| Magazine Feature |

HE SWALLOWED MY PAPERS TO SAVE ME

By Dov Bin Nun and Rachel Ginsberg | September 14, 2011

While hundreds of hostages from the “Black September” hijacked planes in the Jordanian desert have recounted their stories of hope and salvation in the four decades since 1970 Yosef and Tzippy two children traveling alone owe their safety to two bochurim who hovered over them like hawks

For King Hussein of Jordan, September 1970 — Black September — meant the relief of squashing the Palestinian revolt that threatened the stability of his Hashemite monarchy. For the PLO and George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, it meant the shame of a failed revolution, thousands of Palestinian deaths, and the expulsion of the PLO and other militants to Lebanon. And for dozens of innocent hijacked hostages, it meant sitting for weeks in the hot Jordanian desert waiting for salvation.

It was Sunday, September 6 — 5 Elul — 1970, when terrorists from the PFLP went on a hijacking spree, running through the isles of four international aircraft brandishing guns and grenades and taking over the planes: TWA flight 741 from Frankfurt to New York originating in Tel Aviv, and Swissair flight 100 from Zurich to New York were diverted to Zarka, a hot, sandy, out-of-use military airfield in the Jordanian desert; Pan Am flight 93 from Amsterdam was diverted to Beirut and then to Cairo; El Al officials thwarted an attempted hijacking on their flight from Amsterdam; and three days later, the PFLP seized a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight in Bahrain and brought it down in Zarka as well. The PFLP, under the leadership of George Habash, claimed responsibility for the multiple hijackings.

Ten weeks before, Rabbi and Mrs. Yitzchak Trachtman of Chicago had escorted their ten-year-old son, Yosef, to the gate, putting him onto a TWA flight to Israel. It wasn’t easy sending a young kid halfway around the world alone, but Yosef earned it. Rabbi Trachtman, a yeshivah rebbi, wanted to encourage his son to learn, and paid him for every chapter of Tanach or Rambam he completed. With matching funds from his father (“Well, I think it was a little more than that,” Yosef Trachtman admits today), Yosef earned a summer trip to Israel. “Maybe we’ll get hijacked,” Yosef, an imaginative youngster, said to his parents as he was about to board the plane. In 1970, it seemed like every other week, some militant would hijack a plane to Cuba — a 727 was hijacked from Chicago to Cuba just the week before. Yosef never dreamed it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two months later, as the two giant airplanes sat alone on that giant stretch of Jordanian sand known as Dawson Field and renamed Revolution Airport by the PFLP — really no more than parched mud flats hardened under the desert sun — the terrorists began collecting passports and interrogating passengers, especially those they identified as Jews. Among the passengers on the TWA plane were the venerated rosh yeshivah Rav Yitzchak Hutner of Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin and his wife zichronam l’vrachah, and yblch”t his only daughter Rebbetzin Bruria David of the BJJ seminary and her husband, Rav Yonasan David shlita, rosh yeshivah of Pachad Yitzchak in Jerusalem. Two of Rav Hutner’s young students, Yaakov Drillman and Meir Fund, were also on the flight. So were the Sephardic gedolim Chacham Rav Yosef and his brother Rav Avraham Harari-Raful of Brooklyn.

And a few rows back were two young kids traveling all alone, ten-year-old Yosef Trachtman and eight-year-old Tzipporah Moran, facing down a bunch of terrorists — the nightmare of every parent who sends their children on a plane by themselves. As soon as passengers realized the plane was being hijacked, Rav Hutner’s two talmidim moved from their own seats to sit next to the two unaccompanied children.

Eight-year-old Tzipporah was carrying documents from both the US and Israel. Yaakov Drillman was a young bochur at the time, but he knew that signs of Israeli citizenship would put the girl in danger, and so he took her Israeli documents, ripped them into tiny shreds, and swallowed them.

It wasn’t such a far-fetched thought. For among the documents that the hijackers discovered were precious handwritten manuscripts of seforim that Rav Yitzchak Hutner had painstakingly compiled over years. The terrorists confiscated the manuscripts, claiming they contained secret plans for espionage. Years of efforts to retrieve those manuscripts proved fruitless — they were probably incinerated when the planes were blown up. The terrorists also discovered in his possession documents relating to the purchase of two apartments in north Jerusalem, one for him and one for his daughter. The terrorists were enraged by his plans to buy apartments in territory that had been “stolen” from them. “It’s ours! It’s ours!” they shouted repeatedly.

It’s possible that this was why the terrorists decided to subject Rav Hutner to “special treatment” and removed him from the plane one day before the other Jewish passengers were taken off the aircraft, on Thursday night of that week, the evening of the tenth of Elul. As Rav Hutner was brought down from the plane, he assumed they were planning to kill him, and he shouted “Shema Yisrael!” on the steps. Rav Hutner was kept separate from the rest of the group and was only reunited with them after their second week in captivity.

Meanwhile, by the end of the week the terrorists had already released many women and children — none of them Jews — and transferred them to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. The hijackers were demanding the release of terrorists imprisoned in Switzerland and Germany, as well as thousands of terrorists imprisoned in Israel.

For a week, close to a hundred of the remaining Jewish captives lived and slept in the hot, stench-filled airplane cabins. On Friday night a group of men, including the yeshivah boys and rabbis, were removed from the plane, and the next day the rest of the hostages were moved — after which all the aircraft were ceremoniously blown up. Women and children were released and sent to Cyprus for their return home, but for the Jewish men and others, the ordeal was to last until the end of the month.

For years, Tzipporah thought about those anonymous bochurim who acted so heroically. Thirty years later, married to an IDF Air force officer, with a family of her own, and living in a Tel Aviv suburb, Tzipporah was listening to a popular call-in radio program where listeners could ask for assistance in locating lost relatives or friends. The program was credited with reuniting many family members separated in the Holocaust. Tzippy called into the program and related that she was among the airplane passengers who had been held prisoner in Zarka. She was only eight years old at the time and had been visiting her aunt in Israel; she was flying back to America alone. As soon as the plane was hijacked, two chareidi youths approached her and placed her under their charge.

“Most of the time I was not afraid, mostly because of the two young men who calmed me and the other boy down,” she reported on the airwaves, but didn’t know their names. Would anyone be able to track them down thirty years later? The following day, her request was published in the daily Yediot Achronot. And Mishpacha solved her mystery.

While putting together a story for the thirtieth anniversary of the hijacking in 2000, Mishpacha’s Hebrew edition contacted Rabbi Yosef Trachtman, the ten-year-old traveling alone on the flight, who had made aliyah and was living in Tzfas. Did he remember the girl? Certainly, he said. Her parents were family friends from Chicago and the two children were assigned to travel together on the same flight.

And the bochurim? They were none other than Rav Meir Fund, now rav of Beis Medrash Sheves Achim (the “Flatbush minyan”) and Rav Yaakov Drillman, rosh yeshivas Beis Yosef Novardok and former maggid shiur in Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin. Yosef Trachtman has remained close to Rav Drillman all these years.

The two rabbis were contacted and were happy to know they still had hero status after so many years. “I knew if I could conceal the little girl’s Israeli connection, it would be to her advantage, and we didn’t know what the terrorists were capable of doing,” Rav Drillman told Mishpacha when he was contacted after the radio program. “So I took her documents, ripped them into tiny shreds, and swallowed them, one after another.”

“I was a little girl, and I remember very little. I do remember that they took my passport, as well as an Israeli check that I had,” Tzipporah remembers more than four decades later. “The bochurim were removed from the plane on Friday night, and we were left there until the morning. So I never had a chance to thank them. It was fascinating learning who they were after all those years.”

How did an eight-year-old, all alone on a transatlantic flight, keep her emotional equilibrium while facing the possibility of execution by a band of terrorists? “I remember them going through the isles with guns, but I don’t think I felt like my life was in danger. I just thought they were really mean. They went through our luggage [a Swissair flight attendant later reported that the terrorists looted three million Swiss francs before blowing up the planes], and they took away my toys. I was devastated. How could they be so mean to a little girl and take away her toys? I think I was aware that the Jordanians were around, making sure the terrorists didn’t kill us.”

Tzipporah asserts that she has no residual trauma from the event, and says she was totally calm when she visited Jordan many years later as a tourist. “I called my father, and said, ‘Here I am in Jordan, and no one is holding a gun to me.’ But I honestly don’t think the event has ruled my life in any way. I think it’s because I was so young and really didn’t understand that my life was in danger. And those boys deflected the tension and protected us. I remember being really filthy, and worried that maybe we wouldn’t have any more food, or that I couldn’t use the bathroom because the toilets were all stopped up — but that we might be blown up? It was true, but I guess that’s the blessing of being a little kid — I don’t remember feeling that threat.”

A Week of Nerves

Two days into the hijacking, the Swiss were the first to give in to hijackers’ demands, freeing terrorists who were serving a twelve-year sentence for their role in an attack on an El Al plane two years earlier. The Swissair passengers who were neither Jewish nor Israeli were transferred to Amman. Over the following two days, non-Jewish passengers from the TWA flight were transferred as well. Only the Jews continued to be held prisoner on board the planes.

It was later learned that America actually weighed the possibility of taking military action in order to free the hostages, but it ultimately rejected the plan due to the significant risk it posed for the hundreds of captives. After many of the non-Jewish captives were released, a State Department spokesman announced that America was “dismayed” by the separation of the Jewish passengers from the rest of the hostages.

By Thursday, hundreds of Palestinian militants had flooded the airfield and declared it “liberated.” The terrorists held a press conference in the heart of the desert, alongside the captured planes — and one of those interviewed was Rav Yonasan David. He told the journalists that the captives were being treated decently, but that the terrorists were circulating among their captives with biks (the Yiddish word for machine guns) in their hands. The reporters did not bother asking him for a translation of the word; instead, his answer — which was incomprehensible to anyone who did not understand Yiddish — was broadcast repeatedly on international news reports.

At this point, there was some level of solidarity between the four countries whose citizens were being held hostage, to maintain a united front throughout the negotiations. Holland, however, violated the solidarity and managed to secure the release of its two citizens through secret negotiations. The other governments were enraged.

On Shabbos, before the terrorists blew up the planes in front of worldwide television cameras, the hostages — most of whom were slated for release — were transferred to hotels in Amman. Yet over forty Jewish men and the male flight crew were to remain hostage as political prisoners and were hauled off to a refugee camp and then to private safe houses, while King Hussein declared martial law as a full-fledged urban civil war erupted, with the hostages caught in the crossfire between the Palestinian rebels and the Jordanian military.

All Alone

Rabbi Yosef Trachtman still replays those days as every September rolls around, but admits that the memories of a ten-year-old might not be as frightening as those, more mature, who realized death could come at any moment of their captivity.

How does a ten-year-old survive for a week on a Jordanian airstrip?

“You have to realize,” he says, “I was just a kid, and we were hearing about hijackings all the time. In 1970 it was like an epidemic. People used to hijack planes to Cuba for a few hours to make a statement. It was almost popular. I remember one guy saying he was sick of TV dinners and the Vietnam War so he hijacked a plane to Cuba. So to me it didn’t seem like a big deal. How dangerous could a guy protesting TV dinners be?”

At the airport in Eretz Yisrael, Yosef Trachtman’s uncle spotted the two bochurim accompanying Rav Hutner — Meir Fund and Yaakov Drillman — and told them, “Keep an eye on my nephew during the flight home.” Little did he realize that they would become his protectors throughout the ordeal.

“Actually, we had all become familiar faces from the flight to Eretz Yisrael,” Rabbi Trachtman remembers. “It was a charter flight, and we were the same travelers on the way there and back. In fact, when we arrived in Eretz Yisrael, somehow I couldn’t find my passport, and the Hutners were very helpful. I guess they found it for me because I got out of the airport, but I can’t remember the details. I do remember that Rav Hutner was very friendly. He told me he knew my grandfather from Slabodka.”

During the week on the Jordanian airfield, the bochurim made sure the two children were safe. “I remember that they squirreled away food for us for the next day, because we went from meal to meal, not that there was much to eat. I think we mostly ate pitot and olives. They also gave us lots of encouragement — talked to us about emunah, bitachon, and Olam HaBa — so we just felt safe. Bored, but safe.”

To this day, Yosef Trachtman has a close relationship with Rav Drillman and looks up to him “like an older brother,” although they are both middle-aged by now. Ten years ago, he was the shadchan for Rav Drillman’s daughter (“My only shidduch so far, although my wife and I are always trying”).

What does a ten-year-old do in the desert for a week? “They let us off the plane to walk around freely and I remember a lot of the adults would have these long conversations with the terrorists. Actually, only two terrorists hijacked the plane, but once we landed we were surrounded by hundreds of Arabs. Until today I don’t know if they were Palestinians or Jordanians — or maybe both. I would say it was a very unusual hijacking. Very un-intense. We played cards, schmoozed, played Geography. Somehow we got a hold of some ropes, and everyone started playing jump rope for exercise. At night, back on the plane, it cooled off a little and we would sing. There was a sense of fear, but I can’t say that it reached the level of terror. Everyone tried to make some sort of order. A few older girls took care of the children. The terrorists were biding time but I don’t remember feeling threatened. Maybe that was just because I was a kid. The adults probably realized they could be blown up anytime.”

Back in Chicago, the Trachtmans were beside themselves. Their ten-year-old was alone in the Jordanian desert surrounded by hundreds of desperate Arabs.

“My mother didn’t eat for a week. My father was busy lobbying, talking to the press, to politicians — like Noam Shalit does. We had no contact, but at one point they let us write two telegrams. One never got there, and the other one arrived after I was already back in Chicago. I still have it in my scrapbook of clippings from then.”

For a week the hostages slept in their seats. They were hot (with no air conditioning, the cabin was well over a hundred degrees) and grimy and the bathrooms emitted an unbearable stench. Until Rav Hutner was led off the plane, he kept an eye on young Yosef as well, instructing him what to do and what to eat. “At one point the terrorists offered the children a jeep ride in the desert, but Rav Hutner made sure I didn’t go with them. I think he felt it would be safer for me not to be separated. In the end, the kids had a good time and all returned safely to their parents, but I was happy the Rav was keeping me under his wing.”

What happened before they blew up the planes?

“It was Shabbos and we had nothing, but I remember that there was a feeling of Shabbos. There weren’t many religious people left — all those men had been taken off the plane the night before, but everyone tried to mark the Shabbos in some way. We sang songs on Friday night — not zmiros, but we sang. Someone started to sing the jingle of a competing airline. We tried to pass the time. There were many conversations and a lot of speculation. There was a Holocaust survivor among us who said that she had survived Auschwitz, she had survived other camps, and she would certainly survive this.

“On Shabbos morning, they took the women and children off the plane and brought us to a hotel in Amman. They told us not to leave the hotel. I wasn’t even sure if we were still being held captive, but that was the feeling. On Sunday, we left for Cyprus.”

And then?

“After I returned to Chicago, I was a big hero for a few months, and for the media, I was a special attraction not only because I was a child, but because I was alone. My father agreed to let me be interviewed, but he made sure that whenever I spoke, I should emphasize that there were still dozens of Jewish hostages trapped in Jordan.”

Does Rabbi Trachtman feel nervous about traveling today? “The question is moot,” he says, “because since I made aliyah twenty-one years ago, I’ve never been out of Eretz Yisrael and I never intend to leave.”

In the Crossfire

By the following week, King Hussein had declared martial law in Jordan and set out to eradicate the threat of insurgent Palestinian rebels — an internal political move that ultimately led to the freeing of the hostages. The fifty-three remaining captives, meanwhile, had been moved to a refugee camp and had almost nothing to eat. They subsisted on pitot, olives, and a minuscule water supply. The Palestinian guards circulated among them with their guns drawn, some of them with daggers. They threatened the hostages that if, after they were freed, they released information about how they were treated, their captors would hunt them down to the end of the world and exact revenge.

Meanwhile, Rav Hutner was still being held alone in an isolated location. The low-level terrorists attempted to cut off his beard, but were stopped by their commanders. In the US, there was talk about raising money to ransom Rav Hutner, but Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky ruled against the move. Although there is a halachic basis (Tosafos, Gittin 58a) for paying an exorbitant sum to save a great Torah leader, Rav Yaakov ruled that this applies only during peacetime — and Israel’s ongoing struggle with terrorism constitutes war.

On Friday, September 18, nearly two weeks after the ordeal began, the Jordanian army attacked the terrorists’ encampment at Zarka. What would be the fate of the hostages? Some of them were being confined in narrow cells in a refugee camp near Amman. Others were being held in private homes — smack in the middle of the war zone between the terrorist forces and the Jordanian army. By Sunday, the Jordanian civil war had reached its peak. The hostages spent the week being shuttled from one place to another while bullets were whizzing by. The good news was that Rav Hutner was finally reunited with the rest of the hostages.

The following Friday, the Jordanian army discovered a group of fifteen hostages during a sweep of a refugee camp near Amman. Suddenly, the soldiers heard cries of “Help! Don’t shoot! We are foreign captives!” The captives — eight British citizens, five Swiss citizens, and two Germans — were brought to the military council in Amman. Another hostage was found and liberated on the same day. The hostages were flown to Cyprus, and from there to London.

During a press conference with the released hostages in London that Motzaei Shabbos, Amman’s radio station reported that the terrorists liberated another thirty-two hostages, all of them American citizens, and handed them over to the Jordanian army. Political analysts suggested that the PFLP terrorists became convinced that they no longer had the ability to keep the hostages in captivity, and therefore they decided to release them of their own accord, rather than wait for the Jordanian army to liberate them and take the credit. The captives concluded the same thing. They reported that once there was no more food, the terrorists announced that they had no choice but to free them.

The fate of the six remaining hostages, including Rav Yosef and Rav Avraham Harari-Raful, was still not known.

Finally, on Sunday, September 27 — 26 Elul — Cairo Radio reported that the last six hostages were delivered by the terrorists to the Egyptian embassy in Amman. They were now awaiting their evacuation from Jordan. The embassy spokesman expressed his hope that the European countries would stand by their promises and release the seven terrorists that were agreed on, to be transferred to one of the Arab countries.

Meanwhile, the hostages released the day before were flown to Nicosia in Cyprus, including Rav Yitzchak Hutner, who was accompanied by his daughter and son-in-law, Rav and Rebbetzin David. Rebbetzin Hutner was released after the first week of the ordeal.

Another one of the freed hostages was the oldest hostage of the group, an eldery man named William Coster, who related that he never stopped praying. “Anyone who says he was not afraid,” he remarked, “is either a liar or a fool, and perhaps both together.”

Knesset member Rabbi Menachem Porush z”l chartered a private plane to meet the Hutners in Nicosia. At the time, Rabbi Porush reported that during his three weeks of captivity, Rav Hutner lost twenty kilograms (44 pounds). Rav Hutner’s son-in-law and his two students, Yaakov Drillman and Meir Fund, also appeared emaciated. Rebbetzin David had to be supported as she disembarked from the plane.

Rav Hutner’s tallis and tefillin, jacket and hat, and even his shirt had been confiscated sometime during the ordeal. Menachem Porush gave the Rosh Yeshivah his own shirt and tallis katan.

On Monday evening the group was flown to Europe, and from there to America. By Wednesday evening, the first night of Rosh HaShanah, they were all home, barely able to believe the horror, and the salvation, they had gone through over the past month.

THWARTED IN MID-AIR

As the TWA and Swissair flights were being hijacked, another attempted hijacking was taking place in the air, on an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York. A man holding a gun and a woman handling two hand grenades ran to the front of the plane. The man was a Nicaraguan named Patrick Arguello and his sidekick was Leila Khaled, a twenty-six-year-old Haifa native who had grown up in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

A steward named Shlomo Vider tackled the male terrorist and slammed his head into the cockpit door, while the terrorist fired off several rounds. The first bullet struck a service tray and another hit Vider’s shoulder and stomach. Meanwhile, the pilot, Uri Bar Lev, threw the plane into a nosedive, knocking the terrorists to the ground, where they were subdued by a flight marshal who shot and wounded Arguello. It was only at that moment that most of the passengers realized something strange was happening, but a flight attendant who managed to maintain her own equanimity informed them that the hijacking was over and suggested that they sing a few songs together in order to calm down. The plane landed safely in London, and Arguello died on route to the hospital. Leila Khaled was delivered into British police custody, but was released at the end of September together with other terrorists in a swap of the remaining hostages in Jordan.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 376)

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