Shemer in a stolen jeep. Shemer and Ekstein were former employees
of the Israeli Security Agency(ISA). The police arrested them in
their homes that same night. By the next morning, the police had their
confessions to the crime. A third man involved in the murder, Yoseph
Menkes, was arrested a little later.
On the day of the assassination, an ISA agent had warned his su-
periors that the assassination would take place that night, but no pre-
cautions were taken. There were rumors and accusations that the ISA
was involved in the murder in order to silence Kastner and prevent
him from disclosing embarrassing details about the alleged connec-
tions of the Mapai leadership with Nazi Germany. This rumor arose
by virtue of the fact that one of the three young men charged with the
murder had in the past been linked publicly with the ISA and had
been sent as an informer to a group that was connected with the un-
derground movement in Israel.
It will never be known if indeed the assassination was arranged by
the Israeli government to remove a man who could be an embarrass-
ment and who threatened to become a perpetual liability. What had
become clear after the killing was that Kastner, in his capacity as a
Jewish community leader in Hungary, had in fact provided indispen-
sable assistance to SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann in the lat-
ter’s efforts to transport half a million Hungarian and Transylvanian
Jews to the Nazi extermination camps. At the time Eichmann was
head of the Gestapo department in charge of Jewish matters and pop-
ulation evacuation. Eichmann had been largely responsible for the
deportation to the East of nearly 190,000 Austrian Jews from March
1938 onward. He had also participated in the January 1942 Wannsee
Conference, where the administrative and logistical details of the “fi-
nal solution to the Jewish problem” were settled. He was not a policy
maker in the Third Reich, and his activities and decisions were
mostly bureaucratic. His role, on arriving in Budapest in March 1944,
was to send the half-million Hungarian Jews to their deaths as swiftly
and efficiently as possible. See alsoEICHMANN’S CAPTURE.KEDAR, MORDECHAI (MOTKE). Born in the early 1930s in Israel
as Mordechai Kravitzki. During Israel’s 1948–1949 War of Indepen-
dence, Kedar was drafted into the Israeli Navy, but was dismissed from
service because of disciplinary problems. He returned to his hometown140 • KEDAR, MORDECHAI06-102 (03) H-P.qxd 3/24/06 7:24 AM Page 140