synagogue in Hendon were at once exposed. The congregation called
the police and the “religious” agents were arrested. They were re-
leased at the intervention of the Israeli ambassador in London.
Mossad agents succeeded in luring an Orthodox rabbi to Paris, “to a
wealthy orthodox family that wanted him for a circumcision ceremony.”
At the airport Mossad agents in black coats and wearing ultraorthodox-
style headgear awaited him. Instead of the purported circumcision cer-
emony, they took the rabbi to a Pigalle brothel. Flanked by a pair of
prostitutes, paid in advance, the rabbi was photographed. He was shown
the pictures, which the agents threatened to send to his congregation if
he did not divulge information on Schumacher’s whereabouts. In the
end the rabbi’s interrogators were convinced that he knew nothing and
did not have a single clue to finding the boy; they destroyed the pictures.
Another rabbi, Shai Freyer, was picked up by Mossad agents on a jour-
ney from Paris to Geneva. He was rigorously questioned, but here too
the Mossad agents ultimately believed him when he said that he knew
nothing about the case. Harel, himself one of the interrogators, ordered
the rabbi to be kept in a Mossad safe house in Switzerland until the op-
eration in search of Schumacher was completed lest he alert the entire
Orthodox community.
Harel personally crisscrossed Europe for months on this mission.
He worked in the field and slept on cots like his junior agents. In one
instance, a Mossad agent disguised as an Orthodox Jew knocked on
a door of an Orthodox Jewish family in Montreux, Switzerland.
When the door was opened, he said that he was hungry and asked for
some food. The woman who opened the door could hardly believe
her ears, as that day happened to be a Jewish fast.
The Mossad encountered Madeleine Frei by chance as part of its
general search among Orthodox Jews. She was the daughter of an aris-
tocratic French family that in World War II had saved many Jewish
children from deportation to the Nazi death camps. After the war she
converted to extreme Orthodox Judaism and visited Jerusalem several
times. In August 1962 she was lured to a place on the Paris outskirts by
Mossad agents, who explained to her how Yossele’s parents missed
him. They asked her to consider the parents’ moral right to raise their
son as they wished. Frei insisted that she knew nothing, and almost had
the agents believing her. But the ubiquitous Harel demanded to see her
passport. Pasted in it was a picture of her “daughter” that was identical
to a picture of Yossele Schumacher.SCHUMACHER, YOSSELE• 24906-102 (04) Q-Z.qxd 3/24/06 7:25 AM Page 249