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Reuben Efron, the CIA agent who tracked JFK’s assassin, tried to recruit his nephew — to be an observant Jew
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Visiting his uncle Reuben in his Washington D.C. law office when he was a teenager, something seemed amiss for Barry Effron.
“There was a wooden desk, and a couple of wooden chairs, [but] there were no bookcases,” he recalled of the visit, which would have taken place in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Lawyers frequently have legal volumes at arm’s reach, but the absence of bookshelves wasn’t the first gap that Barry and his dad, Irving, had noticed when it came to Irving’s brother. “He had traveled a lot, yet he had no visible means of support,” Effron said this month in an interview.
Reuben Efron did, in fact, have a good job, one that would have come with a pension and a generous expense account. He was a CIA spy, and documents recently declassified by the Biden administration show that Efron was involved in tracking John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the years prior.
After that revelation, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency uncovered another side to Efron: a scholar who after his retirement wrote passionately about spies in the Bible, applying the spycraft he learned on the job to assess figures as diverse as Joshua, David and Rahab the courtesan.
Reuben Efron was expansive about his Orthodox faith, Barry Effron recalled, urging Barry to intensify his Jewish observance. “He talked mostly about Judaism, about being religious and being righteous, being prayerful.”
Jewish spies have at times been integral to the American intelligence complex, and at others have been viewed as suspect because of their purported ties to Israel. Efron seems to have been among those who thrived in the service.
Abba Cohen, the Washington director of Agudath Israel of America, whose father was an Orthodox CIA agent, recalled in an email that his parents socialized with the Efrons when they lived in Washington in the 1970s, as members of both the Orthodox and CIA communities.
“I would visit them for dinner after school sometimes, as the Rittenhouse where they lived was across the street from the Hebrew Academy on 16th Street,” he said. “Reuben was an extremely good-natured, low-key, scholarly and modest person.” The friendship between his parents and the Efrons continued after both couples moved to Israel, Cohen said.
After the D.C. visit, the Effrons, father and son, began to put two and two together. (Reuben Efron, the elder brother, and Irving Effron spelled their last names differently.)
“He didn’t have much of a law practice, he knew a lot of languages and he was very, very, very erudite, and he traveled a lot and he had a PhD in international affairs, and he wrote dense scholarly articles that appeared in places like Foreign Affairs Quarterly,” said Barry Effron, who is now a cardiologist in Cleveland. “We thought Reuben was in the CIA.”
The turmoil of the first half of the last century kept the brothers apart for years; Irving Effron was the first to come to the United States, finding work with uncles in Cleveland. Then he returned to their native Lithuania. He used his skills in English to return to the United States via England as Hitler’s shadow loomed larger over Europe; around the same time Reuben managed to arrive in the United States via Cuba. Their widowed mother perished in the Holocaust.
The brothers were not close, but they kept in touch and got together for major occasions; Reuben Efron attended Barry Effron’s bar mitzvah in Cleveland and his wedding in Columbus, and Irving and his wife attended Reuben’s late-in-life wedding to Edna, the “spinster” secretary at the Orthodox synagogue in Miami where Reuben prayed.
The wedding was at the Fontainebleau. Efron in his retirement had purchased an apartment on ritzy Collins Avenue, and also a garden apartment on Keren Hayesod street in the heart of Jerusalem. For Barry Effron, the displays of wealth were additional evidence that there was more to his uncle than met the eye.
Lorri, Barry’s wife, chimed in during his interview, saying she recalled that Reuben Efron’s Jerusalem apartment was near those of government officials (he lived a five-minute walk away from the prime minister’s residence). “He used to have meetings,” she said. (Barry Effron did not recall that detail.)
When they visited him, whether it was in Miami or in Jerusalem, much of the conversation was about Jewish observance, Effron recalled.
“He was proud of his religion, he believed in Jewish law and he believed in kashrut, he believed in davening and all that so he was particularly interested in passing it on,” Effron said. “He had no children of his own, so he was interested in conveying his love of Judaism to his nephew and niece,” Barry’s sister.
He was taken with his great-nieces, Barry and Lorri Effron’s daughters. One had bright blue eyes; he would call her a “shayneh maydeleh,” Yiddish for pretty girl. One of the last times they saw him before he died in 1993, at a home for the elderly in Florida, the girls joined him in Shabbat prayers.
Barry’s family was all Reuben had, Barry Effron said, besides his wife, Edna. “He had my dad and then he had my sister and me,” he said.
Irving Effron was proud of his brother. Effron recalled that his father kept copies of Foreign Policy Quarterly, with its august gray cover and its thick interiors paginated by volume instead of by issue, inside a desk drawer. He was thrilled to see his brother’s name on the same contents page that had featured luminaries like Henry Kissinger.
“My dad was very proud of it, even though he probably didn’t understand the article and of course I didn’t as a young kid or a teenager, but that was pretty exciting,” Effron said.
After Reuben Efron died in 1993 and Irving Effron died in 1996, Barry Effron took to searching for clues about his uncle on the Internet. He soon realized that his and his father’s guess, that Reuben was a CIA agent, was correct.
One piece of evidence was Efron’s presence as a translator for Marina Oswald, the assassin’s Russian-speaking widow, when she was interrogated by the congressional committee investigating the assassination. Another was his uncle’s involvement in the alleged sighting of a UFO in the Soviet Union, while accompanying U.S. Sen. Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat on a visit to the Soviet Union.
“The guy’s traveling in Russia at the height of the Cold War in 1957, with a congressman, he’s obviously a CIA attache of some kind,” he said.
Barry Effron was in Israel recently for a wedding. He sought out the Keren Hayesod address where his uncle once lived.
“It’s now a very wealthy area in Jerusalem,” he said. He would have ventured closer, but he couldn’t find parking.
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The post Reuben Efron, the CIA agent who tracked JFK’s assassin, tried to recruit his nephew — to be an observant Jew appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land
This 1 V. postage revenue stamp from West Refaim was postmarked in Virikoso in South Giantsland 100 years ago. Problem is—none of these places ever existed. There is a second […]
The post Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.