Yossele Schumacher is an Israeli whose abduction as a child became a cause célèbre in Israel and led Shin Bet and its director Isser Harel on a worldwide search for his whereabouts.
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Schumacher was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel as a child with his parents. Ostensibly, due to financial difficulties, but actually because his parents wanted to live a carefree life in Holon and didn't want to be 'bothered' by having to deal with their two children; his parents requested that Yossele's Haredi grandparents, Nachman and Miriam Schtraks, take care of him. They became his 'surrogate parents' because his parents were "too busy' even to visit their son. Yossele became very attached to his grandparents and was brought up by them as regular Haredi boy.
After a few months, the father, who was an avowed communist, yet from his days in Russia, decided that he wanted to move back to Russia. Yossele's grandparents were aghast and were determined that Yossele not go back.
Fearing that the Schumachers might end up in Russia, the Orthodox community of Jerusalem took the boy from his grandparents and hid the boy in 1960 with another Haredi family in Bnei Brak.
In the shadow of a court order for his return and a possible police search, the rabbis of the Jerusalem Orthodox community disguised Schumacher as a girl and placed him the care of a Frenchwoman and convert to Judaism named Ruth Ben-David (then Madeleine Feraille, later well known for her controversial marriage to Rabbi Amram Blau), who took him with her to Europe. Schumacher would spend two years total in France and Switzerland under her care.[1]
By this time, authorities in Israel had increased their search efforts, leading Ben-David to again disguise Schumacher as a girl and smuggle him into the United States in March 1962. There he was hidden in the apartment of a Haredi woman named Mrs. Gertner at 126 Penn St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Subsequently the family changed Schumacher's name to Yankele Frenkel and kept him indoors, holding him from the time he arrived in March until August 1962.[1]
Following Schumacher's disappearance from Israel, Schtraks was imprisoned and police arrested the couple that had hidden the boy in Bnei Brak. Sometime later on, Ruth Ben-David, still in France, decided to sell her house and met a potential realtor named Mr. Faber in an attorney's office. The realtor was, in fact, Isser Harel, who placed Ben-David under interrogation with humiliating treatment. Though uncooperative at first, Ben-David began to talk after the Shin Bet told her that her son was cooperating with them.[2]
By this point it was August 1962, and with Schumacher's location identified, two officials from Shin Bet came to the door of the Gertner's home in Brooklyn on a Saturday night and requested the immigration papers of Yankele Frenkel. No papers were presented, and the boy was removed from the house until his mother came to retrieve him several days later.[1]
The abduction of Schumacher caused enormous controversy in Israel between many Haredi Jews — who supported the grandparents and claimed that Schumacher's parents were communists who wished to bring the boy with them back to Russia — and secular Jews, some of whom reportedly yelled in Jerusalem, Epho Yossele? ("Where is Yossele?").[1]
The search was also an object of controversy, and Harel was criticized for his focus on this case at the expense of manhunts for Nazi officials, notably from then Aman director Major General Meir Amit and even from Israeli spy, Peter Malkin (who had caught Adolf Eichmann).[3]