Operation Tiger

Operation Tiger was Mossad’s eight-month search for Yossele, an eight-year-old whose disappearance had become a national crisis in Israel. Ordered to take priority over the pursuit of Josef Mengele, the operation ultimately located the boy in Brooklyn and brought him back to Israel; its success came at a cost of $1 million and gave Mengele time to move.

Background and Competing Pursuits

By 1959, Hermann Langbein’s investigation had helped secure an arrest warrant for Mengele from the prosecutor in Freiburg im Breisgau, and Langbein pressed for Argentina to be asked to extradite him. The requests moved slowly through government and legal channels. Meanwhile, Isser Harel, director of Mossad, was planning to add Mengele to the agency’s pursuit after the scheduled capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. His information about Mengele was fragmentary: he believed the fugitive used the name Gregor and ran a furniture factory in central Buenos Aires. Harel’s plan allowed nine days after Eichmann’s arrest, set for May 11, 1960, to capture Mengele and bring him to the plane returning Eichmann to Israel.

The Search Takes Priority

That pursuit was interrupted when Harel ordered the investigators to turn to Yossele. The child’s secular parents, facing severe financial difficulties, had entrusted him to his ultra-Orthodox maternal grandfather. When they later came to take him home, the grandfather refused, insisting that the boy be raised according to the Torah. On the family’s second visit, Yossele had vanished. The grandfather’s refusal to cooperate with police led to his imprisonment, and religious extremists took to the streets in protest. They portrayed the detention of the old man as an attack on a holy figure; the resulting confrontation sharpened divisions between Orthodox and secular citizens, while Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion risked losing his majority in the Knesset. With the child thought to be abroad, finding him became an urgent political as well as police objective. Mossad assigned forty of its best investigators, and Operation Tiger began.

Methods, Discovery, and Consequences

The investigators set aside the Mengele hunt and worked under false identities, using false beards to enter extreme religious communities in Europe, the United States, and South America. Their search led to Madeleine Frei, a French aristocrat, convert to Judaism, and Resistance heroine who was devoted to the grandfather’s Guardians of the City sect. Frei had dyed Yossele’s hair blond and dressed him in girls’ clothes to take him beyond Israeli jurisdiction. The investigators eventually found him living with an ultra-Orthodox family in Brooklyn and brought him back to Israel.

Operation Tiger lasted eight months and cost Mossad $1 million. Its resolution ended the immediate search for Yossele, but the interruption mattered to the parallel pursuit of Mengele: by the time the operation concluded, he had moved. The contrast between the two searches also exposed the competing demands placed on Mossad, as a child’s disappearance threatened domestic political stability while the pursuit of a fugitive Nazi depended on uncertain intelligence and a narrow opportunity to act.

The Wider Pursuit of Mengele

Mengele’s movement took place against a wider pattern of delayed and obstructed efforts to bring him to justice. West German authorities later focused their search on Paraguay after obtaining documents confirming his citizenship there. In 1964, as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials drew international attention, West Germany publicly identified him as a Paraguayan citizen who lived in the tri-border region and often travelled to Brazil, and asked Paraguay to strip him of his citizenship. President Alfredo Stroessner rejected the pressure and invoked Paraguayan sovereignty. These developments underline the difficulty of pursuing Mengele across borders, but the immediate consequence of Operation Tiger was more direct: while Mossad searched for Yossele, Mengele escaped the planned window for his capture.