| Profiles |

My Son, The Spy

By Shimon Breitkopf and Yossi Elituv | June 1, 2016

Yossi Cohen is smart, charismatic, and fearless — and he’s also the first religious Mossad chief since the institution was founded. His parents, Reb Aryeh and Mina Cohen — both from old-time Yerushalmi families with roots going back to Minsk and Lubavitch — talk about how heroism in their family comes in all colors

“It was an unforgettable Shabbos, an example of true Jewish heroism — the gevurah of a child who grew up in a home where ‘Jewish hero’ was part of his DNA,” says Aryeh Cohen, remembering the bar mitzvah Shabbos of his brave, inspiring grandson Yonatan. Reb Aryeh is the father of newly appointed Mossad head Yossi Cohen — the first shomer Shabbos Mossad chief since the secret-service institution was founded — and Yonatan is Yossi Cohen’s special son.

Since infancy, Yonatan has suffered from cerebral palsy, as a result of a premature birth with insufficient oxygen, but from his wheelchair, he’s done his father proud. He can’t walk, can’t read as he’s legally blind, and can’t write, but he finished school as a multilingual honors student and even served in the IDF intelligence corps for several years.

We were sitting with Aryeh and Mina Cohen in their Jerusalem living room to hear about their son Yossi — the number-one man in Israel’s wide-ranging international security apparatus and former handler of an international ring of secret agents — but Yossi and Yonatan are really part of the same story.

“Yonatan is the real hero,” Yossi Cohen told the press at the time of his recent appointment as Mossad chief.

Yonatan’s bar mitzvah was 16 years ago, but the senior Cohens still remember every detail. “Yossi was living in Vienna then, involved in some mission that of course we have — nor ever will have — any idea about,” says Mina Cohen, “and Yonatan was studying in a special school in Hungary. But he had no intention of giving up on any of the regular bar mitzvah ‘duties.’ Aryeh sent Yonatan a tape with the brachos and the haftarah with the trop. For months, Yonatan listened to the recording, refusing to give up until he knew every nuance by heart.

“We all traveled to Vienna for the bar mitzvah,” Mrs. Cohen continues, “and it was a sight that makes me cry whenever I think about it — when it was time for Yonatan’s aliyah, Yossi and our other son Chaim came over to lift his wheelchair up to the bimah but Yonatan adamantly refused. ‘It’s not kevod haTorah to go in a wheelchair,’ Yonatan whispered to his father and his uncle. So the congregation waited while Yossi and Chaim held him from each side, and he actually forced himself into a standing position in front of the sefer Torah. He read like a real hero and there wasn’t a dry eye in the shul.”

This isn’t just the story of one boy who decided not to let his physical handicap hold him back from moving forward; rather it symbolizes an entire family — a family that copes with all kinds of obstacles and handicaps, that puts the security of the Holy Land before its own needs, and that refuses to be intimidated by lurking dangers when it comes to defending Jews — all without compromising mitzvah observance.

Sons in the Shadows

Reb Aryeh and Mina Cohen — both from old-time venerated Yerushalmi families with roots going back to Minsk and Lubavitch — are modest people who’ve always shunned accolades or publicity. But today their son Yossi stands at the pinnacle of the State of Israel’s exterritorial intelligence community — he is the director of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, or, by its better-known name: the Mossad.

It wasn’t easy to set up a meeting with Reb Aryeh. Although in his 80s, he still maintains a busy schedule that would tire out many who are years younger. His day starts in his local shul in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood, and continues in the beis medrash of the Great Synagogue, where he spends hours learning Gemara and halachah in a kollel of his relative, Rav Yisrael Druk. When he returns home for lunch, his wife Mina is waiting for him with a hot meal (“The refrigerator is always full, even an army brigade won’t put me out”); later on, he volunteers in the Bnei Brit organization for assistance to the needy, and is an active board member of Beit Midrash Be’er Miriam and of Herzog Hospital, where he is responsible for the hospital’s financial investments.

Mrs. Cohen is a counselor for couples in crisis, teaches Tanach, and volunteers in organizations that help the needy and youth in crisis — all this besides the Torah study that is so dear to her from her days growing up in Shaarei Chesed together with the children of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, who was their neighbor.

The residents of Shai Agnon Street in Katamon know that the Cohen house is the home of Cohen the banker with the senior position in Bank Mizrachi who never misses a minyan for Bircas Kohanim, and of his wife Mina the educator. They also know it’s always been a place for anyone who needed an encouraging word, a warm meal, wise counsel, some human warmth, or even a bed to lie in. But not all the neighbors know that this home — founded on punctiliousness in halachah, ahavas Hashem, and ahavas Yisrael — raised two of the central figures influencing Israel’s security and economy.

For years, the two Cohen boys — graduates of Yeshivat Netiv Meir and Yeshivat Or Etzion — stayed in the shadows, and few knew of the power they wielded. There is Yossi, director of the Mossad, and his wife Ayah, head nurse of oncology at Hadassah Medical Center; and there’s Chaim, a senior economist who served as CEO of Dun and Bradstreet in Israel, and his wife Zahavit, managing director of the investment firm Apax Partners-Israel.

Crisis Control

When Yossi Cohen replaced Tamir Pardo as head of the Mossad earlier this year, the appointment received mixed reactions. Some saw it as one more in a string of appointments of people from religious families who were taking over key positions in the country — but those skeptics never met Yossi. His hundreds of admirers, from all walks of life and all over the world, from the shul in Modiin that he helped build, to his classmates from yeshivah, to his connections in the capitals of Europe where he held secret postings over the years, reacted differently. They were happy that a brilliant, courageous believing Jew with grounded religious ideals would be at the helm to navigate the only democracy in the Middle East during such a sensitive time for Israel and the entire region.

“The values that I was raised with,” Cohen recently told an audience of yeshivah students, “are Am Yisrael, Torat Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael. These are the values that have guided me all over the world, and have always protected me.”

According to the Mossad charter, the organization’s goals are to secretly collect information and conduct special operations outside the state’s borders; to stop hostile countries from developing unconventional weapons and arming themselves with them; to thwart terrorist activities against Israeli and Jewish targets abroad; and to help Jews living in hostile countries stay safe or immigrate.

Over the years Cohen, 54, has specialized in recruiting and handling agents. He speaks perfect English, is fluent in Arabic, and is in top physical condition, keeping fit as an avid marathon runner. As a 30-year-veteran of the Mossad, he’s handled agents in a number of countries over his career, and led the Mossad’s Tzomet worldwide “secret agent” division, where he was known simply as “Y” (until the late 1990s everyone in the organization, even the head, was only known by his initial, but that’s changed in a different politically correct 21st century). From 2011 to 2013, Cohen was the Mossad’s deputy director, after which he was appointed national security advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Following his most recent appointment as Mossad chief, Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper wrote that if it was true that the Mossad had in recent years assassinated Iranian scientists, intercepted raw materials for Iran’s nuclear program, and planted viruses in its computers — as widely reported abroad — then that was in large measure due to Yossi Cohen and the agents he recruited.

When he took leave of the Mossad in 2013 to become Netanyahus’s top security advisor and confidant, he quickly found himself the prime minister’s “go-to guy” when it came to the execution of complex missions. Cohen was someone who could be sent at a moment’s notice to the Élysée Palace in Paris to head off a developing diplomatic crisis and on the way to the airport conduct an impassioned conversation with the White House about Israel’s military aid.

In many ways, Cohen was Netanyahu’s personal foreign minister, and it was no easy decision for Bibi to relinquish his services for the good of the Mossad.

“If you want an exact description of who Yossi Cohen is,” one of the prime minister’s close people confided to us, “consider the following scenario. A diplomatic crisis is unfolding and they’re all sitting in a room together: the chief of staff, the attorney general, ministers, and the rest of the political elite. Everyone is hunkering down in their positions, and it looks like the crisis is unavoidable. And then Yossi gets up, with his charm and brilliance, and finds a solution. Most importantly, he makes sure to do it in a way that has everybody coming out smiling. Every crisis ends with a clever Jewish saying or a vertel from the Shabbos table.”

After his appointment, Cohen spoke in his shul in Modiiin. “Without siyata d’Shmaya, Divine assistance, the State of Israel would not have come into being. This was true then and is still true today.” The parshah that week dealt with the shevatim going to Egypt during the famine to bring back food to their families. “We can see the importance of the strategy that bnei Yaakov used in going down to Mitzrayim,” Cohen told the congregation. “But strategy isn’t everything. The brothers had a good plan, but what they didn’t take into account was that their brother was the ruler of Egypt.”

Family Tree

Reb Aryeh Cohen considers himself the bridge between his illustrious rabbinic past and the generation of the future, which might look different, but is no less dedicated to Yidden and Yiddishkeit in Eretz Yisrael.

“Yossi is dark-complexioned and his last name is Cohen, so many people assume he’s Sephardic,” says Reb Aryeh. But in fact, his lineage is pure Eastern European and Reb Aryeh has it all at his fingertips.

“Look,” Reb Aryeh says as he shows us a carefully preserved item from the newspaper Sdei Chemed, a popular Jewish publication from 150 years ago. “This is a report about my great-great-grandfather, Rav Oizlander arriving in Eretz Yisrael. He had been a venerated dayan in Minsk. He immigrated with his two daughters and a talmid, a young bochur named Yosef Halperin, who eventually married one of his rebbi’s daughters. This Reb Yosef — they called him Yossele Minsker — became the first melamed in Talmud Torah Torah V’yirah in Meah Shearim.”

The couple had a son, Chaim Yisrael Halperin, who was the chief mohel in Jerusalem. “He wasn’t just a mohel,” Reb Aryeh quickly qualifies. “He was also a builder and the founder of the well-known matzah bakery that bears the family name. But the role he was most proud of was mohel. Whenever he had a bris, he dropped everything. He didn’t just do his job and leave, it was a big thing for him. He would fast before the bris, and he would also visit the mother and baby before the bris in their home. If he would see that the house was run-down, as was often the case in those times, he would buy the family clothing for the occasion and pay for the bris seudah himself.”

Rav Chaim Yisrael had six children, two sons and four daughters, and, as a Kohein himself, he made sure that all of his daughters married Kohanim too.

“My mother, who was Rav Chaim Yisrael’s middle daughter, married Reb Yosef Cohen, a Yerushalmi whose father Rav Yehudah Cohen, was a great talmid chacham who sat all day in the beis medrash. His wife, my grandmother, was Esther Makovky, of an old Yerushalmi family that was famous in the old yishuv for their spectacular succah decorations.”

Yosef Cohen, Reb Aryeh’s father, worked for a living but also made great efforts for the Torah scholars of the yishuv. He was one of the eight founders of Tiferes Bochurim, and as a child, Reb Aryeh would accompany his father to hear Rav Elyashiv’s daily Gemara shiur there.

Rav Elyashiv knew the family well, and Reb Aryeh tells how even his grandson Yonatan had a chance to meet the sage — under very moving circumstances.

“You can’t imagine how much our Yossi put into his son Yonatan — he put his soul into him,” says Reb Aryeh. “When Yonatan was 11, he went to a special school in Hungary. Yossi hired private Torah teachers for him there, and one of the teachers told him about a halachah competition here in Israel run by the Degel Yerushalayim organization and that they were looking for competitors around the world, including in Hungary. He suggested that Yonatan take part. It seemed like an impossible task, but Yonatan rose to the challenge, studying for hours upon hours. The whole family came back to Israel for the competition in Yad Eliyahu Stadium — and Yonatan came in second! I can’t even begin to describe the excitement. We all sat there watching Yonatan, with all of his handicaps, win the title of runner-up. After the competition, the organization’s director, Rav Naftali Porush, took us into Rav Elyashiv, who remembered my father from decades earlier in the shul.”

Two Halves

Reb Aryeh grew up in Batei Ungarin, a traditional Yerushalmi neighborhood bordering Meah Shearim. “In those days,” he said, “there were no such definitions as who was chareidi and who wasn’t — we were a family that was careful about kallah k’chamurah.”

He studied with his brothers in Eitz Chaim, and after that went to the Geulah school and then on to the Beit Medrash L’morim (teacher’s seminary). After that he joined the pre-state Etzel (“Irgun”) underground fighting force.

After the War of Independence, Reb Aryeh began his career as a teacher, and soon became assistant principal in the Talpiyot school where Mina was a teacher.

“It was a very suitable shiddduch,” he says.

Mina Cohen (née Werker) shares her own yichus, starting with her great-grandmother Alte Werker. They don’t know her maiden name, but they do know her story. “She was born to parents who had lost all their other children in infancy, and a great rebbe advised them to give up the next child for adoption — and that’s what they did,” Mrs. Cohen recounts. “My grandmother was given to a local family, who emigrated to Eretz Yisrael. When she was bas mitzvah they married her to Rav Yaakov Moshe Werker, a member of one of the most distinguished families in Yerushalayim. They had a son named Yechiel, my grandfather. When he grew up, he married my grandmother, Chentcha Lipkin, of a well-known Chabad family from Chevron.”

On her mother’s side the family also comes from the elder Chabad chassidim of Eretz Yisrael at the time, although her mother was orphaned at a very young age.

“Her father died during a very difficult period,” Mina Cohen recounts. “In Yerushalayim back then there simply was nothing to eat. My grandfather heard that in Petach Tikvah there was work and food. He picked up and left, walking all the way to Petach Tikvah. On the way, he ate grasses that he picked, and he apparently ate something poisonous and died on the road.”

Mrs. Cohen says that although her mother’s family was closer to the old yishuv in ideology (her cousin was Rav Amram Blau, a leader of the Neturei Karta group), her parents educated them in the spirit of the Religious Zionist movement.

At the time she was growing up in Shaarei Chesed, the neighborhood “was one big family. We were the next-door neighbors of the Auerbachs, but they didn’t have a phone and so all their calls came to our home. It was a common sight to see Rav Shlomo Zalman running to our house to answer urgent halachic calls that came for him. We were also close with all the children. Rav Avraham Dov, today the rav of Teveria, was born three days after me and we used to play together as children.”

The Werkers were Mizrachi with chassidic roots, and their venerated neighbors were chareidi nobility. But, then, lines were fuzzier, barriers gentler.

“There was only one shul in the neighborhood, and although we didn’t all think alike, everyone truly loved each other. Everyone davened in the Gra shul — even my grandfather, who davened nusach Sfard, went there. Eventually, when they opened the Beis Knesses Chassidim in the neighborhood, they asked Saba if he would join them, but by then he didn’t want to. He was very close with Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlap who was the rav of the Gra shul, and so he didn’t consider going anyplace else.

Mina’s grandfather Yechiel Werker bought a printing press and essentially supported the entire extended family through the business.

“Word was that the Werker family had money,” Mina Cohen confides with a wink. “But my father was an ish sefer. Every day he returned from the print shop with a sefer fresh off the presses. Mother would say that the house was already full of books, but his thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He also raised us that way; to add more and more knowledge all the time. The conversation at home was always about intellectual issues. When I became the principal of the Evelina de Rothschild School I was told that I would be able to teach only six hours a week and the rest of the time was for administrative duties. I decided to leave the post, because learning and teaching have always been my life’s purpose. Baruch Hashem there are plenty of other administrators around.”

Role Models

Reb Aryeh eventually left teaching and went to work in Bank Discount. After a time he moved over to Bank Mizrahi, where he moved up the ladder to deputy CEO.

“Our two sons, Chaim and Yossi, both studied in the Dugma elementary school, and then continued onto Yeshivat Netiv Meir for high school. Chaim stayed there, but after a year Yossi decided to transfer to Yeshivat Or Etzion, under the leadership of Rav Chaim Drukman, with whom he still maintains a good relationship to this day,” says Reb Aryeh.

“Rav Drukman is proud of Yossi, who still considers himself a talmid. And he has good reason to be. Despite everything Yossi has done and everywhere he’s been, he keeps a kosher home and is strictly shomer Shabbos even during complicated missions. A few years ago he told me that when he’s in meetings with people who don’t know him, he tells them he’s a vegetarian in order to get out of sticky food-related situations. And it was important to him to build a beautiful beit knesset near his home in Modiin. It’s not just a shul — it’s a main part of his life.”

The elder Cohens, in fact, donated a sefer Torah to the shul.

Reb Aryeh says it never surprised him that Yossi wound up where he did. “He was always a chevreman, always the leader, but on the other hand, he knew how to take things seriously — and he knew how to compete. We saw early on how he had this knack for recruiting people who were willing to follow him blindly.”

Yossi was recruited to the Mossad during the time the family was living in London. Reb Aryeh was sent to open a branch of United Mizrahi Bank there, and Yossi and his wife had moved as well, as Yossi was studying in university. Was it a destiny Yossi “just knew” he’d fall into one day?

“One thing I can tell you,” says Reb Aryeh. “Yossi was surrounded by people of courage. Mina’s father was a talmid chacham who was moser nefesh for his people. During the War of Independence in 1948 he utilized his innocent rabbinic appearance — he hid grenades and ammunition under his suit and smuggled them into the Old City. He became the commander of the city’s religious military unit, and there was nothing more important to him than Israel’s security. I like to think I was also a good role model for him. During the war I ran as a courier. I don’t know how I came out of that alive. I was running between the bullets.”

We Never Knew

How does a parent deal with the knowledge that his son is somewhere out there in the hostile world, undercover, with a safety net that’s flimsy at best?

“We never knew what he was doing,” says Reb Aryeh. “All we knew was that he was putting himself in danger and that he worked around the clock. I once asked him if he received compensation for all that extra time. He told me, ‘Abba, the work I do is not for the money. It’s only for someone who believes in it.’ ”

Despite the nature of his work, Yossi has always managed to stay close to his parents, and, says his mother, when he was stationed out of the country, they would travel to visit his family.

“We go to him every year for the Seder,” says Mina Cohen. “But one year, we understood that he wouldn’t be able to be home for the Seder. So we brought all the food with us and went to be with Ayah and the children. And then, as we were about to light candles, he suddenly walked in — not alone though, but with his whole chevreh, with their families too! From a small table we quickly had a huge Seder. That’s Yossi — it doesn’t matter if he’s there or not. His table is always filled with guests.”

Those were sweet moments, but, the elder Cohens admit, the tension was always there, shadowing their lives.

“I think the hardest part of all those years was that we never really knew how much danger he was in,” says Reb Aryeh. “We learned early on that there was no point in asking where he was traveling to or when he was coming back. When Yossi recently received the prestigious Israel Defense Prize, he gave the award to us. ‘You deserve this!’ he told us. ‘For your support, for your encouragement, for quietly accompanying me all along the way.’ ”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue XXX)

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