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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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Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
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