns us from exile. Until then, we are destined to suffer life in the diaspora as punishment.

Leaders of Neturei Karta gifting Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas, (ימ׳׳ש) models of the Dome on the Rock.

I’m not going to take the time to debunk this argument since it’s been refuted by more Halakhically learned men many times over. You can check out a concise counter-argument here. Even if they are sincere in their incredulousness, and I have no reason to believe they’re not, it fails to adequately explain the public behavior of Neturei Karta. They are not the only sect of Haredi Judaism which rejects political Zionism, but they are the only one which loudly proclaims its opposition to it in the streets. They also notably have been the only sect to shake hands with leaders of Hamas and attend Holocaust denial conferences in Iran (the background for this will become more apparent later). Although plenty of Jewish organizations take up blatantly heretical causes under the mantle of Judaism, you’ll never see Neturei Karta protesting Keshet’s float at a pride parade. For a people supposedly concerned about heresy, they seem to only be concerned with one specific heresy.

So allow me to expand with an alternative explanation.

It begins with the story of a boy named Yossele Schumacher.

Yossele was born in the Soviet Union in 1952 and moved with his parents, Alter and Ida Schumacher, to Israel when he was four. Like many immigrants to Israel in the 1950s, they were quite poor when they arrived, and so they reached out to Yossele’s maternal grandparents, the Shtarkes, to take care of him while they worked to establish themselves in the nascent state. Typifying to other Israeli immigrants in the 1950s, the Schumachers were hard workers, and it actually only took them a few months until they were financially capable of bringing their son back home. 

However, in a twist, the Shtarkes were not willing to give Yossele back to his parents.

In case you haven’t already guessed, the Shtarkes were Haredi, and were unwilling to allow Yossele to be brought up in a secular household. Refusing to surrender the boy back to his parents, they allowed him to be trafficked between several different Haredi families around Israel. They slandered the parents, and accused them of wanting to take the boy back to the Soviet Union and raise him as a communist. Even after a Supreme Court ruling and the consequent imprisonment of Yossele’s grandfather, the family refused to give up the boy’s location. One of their accomplice families in Bnei Brak also went to prison for refusing to declare the child’s whereabouts. For months they were able to keep him away from the police but, with the pressure mounting, it was eventually decided that they would need to traffic Yossele out of the country to keep him from his parents.

Enter Ruth Blau, but I’m going to start by calling her Madeleine.

Madeleine Lucette Feraille was born in Calais, France to Catholic parents. At the age of 19, just days after the beginning of World War II, Madeleine married a man named Henri Baud, with whom she had a child named Claude. However, their marriage was never happy, and the couple separated in 1942, finalizing their divorce shortly after the liberation of France. During the war, Madeleine was enrolled at Toulouse University where she earned a degree in classics. She later expanded her field of study to more generalized philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She claimed to have also participated in the French resistance during the war and to have hidden Jews from Nazis, although her son has since disputed the latter claim.

Regardless of the precise details of her wartime experience, Madeleine’s study of philosophy and classics guided her toward an interest in religion. In 1947, while living illegally in Switzerland, she became friendly with a Seventh Day Adventist family, a sect of Christianity which still honors the correct Sabbath day and puts weightier emphasis on the Hebrew bible. After eventually being forced to return to Paris, she began to rethink her traditional Catholic beliefs and by 1950 she had “converted” to Reform Judaism. However, she apparently was not well liked by her congregation, and by 1952 had moved on to a traditional Orthodox Sephardic congregation. Madeline, who by this point had changed her name to Ruth Ben-David, was originally well-liked by the Sephardim, but caused controversy when she tried to seduce one of the Rabbis. After a stint in jail for tax evasion, Ruth and the Rabbi went to Israel where they planned to get married, but the wedding was eventually called off.

Bouncing back and forth between Israel and France over the next few years, Ruth became increasingly captivated by Rabbi Elie Maizes, a Rabbi from Neturei Karta who, for unclear reasons, had been one of her few supporters during her days at the Reform synagogue. Maizes eventually came to oversee Ruth’s halachic conversion to Judaism as well as her son’s, who took on the name Uriel. During the process, Maizes was contacted by the increasingly desperate Shtarkes, and he determined that Ruth was just the woman who could help them. To prove her devotion, Rabbi Maizes instructed Ruth to abduct Yossele and traffick him to Europe. She agreed and, in June in 1960, she crossdressed Yossele as a girl, got him a forged passport, and trafficked him to Switzerland where she enrolled him in a local Orthodox yeshiva. To be clear, these are all highly illegal actions within the confines of Jewish law.

It wasn’t long before the Israeli authorities realized that Yossele was out of the country, at which point Prime Minister David Ben Gurion put the Mossad in charge of finding him. They took extreme measures to get him back. In one incident, a team of Mossad agents kidnapped the head of Yossele’s yeshiva and tortured him, but he was able to hold out long enough for Ruth to flee with the boy to Belgium, and then to Paris, and then finally, to New York City. It was there where another team of Mossad agents, many of whom involved in the abduction of Adolf Eichmann, caught up to Ruth. After taking Ruth into custody, she still refused to give up the whereabouts of Yossele until the agents claimed that her son, Uriel, had ratted her out. For context: Ruth and her son had a falling out during this saga because Uriel decided to join the IDF, which offended the anti-Zionist sensibilities Ruth had developed while immersing herself in Neturei Karta. She believed the agents bluff and relented. Yossele was extracted from an Orthodox household in Brooklyn by Mossad and the FBI and was returned to his real parents in Israel. Just to add to this happy ending, Yossele is still around today and proudly resides in Shomron.

Yossele Schumacher in an undated photograph

But this wasn’t the end of Ruth’s story. Three years later, clearly impressed by her willingness to commit human trafficking for their cause, Neturei Karta’s leader, Amram Blau, took Ruth as his wife. Due to her status as a convert and the Rabbi’s sterility, the marriage provoked a great deal of controversy within the Orthodox community. Amram’s own sons and his Rabbinical court openly disapproved of the marriage, and were joined by other ultra-Orthodox sects. Nonetheless, after many deliberations, the marriage went through and Ruth boosted her social standing as the Rebbetzin to the movement’s Rabbi.

Blau, 26 years his wife’s senior, died less than ten years after their marriage, but Ruth continued to play a leading role in Neturei Karta. Organizing for another quarter century, Ruth made friends with Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, and other murderers whom she found could satisfy her deep resentment for the Jewish state that foiled her kidnapping scheme. Since then, the ties between Neturei Karta, Palestinian terrorists, and the Iranian Mullahs which she directly established, have only grown stronger. The grotesqueness of their treason to the Jewish people peaks in 2006 when they officially declared their support for Hamas before Palestinian Parliament and attended Iran’s infamous Holocaust denial conference. 

Ruth Blau throughout the years.

As I said from the outset, most Zionist Jews tend to dismiss this fundamental betrayal to our people as a matter of religious fundamentalism. Quite frankly however, this is a dangerous narrative to accept. At it’s core, it suggests that there exists an interpretation of Judaism that would allow for the open support of those who threaten and execute the mass murder of Jewish people. No other Orthodox sect accepts this premise, regardless of how offended they are by political Zionism. This is why even Satmar and Toldos Aaron have no association with Neturei Karta these days. Rav Amnon Yitzhaki, a contemporary Mizrahi Rabbi who also has gripes with political Zionism and is famous for his banter at public lectures, openly chastises members of Neturei Karta as violaters of Torah Law. “Though shall not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor” (Vayikra 19:16). Here you can watch a snippet of Mizrahi directly engaging with a Neturei Karta member:

The reality is that Neturei Karta is not driven by religious zeal. They are driven by a fanatic resentment towards a state which did not tolerate their cult leader’s wife’s desire to kidnap, crossdress, and traffic a child around the world, depriving him of his loving parents for two agonizing years. If they truly cared about Torah learning, surely they would support the ‘secular state’ which houses and protects the largest population of Torah learning Jews ever to exist in history.   

So next time you see a Neturei Karta cultist calling for the destruction of Israel, don’t get into a theological debate with them. Instead, ask them why they support Ruth Blau kidnapping children.

Signed,

Beau Chasse, with edits from the Lawless Levite