Michel Bails Boaz Out and Finds Him a Job

Michel Sommo’s rescue of Boaz from police custody becomes a turning point because Michel meets hostility with bluntness, gives the young man a real choice, and then acts on the independence Boaz says he wants. The result is not a reconciliation in any simple sense: Boaz is released using Alexander Gideon’s money, takes work in Tel Aviv, and remains unaware of who paid his bail. But Michel’s intervention converts a crisis that might have ended on the street into an immediate, workable arrangement.

The crisis behind the intervention

The episode follows a precarious period in which Ilana Sommo had appealed to Gideon for help with Boaz. She feared that, without intervention, the boy would soon be put out of his boarding school and left to fend for himself. Her appeal offered Gideon a written admission about Boaz’s paternity in exchange for assistance. In the event, the immediate crisis changed: after the headmistress told Boaz he would not be expelled but would receive a caution, he picked up his kit bag and disappeared.

Michel arranged a job for Boaz at the request of the young man himself, but the police soon informed the family that Boaz was being held at Abu Kabir for possession of stolen goods. Michel had contacts in the police, and a friend of his brother who held a senior position in the Tel Aviv police spoke with Boaz’s probation officer. After complications, the family secured bail. The legal intervention got Boaz out of custody, but it did not by itself secure his cooperation: he initially refused release and asked to be left alone.

The financial pressure on the family explains why Gideon’s assistance mattered. Michel was a nonqualified French teacher at a religious state school; after mortgage payments, his salary barely covered the household’s needs, including those of Madeleine Yifat Sommo, who was almost three. Ilana later explained that part of Gideon’s money had gone toward Boaz’s bail, although that was not what the family had originally expected to use it for. The account makes clear that the bail was not an abstract gesture of generosity: without outside funds, the family had few practical means to act.

Michel’s encounter with Boaz

Michel went to Abu Kabir without Ilana. A police contact arranged for the two to speak alone in an office, removing the family audience from a conversation already charged by Boaz’s contempt for Michel. Michel acknowledged that he knew about the insults Boaz used for him and invited him to say them to his face. He also pointed out that he could answer in French and Arabic, languages Boaz scarcely knew, making the imbalance in their verbal contest plain rather than pretending the hostility was not there.

Michel then redirected the encounter toward a decision. He proposed that Boaz identify what he wanted from life and that he and Ilana say what they could provide. Boaz rejected the premise: he wanted nothing, he said, and did not want people questioning him about his future. Rather than keep pressing him with an appeal to gratitude or family feeling, Michel stood to leave. He said he would not prevent Boaz from facing institutional consequences and was going. The departure made the offer of help finite and concrete instead of an unlimited demand for emotional agreement.

Boaz tried to provoke Michel by threatening future violence and escape. Michel did not bargain over the threat or claim parental authority. He made clear that he was neither Boaz’s mother nor father, and gave him sixty seconds to decide whether to leave on bail. When Boaz stopped him and asked why he had travelled from Jerusalem to secure his release if he did not care, Michel answered with humor, saying he had wanted to see what kind of person Ilana had produced and whether her younger daughter might have potential too. The exchange allowed Boaz to question Michel’s apparent indifference while Michel avoided turning the conversation into a contest over who possessed the stronger claim on him.

Bail, work, and a limited independence

Michel’s intervention succeeded first in practical terms. He and Boaz left the station together; Michel used Gideon’s money to secure the bail, took Boaz to a newly opened kosher Chinese restaurant in Tel Aviv, and went with him to a film. Ilana later observed that someone seeing them together might have taken Boaz for the father and Michel for the son. The reversal captures the scene’s unusual shape: Michel does not insist on being recognized as a father, yet he performs the care that gets Boaz out and spends time with him afterward.

During their meeting, Boaz said that he wanted to work, earn money, and avoid dependence on anyone. Michel accepted that request immediately and arranged a position with a wholesale greengrocer in Tel Aviv’s central market, a man married to one of Michel’s cousins. He made the arrangement that evening without first consulting Ilana. By the time Michel returned to Jerusalem, the job had been set up. Boaz had not been told that Gideon’s money paid for his bail; Ilana believed that, if he had known, he would have rejected the money and the people associated with it. The assistance therefore enabled his release while remaining concealed from its recipient.

Boaz also found a place to stay at the Planetarium in Ramat Aviv. A connection there came through a person in charge whose wife had studied with Michel in Paris in the 1950s. Boaz was drawn not to the stars but to the telescopes and the subject of optics. This detail gives his new situation a specific direction without suggesting that his difficulties are resolved: the arrangement provides lodging, work, and an interest to pursue, but the account does not claim that he has returned to school or reconciled with his family.

Money, responsibility, and the episode’s significance

Ilana sent Gideon a detailed account with Michel’s consent because Michel felt that receiving Gideon’s money created an obligation to explain how it was used. That disclosure frames the bail and job as more than a private act between stepfather and stepson. Gideon’s financial help passes through the family, but its use is shaped by Boaz’s resistance to dependence and by Michel’s choice to answer a stated need rather than demand gratitude. The secrecy surrounding the source of the bail underscores the tension: material assistance makes release possible, yet openly naming its giver might have caused Boaz to refuse it.

The exchange also reverses the expectations established by Ilana’s earlier appeal. Boaz’s attraction to the sea had led her to suggest that Gideon might use his influence to help him enter naval college. Instead, after leaving school, Boaz chooses market work and earnings of his own, while his curiosity at the Planetarium centers on instruments and optics rather than astronomy. Michel’s response does not force him into a grand plan; it gives immediate form to the modest request he actually makes.

The assistance sits within a broader and continuing negotiation over money. Gideon subsequently instructed his lawyer, Manfred Zakheim, to send Michel an additional five thousand dollars and asked that further requests be made directly and in a definite sum. In a later letter, Ilana and Michel set out much larger needs, including household expenses and a proposed purchase and renovation of Alkalai House in Hebron; those requests should not be confused with the specific bail arrangement. Gideon later referred to providing for Boaz and the Sommo family in his revised will. Across these exchanges, help creates both practical possibilities and obligations to account for its use. Michel’s actions at Abu Kabir are distinctive because, within that larger financial dependence, he makes the decisive immediate offer not as money alone but as a route to work that Boaz has chosen for himself.