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JFK documents reveal assassin’s CIA monitor was Reuben Efron, a Jewish spy who loved Midrash
(JTA) — For decades, armchair analysts scrutinizing the mysteries of the President John F. Kennedy assassination have fixated on who, exactly, opened his future assassin’s mail while he was under CIA surveillance.
As the conspiracy theory went, that person would have understood Lee Harvey Oswald’s relationship with the Soviet Union and thus could unlock new information about a possible Communist plot against Kennedy — or a U.S. government plot to obscure his true killer.
Last month, a new document dump in the ongoing declassification of Kennedy documents revealed the identity of the CIA screener: one Reuben Efron, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania.
The New York Times was the first to report Efron’s identity. “And that means — what, exactly?” the newspaper asked in its report. “A tantalizing clue to unraveling a complicated conspiracy that the government has sought to cover up for decades? Additional proof that the C.I.A. knew more about Oswald than initially acknowledged? Or a minor detail withheld all this time because of bureaucratic imperatives irrelevant to the question of whether Oswald was the lone gunman on the fateful day?”
A deep dive into Efron’s Jewish identity does not answer those questions. But it does reveal that Efron not only worked as a spy but had a deep knowledge of the spies in Jewish tradition.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has confirmed that Efron spent time living in Israel before dying on Nov. 22, 1993 — 30 years to the day after Kennedy’s assassination. While there, he contributed five articles in the 1970s to the Jewish Bible Quarterly, a World Zionist Organization-affiliated publication based in Jerusalem, that channeled his expertise in espionage.
“Rahab and her premises were under surveillance of a counterintelligence team of the king of Jericho who soon established that the two men visiting Rahab were actually Israelite spies,” he writes in one of the essays, referring to a Jericho courtesan who, according to the Book of Joshua, assisted the Israelites in preparing to rout the Canaanites. Efron called Rahab “a prototype of a Mata Hari,” the World War I-era exotic dancer-turned-spy.
In one of the essays, Efron directly addresses the problem of spies incorrectly assessing their surveillance target — a critique that has been leveled about his read of Oswald. About the 10 spies who, in the Book of Numbers, returned to the Israelites unsettled by their venture into Canaan, he writes, “The militarily inexperienced scouts apparently had been unduly impressed with the prowess of the enemy and, as is frequent among Easterners, exaggerated his capabilities.”
The essays, three of which appeared in a series called “Military Intelligence in the Bible,” do little to illuminate either the Kennedy assassination or the inner life of the man who read Oswald’s mail. But they do shed light on how he spent his retirement.
Efron was born Ruvelis Effronas in Simnas, Lithuania, on April 12, 1911, and attended a Jewish high school there (a “Hebrew gymnasium,” in his words), followed by Vytautas Magnus University in what is now Kaunas. He practiced law for five years in that city — a thriving hub of Lithuanian Jewish life that would become the site of the country’s largest ghetto under the Nazis — before emigrating, as his brother had done previously.
Efron immigrated to the United States in December 1939, arriving in Miami via Cuba. U.S. immigration documents list his profession as a salesman. According to a family history compiled by a relative, the following fall he enrolled at the Atlanta Law School, a night school that closed in the 1990s. He worked at a clothing store in downtown Atlanta until graduating in 1943.
He spoke Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Yiddish and German and enlisted in the Air Force during World War II as an interpreter, according to a death notice published in the Miami Herald. After the war, the death notice said, he played a role in peace negotiations and in talks related to the resettlement of war refugees — among them, perhaps, members of his own family, but not his mother, who according to the published genealogy was murdered in the Holocaust.
For decades, Efron worked for the U.S. government, playing roles that are only now coming to light as secret government documents are made available to the public. His family history says only: “Reuben worked for the Pentagon.”
In addition to his now-revealed role reading Oswald’s mail, Efron pops up in another declassified document dealing with an area of amateur sleuthing that has garnered a following as intense, if not more so, than the Kennedy assassination.
In October 1955, Efron was traveling by train in the Soviet Union with U.S. Sen. Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat, and a senior U.S. army official. The three men reported seeing two “circular and unconventional aircraft resembling flying discs or flying saucers … taking off almost vertically one minute apart.”
“After sighting, Soviet train men became excited and lowered curtains and refused permission to look out windows,” says the 1955 report, declassified in 2004. “U.S. observers firmly believe these unconventional aircraft are flying saucer or disc aircraft.”
In retirement, Efron apparently enjoyed the freedom to opine. Living in Washington, D.C., in 1971, he wrote to the New York Times urging the Nixon administration to reject proposals of a joint U.S.-Soviet force to police Egypt-Israel peace, saying it would ”communize the whole area.”
It’s not clear if he ever officially immigrated to Israel using its Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews who move to the country. But the obituary in the Miami Herald said that Efron “commuted between Israel and the United States for many years, during which he studied Israeli law and was admitted to the Israeli bar.” The obituary said Efron was inspired by his mother’s work in Lithuania with Jews who were immigrating to Palestine.
In 1982, Efron lived on Keren Hayesod street in Jerusalem bordering the neighborhood of Rehavia, genealogical records show. Rehavia, now a neighborhood bursting with ostentatious wealth, much of it American, was then a leafy and somewhat decayed enclave of aging “yekkes,” or German Jews, many of them from the university-educated class that had fled the Nazis, arriving in Palestine in the 1930s.
The address would have been a pleasant 10-minute walk from the offices of the Jewish Bible Quarterly.
A staffer at the quarterly checked with surviving retired staff who worked during the late 1970s; no one could recall working with Efron. But his contributions to the quarterly are mostly preserved: JTA was able to locate three of the five essays.
In them, Efron comes across as an enthusiast of the ancients with a fundamentalist’s belief in the Bible as relaying an accurate historical narrative.
“The Bible relates truthfully David’s charismatic personality, physical charm, as well as frailties and ethical shortcomings,” Efron writes, reviewing the clandestine means David and Jonathan employed in the Book of Samuel to determine whether Jonathan’s father, Saul, planned to assassinate David.
As befits someone writing for a World Zionist Organization publication, Efron draws parallels between ancient and modern Israel, and finds much to praise in both national expressions.
“It should be noted that in ancient as well as in recent times the people of Israel adhered to their promises and covenants with their neighbors,” he writes in describing Joshua’s sticking to his pledge to protect the Gibeonites despite their deception, the spycraft that is the article’s focus.
Efron deploys accounts of Israel’s modern spycraft to establish a continuum between biblical times and the 20th century.
“A recent example of such a secret encounter in Israel’s international relations is the now well publicized, but at that time very guarded meeting between the former Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan, with the then Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister, Muhammed Hassan al-Tohami, in September 1977, in Morocco, which laid the groundwork for Egyptian President Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem,” he writes in the article about David and Jonathan.
Details about Efron’s identity and background exercised the community of JFK assassination theorists to a much lesser degree than the fact that a senior CIA official was tracking Oswald — and the tantalizing prospect that there was more to learn.
“The memo shows that high-level CIA officers were interested in the smallest details of Oswald’s life 17 months before Kennedy was killed,” Jefferson Morley, an author of multiple books about the CIA, and about Kennedy, said on his blog, JFK Facts, after the revelation. “If Oswald was the ‘lone gunman,’ as a substantial minority of Americans believe, the clandestine service had much more access to his personal information than most know.”
Efron had a wife, Edna, a brother, Irving, and no children. Said the death notice in the Miami Herald: “He was a most diligent and modest person.”
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The post JFK documents reveal assassin’s CIA monitor was Reuben Efron, a Jewish spy who loved Midrash appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘I Grew Up Hating Israel, Jews’: Former Antisemite-Turned-Zionist Takes on World’s Oldest Hatred in New Doc
Norwegian student Marie Andersen carries an antisemitic sign at an Oct. 21, 2023, pro-Hamas demonstration in Warsaw, Poland. Photo: Screenshot
In a world grappling with a resurgence of antisemitism, a new documentary seeks to confront the issue head-on, positing an unsettling take on the motivations behind the world’s oldest hatred through the insights of Rawan Osman, a Syrian-Lebanese antisemite-turned-Zionist.
“Tragic Awakening: A New Look at the Oldest Hatred,” directed by Canadian-Israeli filmmaker Raphael Shore, interweaves historical analysis with contemporary events through the voices of clerics, historians, sociologists, and cultural commentators, including the late British Chief Rabbi Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, author Yossi Klein Halevi, Israel’s antisemitism envoy Michal Cotler-Wunsh, and journalists Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray. It argues that antisemitism stems not from a perception of Jewish inferiority, but rather from resentment of Jewish excellence and moral leadership.
Osman — who founded “Arabs Ask,” a forum designed to challenge preconceived notions about Judaism and Israel among Arabs, and who describes herself as an Arab Zionist — narrates the movie.
Born in Damascus, Syria, she was raised in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and later lived in Saudi Arabia and Qatar before eventually settling in Germany. Her first encounter with a Jewish person was when she moved to Strasbourg, France in her twenties. In her words, the encounter prompted her “first and last panic attack.”
But a long process of exploration, including studying Modern Hebrew and Jewish history at a German university, led her to challenge the antisemitic beliefs she had absorbed growing up in the Middle East and ultimately change her perspective.
“Life is strange. I grew up hating Israel and the Jews, just like many Lebanese and Syrians,” Osman told The Algemeiner.
“Living in Europe, especially the decade I spent in Germany, made me one of the most vocal supporters of the Jewish state. Who would have thought?”
After reexamining her beliefs, Osman dedicated herself to soft diplomacy, educating the Arab world about Jewish history and the Holocaust. However, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7, she adopted a more direct and assertive approach, despite the personal risks tied to openly supporting Israel. Reflecting on a conversation with her son, she recalled him asking, “Why are you doing this to me?” to which she responded, “I am doing this for you.”
Osman, who has expressed a desire to convert to Judaism and move to Jerusalem, teamed up with Shore and Rabbi Shalom Schwartz, the film’s executive producer and founder of Aseret, an organization dedicated to promoting the universal values of the Ten Commandments.
“I found myself on a quest to try and understand antisemitism. The Jews are blamed for all ills of the world. Why? Antisemitism requires a different type of explanation,” Osman says in the film.
Shore, who released the film alongside his new book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew?, argued that while religious, social, and political reasons may trigger antisemitism, they fail to explain its deeper motives, leaving efforts to combat it ineffective.
“Today, more than ever before since the Nazis were defeated, we are forced to discover ways of finding greater tolerance in our world. We are completely delusional if we think that hatred of the Jews will end with the Jews. We are always the canary in the coal mine — a harbinger of what is to come for the entire civilized world,” Shore told The Algemeiner.
“If we are ever to effectively combat antisemitism, we need to better understand its roots with moral and spiritual courage, which demands unwavering pride in our common Jewish identities,” he continued. “Combating antisemitism requires pushing back at our enemies with clarity, unity, and an appreciation that our traditions and history are what have allowed us to overcome our enemies.”
Osman says at one point in the movie: “Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews because they were bad; he wanted to kill them because they were good.”
Shore explains that for Hitler, the Jews represented “a spiritual and moral threat” because the ethical foundations of Western civilization — at their core, Jewish ideas — are the antithesis of his Darwinian outlook.
“Hitler believed that there was one great conflict that drives human history, and that was the idea of survival of the fittest,” Shore said. “Hitler believed that if the ideas of humanitarianism, love, equality, democracy were to succeed, that would be the end of humanity.”
After a screening of the movie in Tel Aviv last week, Osman shared her thoughts on the downfall of Iran’s regional axis of proxies, culminating with the recent fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Osman said that the reaction of some Israelis’ apprehension at Assad’s demise “literally broke my heart,” she said.
“I invited my Israeli friends to reach out to the Syrians and congratulate them” on the fall of Assad, who was the “monster of the century,” she said.
“Some of them misunderstood — they thought I’m endorsing Islamists,” she said, referencing the rebels led by a former member of ISIS and al Qaeda, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
Still, she noted, these groups achieved what the world, including the US and Israel, could not, emphasizing that the removal of Assad had to come from within Syria, as an external force taking him down would have turned him into a martyr.
Though Osman approached the recent changes with caution regarding their impact on Israel’s relations with its neighbors, she remained hopeful. “While I watch myself together with Rav Shalom Shwartz and Rav Shore on the big screen, I feel that peace between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria might come in my lifetime after all,” she told The Algemeiner.
The post ‘I Grew Up Hating Israel, Jews’: Former Antisemite-Turned-Zionist Takes on World’s Oldest Hatred in New Doc first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Blinken Calls for Final Gaza Truce Push Before Biden Leaves Office
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a media conference after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at the Czernin Palace, in Prague, Czech Republic, May 31, 2024. Photo: Peter David Josek/Pool via REUTERS
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday called for a final push for a ceasefire and hostage-release deal to halt fighting in Gaza before outgoing President Joe Biden leaves office on Jan. 20.
“We very much want to bring this over the finish line in the next two weeks, the time we have remaining,” Blinken told a news conference in South Korea when asked whether a deal was close.
While it remains unclear exactly how close Israel and Hamas are to an agreement, Jerusalem has reportedly sent a team of officials to Qatar for talks brokered by Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
Foreign media on Monday published a list of 34 hostages to be released as part of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement. According to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, Jerusalem had submitted the list to mediators in July.
Israel’s Channel 12 News reported that Hamas had agreed in principle to the list but was refusing or unable to confirm whether the listed hostages were alive. However, a Hamas official told Reuters the Palestinian terrorist group had cleared the list of who could be freed in the initial phase of a truce.
Of the 251 hostages kidnapped by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during their invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, approximately 100 remain in captivity — at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Blinken’s latest comments came after he told the New York Times in an interview published over the weekend that Hamas, not Israel, has been the biggest impediment to achieving an elusive ceasefire deal to end the ongoing war in Gaza.
Blinken batted down allegations that Israel walked away from opportunities to secure an end to the conflict, arguing that Hamas leadership purposefully prolonged the war to the detriment of their Gazan civilian population.
He added that placing on Israel and focusing primarily on its conduct only made achieving a ceasefire more difficult, claiming that the Hamas terrorist group used the perception of “public daylight between the United States and Israel” as leverage against the Jewish state in negotiations.
“The two biggest impediments to getting that over the finish line — and we’ve been so close on several occasions and as we speak today, we’re also very close — there have been two major impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas,” Blinken said.
“One has been whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a cease-fire and the release of hostages,” he said. “And so there are times when what we say in private to Israel where we have a disagreement is one thing, and what we’re doing or saying in public may be another. But that’s in no small measure because with this daylight, the prospects of getting the hostage and cease-fire deal over the finish line become more distant.”
Blinken also argued that Hamas believed that prolonging the conflict could eventually spark a broader regional war involving Iran and its Hezbollah terrorist proxy.
“The other thing that got Hamas to pull back was their belief, their hope that there would be a wider conflict, that Hezbollah would attack Israel, that Iran would attack Israel, that other actors would attack Israel, and that Israel would have its hands full and Hamas could continue what it was doing,” Blinken said.
Hezbollah relentlessly pummeled northern Israeli communities with a barrage of missiles, rockets, and drones in the months following the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel perpetrated by Hamas. Estimates suggest that Hezbollah, an Iranian-proxy terrorist organization, fired between 100-200 missiles into northern Israel nearly every day for over a year. As a result, roughly 80,000 Israelis were forced to evacuate Israel’s north due to the unrelenting attacks.
Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire deal in November, effectively ending a 14-month period of war between the two parties.
During his latest interview, Blinken also refuted notions that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “walked away” from opportunities to broker a ceasefire, saying that Israel oftentimes had understandable rationales for taking bold actions such as eliminating Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
“What we’ve seen time and again is Hamas not concluding a deal that it should have concluded. There have been times when actions that Israel has taken have, yes, made it more difficult. But there’s been a rationale for those actions, even if they’ve sometimes made getting to a conclusion more difficult,” Blinked said.
The State Department leader also expressed frustration over the lack of international outrage against Hamas, wondering why a “unanimous chorus around the world” has not emerged to criticize the terrorist group’s prolonging of the conflict.
“[Y]ou hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas. Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender — I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, ‘Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on!’” Blinken added.
Blinken also emphatically denied the unsubstantiated notion that Israel has committed a “genocide” in Gaza. He argued that although Palestinians have suffered as a result of the war, the ultimate defeat of Hamas could present “the prospect of a much different and much better future.”
“[E]veryone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts. And my conclusions are clear. I think as well, there is, in the wake of this horrific suffering — the traumatization of the Israeli population, the Palestinian population and many others — there’s also a light that one can see that offers the prospect of a much different and much better future,” Blinken said.
The post Blinken Calls for Final Gaza Truce Push Before Biden Leaves Office first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York was always a lot more Jewish than Toronto could ever be—but the contrast is more obvious now
It’s a commonplace experience of a Diaspora Jew visiting Israel to realize that suddenly, this thing that made you different is actually the least remarkable thing about you.
The character Alexander Portnoy speaks to this in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint—but I’ve also just lived it when visiting Tel Aviv or Rehovot or wherever. Whether you experience it as being Othered in a bad way or as a point of pride and what makes you special, you get to Israel and lo and behold, no one is surprised that your family doesn’t celebrate Christmas or whatever. Streets are named after Jewish figures, businesses are closed on Jewish holidays, Jewishness is assumed, so distinctiveness requires other sources. Being Jewish isn’t associated with being this way or that—not with being neurotic or good with money—because Jews are everywhere you look. The bimbos and himbos are Jewish, too.
So it took me by surprise, visiting my hometown of New York City over the holiday break, to feel a bit, well, Israel-visit-ish while there. It’s not that everyone is Jewish (nor, for that matter, is everybody Jewish in Israel), but rather that there’s just some crucial difference in population and culture such that it is not a whole thing to be Jewish in post-Oct. 7 New York, not in the way it is in Toronto. Goodness knows that relative to plenty of places, Toronto’s got Jews. But it is, at most, a city with some Jewish areas. We’re Canadian, sure, but one of the city’s many Others.
The streets of Manhattan are not lined with signage admonishing passersby to reflect on Israel’s misdeeds. You can walk for blocks or even days on end and not see a keffiyeh, not because the United States bans free expression but because the interest just isn’t there. The little that remained of post-Oct. 7 signage was more in the hostage-freeing realm than the other sort.
But there isn’t a tremendous amount of pro-Israel this-and-that, either. (I saw maybe one baseball cap expressing support for Israel?) It’s more like, look at all the shiny things you can buy in America, and particularly in Manhattan, so have at it! Shiny things and, uh, MAGA-wear.
But there’s an underlying Jewishness that’s just so much in the air you wouldn’t notice it if it’s part of your everyday life. There are the old standbys (food shops like Zabar’s, etc.) but also newcomers. Breads Bakery is not that new, but it’s newly ubiquitous, and unambiguously, unapologetically Jewish, from the Happy Challahdays signage to the sufganiyot labeled as such. In corporate lobbies and whatnot, no Christmas tree lacks an accompanying menorah. This is not because ‘woke’ or whatever, it’s not a war on Christmas, it’s what the population demands. I heard no shortage of Hebrew.
This is not about better or worse; I am describing the world as it is. Not to suggest anyone up and move (not a trivial thing, even for dual citizens) in either direction. And the thing I experience when I walk out the door in Toronto, where the fact that I’m Jewish is this whole thing, one that is interpreted by some as a prompt for theses on geo-politics that I simply don’t have, is not one in New York, where Jewish is among many unremarkable ways to be. So, Phoebe, you’re Jewish, what’s that about? In New York, no one thinks to start that conversation. Fine not no one, it depends the environment, but it wouldn’t be nearly as regular an occurrence.
Whereas a man in Zabar’s told me that he went to school with the store’s founder, what would have been about 70 years ago. Why did he tell me this? Because it’s what you do while you wait for lox, you tell the person standing next to you your life story. Torontonians would never. We’re too busy not talking to people to whom we haven’t been formally introduced, or, I guess, sorting out the Middle East by leaving what are, in effect, passive-aggressive notes. On the plus side, we can buy our groceries without anyone chatting with us, if we’re not feeling it that day.
Mainly, though, I did not experience public space as a demand to form a coherent position on Middle East politics. This is not because the city lacks anyone who ponders such things (Columbia University is located in Manhattan) but because there’s a level of Jewish presence—or, even in Manhattan, American conservatism—that acts as a buffer against the flags-flyers-keffiyehs blanketing of public space. It struck me the moment I was back in Toronto just how visible the conflict is, including—if less so, in Roncesvalles Village—the pro-Israel side of things.
While I was there, I kept thinking: what are the authors of the anthology On Being Jewish Now, clustered as they are in the part of NYC I come from, experiencing? Or rather, how would they react to so much as five minutes anywhere other than the Upper East or West Sides? Places where a kind of secular-ish cultural Jewishness is so entrenched that you don’t ever really think you’re alone in believing, for example, that Israelis are human beings and not evil abstractions. It started to make sense why so many of the tensions they describe occurred online. I suppose that’s how it goes in areas where you can go to the local coffee shop and forget all that stuff.
The thing one says about Israel is that its existence makes Jews elsewhere safer, even ones who have no interest in packing up and moving there. Can the same be said of New York? Unclear. All I can say with confidence is that I spent what would amount to a zillion Canadian dollars over the course of a few days on the excellent pastries from Breads Bakery.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
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