Rabbi Meshulum 

By Berry Chamish

 

The agents quoted in, They're Talking, claimed the former head of the Prison Services' Medical Department, Yaacov Ziegelboim was murdered by the Shabak just before he was planning to report the torture of Rabbi Uzi Meshulum. Today his son, Eddie Ziegelboim contacted me and in a long conversation, confirmed everything.

Paralleling the Shabak's covert war against all opponents of the Oslo Accord, was an equally vicious battle against Rabbi Uzi Meshulum. In the early years of the state, at least 4500, mostly Yemenite,infants were kidnapped from immigrant transit camps, nurseries and hospitals. Two new Hebrew books have thoroughly documented the fact that these kidnappings took place. It is commonly believed that the infants were sold for adoption,but Rabbi Meshulum, as I will shortly explain,reached a different conclusion. Rabbi Meshulum's congregation lead the fight to have the kidnappings exposed and the kidnappers tried. In the summer of 1994, his headquarters in Yehud (the same city where two car bombs went off today) was attacked by hundreds of army, police and Shabak snipers. They sprayed Meshulum's home with dozen's of bullets in an attempt to murder him and his family but in the end the sole victim was an eighteen year old congregant of the rabbi.

Rabbi Meshulum was imprisoned and subjected to cruel medical techniques aimed at destroying his will and his memory. He was released from prison two years ago with almost a total memory loss. Those who saw him at his son's wedding last month were shocked: he was in such pain he couldn't even sit in his wheelchair. He lay prone throughout the ceremony.

Not long after Rabin's murder, the head physician of the prison Medical Services, Yaacov Ziegelboium, was blown to bits in his car. The police and media blamed Meshulum's followers for the murder, claiming they thought he was behind the rabbi's atrocious medical treatment. I was reliably informed the Shabak carried out the hit...but who gave them theorder? Eddie Ziegelboim called me this morning. 

EZ - I'm sorry I called so early but it's urgent. It's about the information you published from the Shabak agents. 

BC - What about it? 

EZ - I'm Yaacov Ziegelboim's son. 

BC - Oh my. I hope you approve of what I did. 

EZ - That's why I'm calling. I know the Shabak murdered him and I want justice done...My father was honest and he was stubborn. He came from Russia thirty years ago and accomplished as much as any immigrant of the time. It was he who had the most modern prison medical facility built. He cared about his patients and had nothing to do with Rabbi Meshulum's treatment. In fact, he told me, he was the only person in the prison services the rabbi would speak to. 

BC - Did he tell you anything else? 

EZ - Hardly anything but his personality was changing by the end of his life. He was complaining about the dirty politics he had to confront and asked why he was being dragged into it. Just before he died he bought a book called Only The Paranoid Survive, which was out of character for him and told his wife, my stepmother, that she may not see him again. He was obviously frightened but it wasn't like him to show it openly... He was murdered two weeks before he was going to report Rabbi Meshulum's treatment to a government committee. He was preparing his presentation the day his car was bombed. But there's something else about the timing you should know. The night before, there was the biggest protest rally over the Yemenite children ever. The movement was gaining big ground. By murdering my father and blaming it on Meshulum's followers, the Shabak killed two birds with one stone. 

BC - And you're positive Meshulum's people couldn't have done the deed? 

EZ - Do you know how professional this operation was? It wasn't just that the bomb was planted so no one saw it, the explosion occurred right after he dropped his children off. It was radio activated and there were spotters timing it. Not only that, the force of the explosion was perfectly calibrated to blow him to death but no bystanders. Rabbi Meshulum's people were shlemiels, they could barely get the microphones set up at rallies. They didn't have the expertise to pull it off and supposedly a hundred policemen were assigned to the case and they couldn't find the bomber. There should have been no problem finding him if he really was one of the rabbi's followers. I tried getting information from the policemen. They were told to hush up everything and you could hear the fear in their voices. 

BC - Did your father keep a diary? Maybe his secretary has his notes? 

EZ - My father kept a diary and it was confiscated. So was his computer. The police to this day won't return them. The secretary is too terrified to talk. I tried to reason with her, however it didn't help. But do you know who did try to get to the truth, the Police Minister Avigdor Kahalani. He told the media to quit blaming the Meshulum people. It was obvious they didn't have the means to organize the murder. And he was ruined after that. He was accused of corruption and was only cleared of the phoney charges last month. Anyone who touches my father's murder is in serious trouble. No newspaper will investigate. Even the Russian papers I approached wouldn't go near it. They all know it was a Shabak hit, just like Rabin, and they won't even lift a phone to get to the bottom of the crime...just like Rabin. 

BC - Why do you think Rabbi Meshulum was being maltreated in the first place? 

EZ - I remember what my father told me. He said, politics wasn't supposed to be part of my job. Rabbi Meshulum was threatening a political figure powerful enough to have the army put him down and have my father murdered. 

I think I know who the figure is because Rabbi Meshulum told me who he is. I was the last journalist to visit Rabbi Meshulum in prison. After my early revelations about the Rabin murder made national news, he asked his wife to contact me. She requested that I meet him and I agreed. On a hot summer morning, I walked through a maze of corridors in Sharon Prison and had a powerful discussion with the rabbi. He was still strong then and had a vise-like handshake. He turned his tape machine on high so no one would record our conversation with ease and blasted Haredi music.

What he told me was utterly terrifying and I have refrained from reporting the conversation in depth. However, a year later a Jerusalem rabbi, David Savilia confirmed his most awful claims to me. Nonetheless, even now, with my country being set up for ruin, I will qualify the following charges: this is what he told me and I can't prove it and can't stand by it. That said, our establishment mentally and physically wrecked Rabbi Meshulum and there had to be one heck of a good reason. He got straight to the point and said he suspected his movement's spokesperson, one Ora Shifris, of being a Shabak plant and asked me to take over from her. I agreed but she would have nothing to do with the change and prevented it forcefully. He then displayed a fine understanding of world politics and a universally controlled media. He didn't know it but he was describing the New World Order.

I asked him the one question I had prepared: If you have the information, why don't you reunite all the biological children with their parents already? He pulled closer to me and whispered, "Because most of the children aren't alive. I'm waiting for their parents to die before I release the truth." 

I still don't know why he chose me, but he saw something in me and related the following ghastly history. "Back in the late 40s, the Americans still didn't understand the effects of atomic radiation. They were conducting radiation experiments on retarded children and mostly, black prisoners in the American South. But the experiments were exposed and ended. The Americans needed guinea pigs for their experiments and at the same time, Israel was determined to build a nuclear reactor and ultimately bombs. The French knew how to build a reactor but only the Americans had the secrets of bomb building. We traded Yemenite babies to be experimental lab rats for those secrets. 

"The man at the top of the nuclear program was Shimon Peres. He got the French to put up the reactor at Dimona and he is my number one culprit in the kidnappings. He is a monster and he's after me. He's after all of us."

THEY'RE TALKING 
By Barry Chamish 
Uzi Meshulum

(A rabbi who exposed the kidnappings of thousands of, mostly, Yemenite infants in the early days of the state). 
Source 2 - At the same time that the service was being exploited to smear political opposition to the Oslo process, we were being used to snuff out another political threat, Rabbi Uzi Meshulum. I bought the propaganda that he was a dangerous cult leader threatening widespread violence in our society. Most of us did at the time so we cooperated in his silencing. Now we know that his message was honest and that it threatened the very basis of the Labor movement. If it was allowed out, Labor's first heroes were going to be pilloried, the political movement would have no moral imperative to continue and thus the Oslo process would die. We were used again.

As far as the service was concerned, Meshulum's fatal mistake was naming his Shin Bet infiltrator, Ilan Raz. We do not appreciate having our men exposed and their lives thereafter threatened. We planned to move in on Meshulum big-time for that.

But Raz tried to warn Meshulum. He had actually come around to admiring him, and that by the way, is breaking regulation number one; Get close to your target but not too close. He told him to stop his campaign immediately or we would come down on him very hard. He even tried bribing him but Meshulum wouldn't budge. We laid siege to his compound with army and police snipers everywhere. They killed one of Meshulum's young supporters. Meshulum was put into prison and now he seems to have forgotten everything to do with missing infants.

And the story gets worse. The Prison Services medical head, Yaacov Ziegelboim was appalled by the medical treatment Meshulum was receiving and was on the verge of reporting the facts to the proper authorities. A bomb in his car put an end to that. Our public relations people shifted the blame to Meshulum's followers. They are like the 
settlers; they talk big, they used to call protest rallies thinking they could persuade the public to seek justice but they never took murderous actions. Yet the propaganda was so effective that the public believed the bombing was by an extremist Yemenite. I have no proof but I'm convinced, and I'm not alone, that victims like the Amir and Kahalani brothers were chosen because they were Yemenite. Part of the overall operation was to convince the public that Yemenites were unstable and their claims shouldn't be taken seriously.

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