Jonathan Pollard and his fiancée, Rivka Abrahams Dunin, have more in common than meets the eye

Photos: Abrahams family archives

When a parent sits a child down and says, “I’ve got something important you need to know,” the child’s stomach begins to churn.

Rivka Abrahams Dunin was already a grown adult with children of her own when her father, Stephen Abrahams, dropped that line on her one day less than a decade ago, and Rivka still remembers the butterflies in her stomach.

Her father took her to Yad Vashem to view a folder of archived documents that her grandfather, Sergeant Karl Louis Abrahams, bequeathed to the world’s most famous Holocaust museum. Until his death in 1980, Sgt. Abrahams kept that folder in an olive-colored cabinet that he always kept locked. Rivka’s attention was often drawn to that cabinet, wondering what mysteries it might have held. At Yad Vashem, the contents of that cabinet, and her grandfather’s secrets, tumbled out before her very eyes.

The archives include photographs, documents, and a signed confession extracted from Rudolf Hoess, who masterminded the slaughter of more than 2.5 million people on his watch in Auschwitz.

Sgt. Abrahams was a key member of an elite British intelligence group — the 92 Field Security Section — that was in hot pursuit of Hoess in the winter of 1945-1946 after Hoess fled to evade capture. Sgt. Abrahams, an Orthodox Jew from Liverpool, was fluent in several languages, including German and French. His unit took on missions in Brussels, Paris, and Marseille before entering Germany near the end of World War II. Tracking down Hoess would be their toughest assignment.

“I was amazed to see that my grandfather provided Yad Vashem with all the information having to do with the capture,” Rivka said. “I was fortunate enough to have been given original handwritten letters that my grandfather had written to my grandmother after the arrest explaining how he felt. I was extremely proud of my grandfather, but at the same time, I knew I couldn’t keep quiet about what happened like he did. The Jewish People are family, and our whole family needs to know.”

Rivka, who became famous to the Jewish nation last week when she and Jonathan Pollard formally announced their engagement, was born in 1977 in Birmingham, England, into a Torah-observant family. She obtained a Jewish education in that area’s King David School. Since Birmingham had no Jewish high school, she attended a girls’ grammar school, which provided a higher level of secular education.

“That wasn’t for me, I didn’t like it at all,” she said.

So, at age 15, she enrolled in Carmel College in Oxford, which had a Lubavitch shaliach on campus. One Chanukah, the shaliach organized a trip to the US to the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.

“From then onward, I felt like this was really for me,” Rivka said.