Mossad Hunted a Missing Boy Across Three Continents

The missing child had crossed borders under false names while Israeli investigators searched three continents. By July 1962, Yossele Schumacher had been found in New York. The operation had drawn in Mossad, the FBI and a prime minister worried about a dispute tearing through Israeli society.

Historian Motti Inbari reconstructs the moment David Ben-Gurion handed Mossad chief Isser Harel the assignment. At the end of a late meeting in March 1962, the prime minister asked whether Harel could find the boy. Harel’s service had brought Adolf Eichmann out of Argentina two years earlier. This time the target of the search was a child concealed by people who believed his parents would give him the wrong religious upbringing.

One of the people moving him was Ruth Ben David, later known as Ruth Blau. Inbari’s research describes a French-born convert to Judaism with experience in the Resistance and clandestine work. In an interview with The Times of Israel, he detailed how she disguised Schumacher as a girl, helped move him through Switzerland and France, and eventually took him to New York. The changing identities turned the search for one child into an international intelligence problem.

The contemporary news bulletins show how closely the search was being watched. JTA reported on 2 July 1962 that the boy was in the protective custody of the US Immigration Service and that his mother was travelling to identify him. The service said he had entered the country under the name Yaacov Gertner. His grandfather had been jailed in Israel for refusing to reveal his whereabouts.

Inbari’s account puts Ben David at the centre of the final breakthrough. After her son admitted their involvement, she supplied an address in exchange for immunity, according to the historian’s interview. His published research introduction says Mossad passed the location to the FBI. An operation that had ranged across countries ended with an address American authorities could visit.

The return became a public event. A 1962 newsreel preserved in the Israeli Film Archive records Schumacher’s arrival at Lod Airport, where hundreds gathered. Its catalogue describes him speaking to reporters and leaving in a car with his family. His grandfather, released from prison that day, was among those watching the landing.

The Times of Israel reported in 2023 that Schumacher singled out Blau as the participant in his abduction he had never forgiven.