“Kosher Nostra” — Jewish mafia for Israel

The celebration of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence last year brought together many local and foreign celebrities on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Among them was 95-year-old Amos Bar-Yohai. Tears came to the eyes of the gray-haired man with white pirate-like mustache when he saw young soldiers at the opening ceremony. “It’s hard to believe how strong our little country has become since 1948,” he said proudly.

Amos was born in 1923 in the Union of South Africa. At the age of twelve he emigrated with his family to Palestine, where he became one of the founders of the Ein Gev kibbutz on Lake Kinneret. In 1944 he joined the Palmach, the combat unit of the Haganah, which later became the predecessor of the Israeli army. Under the command of the legendary Yigal Allon, Amos quickly rose to the rank of officer.

In 1945 the Jewish Agency for Israel (headed by David Ben-Gurion — the de facto government before the proclamation of the state) created a network in the United States for illegal weapons procurement and smuggling, led by Reuven Dafni. Amos was on his team. “Dafni was an example for all of us. He fought in North Africa in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army against the Nazis and was parachuted behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia in 1944 to join the partisans,” Amos recalls.

In the operation, which involved hundreds of Americans from all walks of life, there was one group that remained anonymous: the “Kosher Nostra” — the Jewish mafia in North America. The center of the arms smuggling operation was a rented two-room apartment at the “Fourteen” hotel on East 60th Street in New York. Teddy Kollek, who later served for many years as mayor of Jerusalem, directed daily operations and monitored everyone entering and leaving the hotel. Among them was Frank Sinatra, who performed there and later became an important supporter of Israel. He met with Kollek several times and donated one million dollars for weapons for the young Jewish state.

At that time, the U.S. government supported an arms embargo against Israel and Middle Eastern countries, but Egypt and other Arab states found ways around the embargo. Another emissary, Yehuda Arazi, learned that the mafia controlled the port of New York and approached mob boss Meyer Lansky. He asked him to deliver weapons by sea to Israel. Lansky immediately contacted Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis of the allied Italian mafia, which controlled many ports and unions on the U.S. East Coast. They helped Israeli agents hide the weapons purchased for the Jewish state and load illegal shipments of military equipment onto ships bound for Haifa.

Two years before his death in 2003, Dafni told Israeli television about his meetings with various mobsters, one of whom was Sam Kay of Miami: “When I entered his office, I was greeted by an old Jew. There was something grim about him, he smoked a cigar, but immediately said ‘tachles’ (‘concretely, to the point’ — Yiddish). Within minutes he promised to help and contacted the president of Panama. From that moment on, all our ships delivering weapons to Israel were registered in that Latin American country and sailed under the Panamanian flag, which helped us greatly.”

Dafni, who later served as Israel’s consul in New York and ambassador to India, was under constant FBI surveillance until his departure. Nevertheless, he continued to meet with notorious figures of the American underworld, such as the “boss of bosses” Lucky Luciano or the infamous Bugsy Siegel, who financially supported Israel.

However, the Irgun (Irgun Tzvai Leumi — National Military Organization), the right-wing Zionist underground paramilitary group that competed with the Haganah, also operated a weapons smuggling network in the U.S., and some of its members contacted various Jewish communities and charitable organizations to help build a Jewish army to fight the Arabs. Some of them also received support from the American mafia.

“I was a very young idealist at that time,” says Yaakov Efrati. The 96-year-old veteran met in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Las Vegas and Los Angeles with Jewish and Italian gangsters. Yaakov, who arrived illegally in Palestine by sea as an orphan, lost his entire family in the Holocaust. “I always knew that we Jews should never again be defenseless, and I would have served the devil himself for Israel’s survival,” he says. “I often met Mickey Cohen, who was said to be particularly brutal. He believed in the Zionist idea, and Israel’s victory in the War of Independence became his top priority. He organized fundraising for the Irgun and convinced leading Jewish underworld figures to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy weapons that were immediately sent to Israel.”

Most Jewish mobsters were willing to help Israel. Some gangsters did it out of Jewish loyalty, others wanted to improve their reputation within Jewish communities. The granddaughter of Meyer Lansky, who lives in Tel Aviv, says her grandfather strongly supported Israel in the War of Independence. One reason, she says, was that he was a convinced Zionist and constantly repeated: “The land of our ancestors must not be trampled by the Arabs.” Some mobsters saw themselves as protectors of the Jews in an almost biblical sense — it was part of their worldview. Others wanted to earn respect to free their children from the stigma of shame. Amos Bar-Yohai believes that this is what motivated some New York gangsters to help the Haganah. “Avner Tzwilman had a daughter of marriageable age, but it was difficult for her to find a Jewish groom because of her father’s activities. I think he helped us because it was a way for him to earn a good name within the Jewish community.”

Perhaps the help to Israel should be seen as a late version of the Jewish gangster tradition of defending “their neighborhood” from antisemites. “After World War II, the Jewish state symbolically represented the Jewish quarter,” says Amos Bar-Yohai, “and helping Israel was immediately understood by Jewish gangsters as the familiar duty to always support their own in the fight against enemies.”

Tal Leder

Translated from German by Viktor Shapiro

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