Police violence was an embarrassing and uncomfortable chapter in Israel’s early history, but in the end, a hidden stash of transcripts shed light on a young bochur who would fight for justice at all costs

Photos: Mishpacha Archives

ne fall morning in 1956, the phone rang in the Chevron yeshivah office.O

“Can you call Chaim Rottenberg?” the caller asked. When he was told that the bochur was not in the yeshivah building right then, the voice on the other end asked to relay a message: “Tell him his cousin wants to meet him at Café Rimon.”

Chaim Rottenberg had been one of the handful of witnesses to a horrific incident at a Shabbos demonstration a month before, when he saw a Yid in his fifties pushed to the ground by police, pleading for his life before he fell unconscious. He couldn’t think of any cousin who would call his yeshivah to set up a meeting at a café.

He shared his suspicions with his friends, and they told him they’d handle it. A few minutes before the appointed meeting time, the bochurim stood outside the restaurant, as they saw a plainclothed man step out of a police car and into the café, take a seat at a table, and wait.

A few minutes later, one of the bochurim entered, sat down across from the detective, and said bluntly, “You’ve come to meet Rottenberg. What do you want from him?”

The detective was a bit taken aback.

“One of the commanders of the Jerusalem police department wants to meet him,” the detective said. “For his own good, he should meet with us before he gives any testimony.”

The bochurim realized that there were forces within the police ranks who would do everything possible to distort the testimony of the bochurim regarding what took place that Shabbos. And at that moment they decided that each one of them who had even the slightest shred of information would come to testify.

Nine years earlier, as the British Mandate in Palestine was coming to an end, there was a strong probability that the United Nations would approve a Jewish state. Still, Jewish Agency executive chairman David Ben Gurion was nervous. The UN was to send a fact-finding team to Eretz Yisrael to establish the nature of this future state, and Ben Gurion — anti-religious as he and his colleagues were — wanted to make sure he had the support of the Agudah leadership both in Palestine and around the world. He certainly didn’t want Agudah leaders telling the UN representatives that the Jewish Agency didn’t represent the demographic of Torah and traditional Jews in the Holy Land.

And so, in cooperation with Agudah leader Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin and Vaad Hayeshivos head Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin, Ben Gurion drafted the famous “status quo” agreement, which met the Agudah’s basic requirements for their consent to the founding of a Jewish state: that marriage and divorce would be under rabbinic authority, kashrus would be observed in an official capacity, there would be autonomy in religious education, and Shabbos would be publicly observed as the official day of rest. (Ben Gurion wasn’t really bothered by this gesture of appeasement at the time — he didn’t believe the chareidi demographic would last more than a decade in the new, progressive state.)

But less than a decade later, in the summer of 1956, disturbing events in Jerusalem threatened to upend the status quo.