 When
I open the police files I find detailed reports
about Jewish criminals. The archives have enough
material for 100 historians and for 100 years, and
even then they won't
finish.
 Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 2, 2004
World of our
(god)fathers By Kobi
Ben-Simhon  »»
The
market square in a Jewish village in Poland.
Jewish mobsters used underhanded methods to
kidnap poor Jewish girls and forced them to work
as prostitutes.
Basing his conclusions on
carefully culled scraps of evidence, historian
Mordechai Zalkin states that until World War
II, the underworld in Warsaw, Vilna, Odessa and
other large cities was controlled largely by Jewish
syndicates. By 'our' people. He takes them out with two hands and makes room
for them. The stories are spread on the table.
Historian Motti Zalkin looks at the dozens of
documents that he has brought up to his fifth-floor
office and smiles. The characters who form the
background of the history of the Jewish people are
enfolded in photocopied pages, waiting for it to
happen. He prefers the small-scale histories,
Zalkin says. He is a historian who doesn't like to
deal with the central currents.  David
Irving comments: I MAKE no apologies for
reproducing this Ha'aretz article. Once
again Ha'aretz excels itself in its
objectivity and even- handedness: it is a
credit to journalism.
Imagine the outcry if a
non-Jewish historian had produced this
piece of reporting. Imagine the fury of
Prof. Richard "Skunky" Evans, as
expert witness in the resulting trial for
race hatred"!
Remember, Evans refused
even to believe that the Nazi police
figures on Jewish insurance frauds in
Weimar Berlin could be anything but
propaganda.
Now here is laid bare
the whole stinking world of the
criminality and mafia gangsterism that
flourished in Eastern Europe in the final
years before Adolf Hitler's armies arrived
to wipe the slate clean.
As this author writes,
the surviving perpetrators fled, to the
United States and other countries, and the
scenario is quietly starting all over
again. See the "relevant stories" flagged
at the bottom of this page: the sex slave
trade, the global narcotics smugglers, and
other racketeering and organised crime
coming from that same corner of
humanity.
Why us? they inevitably
whine, as they are hauled away, the
patience -- and purses -- of their hosts
exhausted once again. Dr Mordechai
Zalkin provides some of the
answers. |
Dr. Mordechai Zalkin, senior lecturer in the
Department of the History of the Jewish People at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva,
is sitting opposite shelves crammed with books. On
the top shelf is a hefty collection of vodka
bottles that he has brought back from his travels,
during which he looked for documentary material on
Jewish criminal organizations in Eastern Europe.
His studies indicate that until World War II, the
underworld in Warsaw, Vilna, Odessa and other large
cities was controlled largely by Jewish syndicates.
By "our" people.Outside his office, workers are dragging a table
along the corridor and whispering. The corridor
goes on like an endless pipe, winding through a
vast concrete structure, which preserves an
academic silence, a late-afternoon tranquillity.
Zalkin takes the conversation into the backyard of
Jewish history, in mid-19th and early-20th century
Eastern Europe. He spends a lot of his time there,
trying to apprehend Jewish criminals who know no
God. Mystery
manThe mystery surrounding the identity of "harodef
hane'alam" (literally, the "pursuer who
disappeared") remains intact. The so-called
"pursuer" belonged to the realm of
institutionalized crimes that were perpetrated in
the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe 150 years
ago. His identity was one of the communities'
best-kept secrets. His task: to hire mercenary
killers to operate against people who threatened
the community. He was chosen from within a small
leadership group and only the group's members knew
his identity. The local leadership entrusted him
with responsibility for the community's internal
security. This man left behind a great many traces and
thereby became an intriguing Jewish legend. "Every
community of the time had its informers," Dr.
Zalkin says. "It was a profession -- just as there
was a rabbi and a shoemaker, there was also an
informer. As long as the informing concerned only
`small' matters, everything proceeded smoothly --
the informer earned his pay and nothing happened.
The problem arose when the informers gave the
authorities information that was liable to harm the
integrity of the community concretely." This was why the communities established a
security apparatus headed by an official anonymous
"pursuer." There is very little documentation on the
subject, Zalkin notes: "The Slonim community in White Russia
inserted regulations concerning the `pursuer who
disappeared' into their charter. The man's
position is also mentioned in the ledger of the
Minsk community. In 1836 the body of a Jew was
found in the river next to the town of Oshitz,
in the Ukraine. The investigation turned up the
fact that his name was Yitzhak Oxman. He
was an informer, usually passing on information
about Jews who evaded military service or tax
payments. Some people in the community decided
that Oxman had gone too far and that he, along
with another Jew, Shmuel Schwartzman, had
to be liquidated. The police investigation got
nowhere. No one in the community revealed who
gave the order to murder the two Jews, but the
person responsible was probably the unknown
'pursuer.'" In another case, a member of the Jewish
community broke under police interrogation,
revealing the existence of the secret apparatus.
Hirsch Ben Wolf, whose father was a
well-known rabbi in Vilna, left home and converted
to Christianity. The view was that a convert was
liable to endanger the community he sprang from, so
it was decided to kidnap Ben Wolf. Zalkin: "In the police investigation
one of the Jews testified that there was an
apparatus within the community with the power to
harm people and even to do away with them." While the "pursuer" remained in the shadows,
Jewish underworld figures roamed the streets
without fear. Everyone knew them, they even entered
Jewish literature. In his work, "In the Vale of
Tears," Mendele Mocher Sforim (penname of
Shalom Jacob Abramovitsch, 1835 -- 1917)
provides an exceptional description of one type of
Jewish criminal organization, cruel and dark. In
the novel Jewish mobsters use underhanded methods
to kidnap Jewish girls from poor, remote towns and
then force them to work as prostitutes. This was a fairly common phenomenon. The Jewish
society described here by Mendele is perverted and
rotten. Sixteen-year-old Biela, from the town of
Kavtsiel, falls victim to this well-oiled scheme.
She was promised work in a household and one of the
prostitutes explains what she must do: "The virgins
of Kavtsiel are in demand here, and if they are
clever and know why they are in demand, they end up
getting rich and everyone is happy." The innocent
Biela doesn't have a clue about what is meant, but
afterward learns from the older prostitutes and the
pimps how to be seductive and how to perform. Dr. Zalkin is familiar with the phenomenon. He
pulls a book by an American researcher from one of
the shelves. The entire volume is about Jewish
organizations that rounded up Jewish girls and sold
them into prostitution. Zalkin says he can map the
network of Jewish brothels in 19th-century Eastern
Europe, but immediately reneges. "That plum I won't give you," he says with
pleasure. Rubles and
jewelryOne of the major episodes in which a Jewish
criminal organization was involved occurred in
Vilna in February 1923. It received unusual
coverage in the local Yiddish paper. For four
consecutive days the paper's lead stories dealt
with the events. A Jewish gang that called itself the "Gold Flag"
kidnapped a boy from a wealthy family for ransom.
According to the police, the man behind the
kidnapping, Berl Kravitz, had belonged to
the Capone gang in the United States a few years
earlier. Zelig Levinson, the head of Gold
Flag, gave the green light for the operation to
proceed despite objections by some of the gang's
members. The kidnap victim was Yossele Leibovitch,
a student in the Hebrew Gymnasium in Vilna. His
father was a money lender. The kidnapping was done
by Abba Vitkin and his assistant Reuven
Kantor. The two grabbed Yossele as he left
school, bundling him into a peasant cart. The
ransom note sent to the family declared: "Money or
death." The kidnappers demanded 15,000 rubles plus
gold, diamonds and pearls in return for the
boy. Yossele was held in Vitkin's house. "The moment
it became clear that a child had been kidnapped,
all the forces aligned themselves against Gold
Flag," Zalkin says. "The Jewish community, the
police -- everyone cooperated." A wave of arrests
followed. Finally the gang decided that enough was
enough and returned the boy to his neighborhood.
That same day the headline of the local paper was
"How the kidnapped boy was returned." The
sub-headline, Zalkin says, translating from the
Yiddish, was "Yossele Leibovitch's own story; 12
arrested, including the member of the Capone gang
in America; how the child kidnapper was
caught." The next day the paper's lead story described
how the police reached the kidnappers. The headline
of March 1 revealed that "Gold Flag planned to
kidnap another child." The rival organization to
Gold Flag was the "Brothers Society," the
federation of the Jewish thieves in Vilna -- they
even had a secretary who represented the society
vis-a-vis the community's institutions. One of the
society's missions was to provide legal assistance
to members that were arrested and placed on trial,
and to smuggle people who were wanted by the police
out of the city. The Brothers Society was known for
the original names its members were given -- such
as "Yankele the Pipe," "Avraham the Anarchist,"
"Tall Elinke" and "Arka Moneybags." "The thieves and criminals were part of the
local folklore, part of the daily reality. The
Jewish underworld was also reflected in song, in
literature and in the press," Zalkin says as he
takes out a book of old folk songs and recites one
of them. "There is music for it, too," he says.
"Here, this song tells about someone whose mother
is a thief and whose father is a thief, whose
sister does what she does and whose brother is a
smuggler." Looking up from the page, Zalkin
explains that historians ascribe great importance
to folk songs. "They spring from the actual
situation, they are very authentic, a very
important way to express social feelings." A report dated February 1905 from the Hebrew
paper Hazman ("The Time"), which was
published in Vilna, sheds light on one of the
sophisticated methods of operation of the Jewish
criminals. They seem to have had no shame.
According to the item, Gershon Sirota, one
of the world's leading cantors, was robbed. "They
did steal clothing and other items," the paper
states, adding that the thieves let it be known to
the cantor that they were ready to return the
property, on one condition: "That he pay them a
ransom of 25 rubles in cash and pray in the
synagogue twice out of turn ... Because the prayer
leader has been stingy with prayers and thus their
profits were reduced and they couldn't make
money." Zalkin explains: "They wanted something very precise
from him. The thieves asked Sirota to give
cantorial concerts in midweek, because on
Shabbat people didn't bring their wallets with
them to the synagogue, and the thieves needed a
crowd with wallets and purses. The two concerts
in fact took place, the pickpockets had plenty
of work and the cantor's property was returned
to him." School for
thievesVilna was not an exceptional hothouse of crime.
Organizations like Gold Flag and the Brothers
Society operated also in Warsaw, Odessa, Bialystok
and Lvov. Zalkin explains the context: The late
19th and early 20th century were bad years, in
which the Jews of Eastern Europe did their best
simply to survive. People didn't know where their
next meal was coming from, whole families were
crowded into cellars the size of a regular room.
Masses of people lived from hand to mouth. Whoever
could, emigrated, mainly to America. Between 1888
and the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, two
million Jews from Eastern Europe moved to
America. These people were driven not by great ideologies
but by sheer want. At the same time, though, the
want nourished the ideologies. "For days on end I
was genuinely hungry," Ben-Zion Dinur
(1884-1973), a historian who was Israel's education
minister from 1951-1955, wrote in his
autobiography, "In a World that Declined." Poverty
and a sense of hopelessness were fertile ground for
people searching for a detour en route to making a
living. "People realized that they had little prospect
of advancing on the normal track," Zalkin
notes. "The major catalyst for the
consolidation of the Jewish criminal
organizations was poverty, poverty so profound
that there was no chance to break out of it. The
Jews had it even harder, because they were a
minority within a majority that placed
restrictions on them." Until World War I, however, Jews had been a key
element in the population of Eastern Europe. "From
a certain point of view, these were Jewish cities,"
Zalkin explains. "For example, 50 percent of the
residents of Vilna were Jews. Because most of the
cities had a large Jewish population, it follows
that the percentage of Jews involved in crime was
also [proportionately] high. The biggest
gangster in Odessa, a huge city, was none other
than Benya Krik" -- the same one from the
title of the book by the Soviet-Jewish author
Isaac Babel: "Benya Krik, The Gangster,
and Other Stories." Jews could be found at almost all levels of
underworld activity, from the individual thief to
gangs that numbered more than 100 members. The
large organizations operated in the cities, which
they divided into sectors among themselves. Each
organization had a charter, a clear hierarchy and
internal courts, and its work was divided according
to different areas, such as theft, protection
money, prostitution, pickpocketing and murder. The
art of crime was treated seriously, as it was a
major source of livelihood for many people. Between
the world wars the idea was even raised of
establishing a school for thieves in Vilna. It's
not known if the idea was put into practice. In 19th-century Russia the best place to rob
people was on the roads. There weren't enough
policemen and there were a great many forests. The
convoys that traveled the roads were easy pickings.
Saul Ginzburg, one of the important
historians of Russian Jewry, describes groups of
Jewish thieves, whom he calls "toughs and
predators." After the heist the thieves slipped
away into the woods. A typical gang of roadside
robbers numbered between 10 and 15 men, who
provided for themselves and their families by means
of their booty. One of the most famous roadmen, Dan
Barzilai, a Jew by all accounts, who ran a
well-known gang of thieves in the Warsaw area, was
captured in 1874. His gang had 27 members, 14 of
them Jews. They descended upon estates around
Warsaw and attacked merchants' coaches on the
roads, making off with furs, jewelry and horses. A
Polish researcher found statements made by the
accused men after their arrest, as preserved in the
files of the police. The statement by the accused,
Yaakov Yankel, began as follows: "I am
Yaakov Yankel from the city of Yanov. My mother
Leah is still alive, my father died six years ago.
I am 24 years old." Yankel went on to describe the robbery in the
wake of which he was apprehended, along with seven
of his accomplices: "We were standing in the forest next to
Glokhov, without going onto the road. We left
the wagons in the forest, and two of us, Hershak
the wagoner and Shlomke, and we eight went by
foot to the estate. Dan and Lieber had three
pairs of pistols and wore masks ... First they
started to smash windows ... We stayed there for
about an hour and filled up three bags with
things and then went to the wagons." No end to
informationMordechai Zalkin has spent much of the past 13
years burrowing in Eastern European archives. They
are his laboratory, the place where he looks for
the remote margins of Jewish history and brings
them to life in his academic work. "When I work in an archive in Eastern Europe,
and it doesn't matter whether it's in St.
Petersburg or Moscow, one of the things that
interests me is the collection of police files," he
says. "What used to be classified intelligence
files are now open. The police collected
information as part of their work, and when I open
the files, from 150 years ago, I find detailed
reports about Jewish criminals. The archives have
enough material for 100 historians and for 100
years, and even then they won't finish." Zalkin is respectful of every document he finds.
"This, for example, is a document from 1820, from
the archives in Lithuania," he says, holding it up.
It's a leaflet, in Yiddish and Polish, published by
the rabbinical and political leaderships of one of
the Jewish communities, threatening a boycott of
anyone who engages in smuggling or gives shelter to
smugglers. "At that time the Jews smuggled
everything that moved and in some places the
Russian authorities pressured the leaders to
take action before they intervened," Zalkin
relates. "A leaflet like this shows that
smuggling was a concrete social phenomenon that
characterized the Jewish community, not a
marginal issue." The task of reconstruction is long and arduous
and ridden with disappointments. It's only rarely
that a lead turns up that can be followed, in the
form of the description of an event in the local
press, a detail from a book, a document of a Jewish
community. This triggers an exhausting search for
additional details and cross-references, with the
constant expectation of the moment at which the
picture will begin to clarify itself and
metamorphose into a coherent story. "In the end
it's all stories," Zalkin says. "We historians,
like journalists, are always after a good
story." The most exciting moments in the archives are
not necessarily related to Zalkin's specific field
of research. Holocaust survivors and relatives of
Zalkin who know about his work in Eastern Europe
often ask him to look for information about their
families. One woman, for example, furnished him
with information about her older brother, who was a
student at the university in Kovno, was taken away
by the Nazis and never heard from again. "I knew
which university he attended, so I was able to find
his student file," Zalkin says. "I brought the
whole file to Israel, including letters he wrote,
certificates and a photograph of him. It is very
moving to hold a file like that in one's
hands." The Haganah
connectionThe Jewish mobsters in the United States are far
more widely known than those of Eastern Europe and
have been the subjects of quite a few films and
books. The gangsters Bugsy Siegel and
Meyer Lansky have become legendary
figures. Ten years ago Prof. Robert Rockaway, from
the department of Jewish history at Tel Aviv
University, published the first important study of
these criminal organizations (in English: "But
He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of
Jewish Gangsters," Gefen Publishing House,
paperback edition, 2000). According to Rockaway's
findings, the vast majority of the Jewish criminals
in America were from Eastern Europe or the sons of
immigrants from there. They did not continue a
tradition of crime, but created a home-grown
tradition in their new homeland. Generally, the reason for their criminal
activity was not to obtain bread, but butter. Most
of the Jewish criminals in the U.S. were from
working-class families and grasped at a very early
age that hard work was not a recipe for economic
advancement. They didn't have capital to invest,
and the underworld offered a way to get rich
quick. Jews were among the biggest criminals in the
U.S. at the beginning of the last century. "In
terms of crime they did everything," Rockaway says.
"Drugs, murder, smuggling alcohol. They had no
limits. A Jew, Arnold Rothstein, was the
head of the New York underworld in the 1920s. He
created the largest gambling empire the U.S. have
ever seen until then. He controlled most of the
gangs in New York, including drugs and liquor.
Rothstein was the first entrepreneur in the U.S.
who created a well-oiled organization to smuggle
liquor during Prohibition." Another Jew, Abner Zwillman, ruled the
crime syndicate in New Jersey for 30 years from his
Newark base. As a boy he acquired the nickname "Der
Langer," "the Tall One" in Yiddish, or "Longy" in
the Jersey version. Together with another Jew,
Joseph Reinfeld, he ran the largest and most
profitable contraband organization in the U.S. The
two imported about 40 percent of the alcohol that
entered the country during the Prohibition era.
U.S. Treasury officials stated that between 1926
and 1933 Zwillman took in more than $40 million
from his smuggling operation (more than
half-a-billion dollars in today's terms). He
translated his vast economic clout into political
power. In the 1940s, the mayor of Newark, three of
his deputies and four city councilmen needed his
approval to get the nod for their posts. Jewish-American gangsters also helped in the
struggle for Israel's creation during the 1940s. In
his book, Rockaway describes how an emissary of the
pre- state Haganah defense organization (the
forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces) approached
Meyer Lansky, one of the major players in the crime
scene in America, and with his intervention,
shipments of weapons and military equipment were
smuggled out of New York harbor, bound for
Palestine. Lansky wasn't the only one. According to
Rockaway, other Jews from the underworld donated
tens of thousands of dollars to the Haganah. Shmuel
Isser's bunkerMembers of the Jewish underworld are absent from
the well-known narrative of the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising in 1943, but were involved in the
day-to-day life of the ghetto, and their connection
to the Jewish underground groups during the
uprising is a fascinating episode. The Nazi Aktion
to liquidate the ghetto was launched on the eve of
Passover, 1943. When the Nazis encountered
resistance they used flamethrowers to set fire
systematically to building after building in the
ghetto. On May 8 they uncovered the central bunker
of the Jewish Fighting Organization, at 18 Mila
Street. What is less known is that this symbol of
tenacity of the revolt, the fighters' headquarters,
where the commander of the uprising, Mordechai
Anielewicz, fought until his death, belonged to
the Jewish criminal Shmuel Isser. Prof. Israel Gutman from the Yad Vashem
Holocaust remembrance authority, who took part in
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a boy of 15, doesn't
remember Isser. "I can't say that I spoke with a
character like that," Gutman says. "The underground
was an ideological body which didn't have anything
to do with people like that." On the other hand,
Gutman definitely acknowledges the contribution of
underworld types to the life of the community in
the ghetto. "The criminal organizations in the
ghetto were somehow able to create an important
mode of existence," he says. "The ghetto lived
from smuggling -- above the wall, through the
gates by cajoling the police, under the wall.
The property that remained in the hands of the
Jews was transferred to the other side [of
the wall], and that is what the criminal
organizations dealt in. It was a highly
organized business." As for the fighting against the Nazis, Gutman
says, the criminal groups "played a minimal role.
Their main involvement was in smuggling, which was
the ghetto's key to life. They also employed a
great many assistants. There was an underground
economy in the ghetto -- workshops, small, illegal
factories, which created a survival base for quite
a few people in the ghetto. The economic foundation
that those organizations created helped support the
community's existence." In his book on the Jews of
Warsaw during the war years, Gutman estimates that
80 percent of the ghetto's foodstuffs were smuggled
in. The professional smugglers -- a euphemism for
underworld figures -- lived a debauched life in the
ghetto. They made a great deal of money very
quickly and became the social elite. They brought
in luxury items such as sweets or other goods that
earned them large profits. In the book, Gutman
quotes one person's testimony:
"The smugglers had enormous
revenues ... most of them accumulated
millions. The smugglers were the richest
class in the ghetto and were glaringly set apart
from the gray, meager and hungry Jewish quarter.
The easy profits and the uncertainty about tomorrow
led the smugglers to spend all their spare time
drinking, visiting night clubs and in the company
of women." In the end, the admired fighters and the members
of the underworld liniked up. Based on their
ideological approach, the members of the Jewish
Fighting Organization did not build bunkers. Their
basic assumption was that they would fight to the
end, so no withdrawal or escape routes were planned
(the other underground group in the ghetto, the
Jewish Military Organization, led by the
Revisionists, built a protected, well-equipped
bunker with an underground passage out of the
ghetto). When the members of the Jewish Fighting
Organization found that they could no longer move
about and hide aboveground, because of the Germans'
flamethrowers, they had no choice but to take cover
in underground bunkers. The largest and best
equipped of these fortified sites were those of the
underworld. According to Havi Ben Sasson, 32, a
doctoral student who works at the International
School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, the
Jewish criminal organizations were part of the
Warsaw landscape. In the course of a few hours of
archival research and reading of testimonies, she
was able to come up with a great deal of
information: "At Mila 18, which became one of the
symbols of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a concrete
connection existed between the Jewish underworld
and the Jewish Fighting Organization," Ben Sasson
says. "In fact, that bunker was built by and
belonged to people from the Warsaw underworld. It
was a huge shelter, with a number of rooms, a power
hookup and even a well for water. Tremendous
amounts of food were stored there, which the
underworld was able to bring into the ghetto,
thanks to its connections with the Polish
underworld." The leader of the bunker was Shmuel Isser, Ben
Sasson says. He dealt mainly in the production of
illegal goods, which were smuggled out of the
ghetto. "We have a number of testimonies about this from
fighters who survived," she notes. "Those who
succeeded in getting out of the bunker definitely
say that the bunker belonged to people of the
underworld and that the fighters were received
their like princes. Shmuel Isser's bunker was
intended to hold his family, which numbered between
80 and 100 people. It was one of the best equipped
bunkers in the ghetto. "Every self-respecting bunker made sure it had
weapons for self-defense, and the members of the
underworld were definitely self-respecting, so I
have no doubt that weapons were stored there, too.
That was why the Jewish Fighting Organization chose
Mila 18. What happened was that the people of the
underworld let the people of the underground into
their bunker. According to testimonies, the
underworld people also served as guides for the
fighters. They were familiar with the ghetto even
after it was burned and its form changed." False
imageThis is actually a war of images. Dr. Zalkin
wants to draw us a different social portrait. "What
interests me is the ordinary person," he says. "I
am not interested so much in the great rabbis and
the philosophers. I am interested in the society,
the people. My studies go in that direction. As a
social historian, I map and classify the society,
and when I came to all the places that have to do
with the social history of the Jews in the 19th
century and in the period between the world wars, I
didn't have to go looking for crime. It was simply
there, leaping up everywhere." In his Jerusalem home Zalkin has a large
collection of books on crime. Criminals would never
believe how much has been written about them. He
himself isn't sure what attracts him to these dark
corners -- to these dubious, often violent,
characters. "The assumption among researchers is that your
field of study doesn't necessary say anything about
your inclinations," Zalkin says evasively, but adds
an argument that is both very mainstream and very
provocative. "In my view, what shapes the great historical
processes is not the great figures, but the masses.
You can ask of any historical study why it is
important. Why is it important to study Moses
Mendelssohn, or David Ben-Gurion? In my
opinion, historical research is vastly important
for shaping the contemporary consciousness of the
society. What I want to say is that beyond my
interest as a historian, the contribution of this
research lies in understanding that, with all
respect to us, the image that all the Jewish
children went to heder [religious school]
and studied Torah and were great religious scholars
is mistaken or invented. My argument is that the
Jews were a normal society." If this conversation had taken place before
World War II, that argument would not have
surprised anyone. Jewish society knew itself.
"After the Holocaust,"
Zalkin says, "there was an
inclination to view the Jewish world through a
rosier prism. Zionist historiography had a
vested interest in drawing a distinction between
the `new Jew,' the pioneer-farmer, and the
wretched, pale ghetto Jew who studied in the
yeshiva and was a moneylender. The image today is
that they were all righteous and saintly. But it
just wasn't so." 
Real History and
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Portrait
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Fainberg
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Former Israeli
minister Gonen Segev arrested for drug
smuggling | Segev
indicted for smuggling 30,000 'Ecstasy'
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Ex-minister
suspected of second drug-smuggling attempt |
Los
Angeles police uncover Israeli drug ring, headed
by an Israeli national
-
Israel's links to the
global ecstasy trade ... -
-
International
Ecstasy smuggling racket: three Israelis
arrested
-
Israelis
at center of the international Ecstasy drug
trade
 -
Ecstasy:
A gift from "our best friend and
ally"...
Ultra-Orthodox
couriers ran drugs for major international ring,
reports Reuters-
international
money-laundering ring run by New York Hasidim
washed millions of dollars in cocaine proceeds
for the Colombian cartels
-
Real
History, Drug rings, and Israel: Reports from
DEA field offices state young Israelis claiming
to be art students and had been attempting to
penetrate DEA offices
-
Police
raid Michel Friedmanns house for cocaine.
Drogenrazzia beim Vizepräsidenten des
Zentralrates der Juden in Deutschland, Michel
Friedman.
|
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write to David
Irving