I know I should be posting this in the "Living History" section (shortly will do so), but I don't know if the same readers here visit that section so I'm putting this here just in case:
I've translated a fascinating article about a person called Moshe Tavor who was a lock and safe breaker for the Israeli secret service, served in the pre-State Israeli underground and with Wingate; and in the Jewish Brigade; hunted and executed war criminals and brought Eichmann to Israel. An interesting read.
The article was 6 pages long and with pictures so I'm pasting a portion here (to see if this speaks to you); there's a link to the full piece down below:
Already at the national school they discovered that Moshe had unique hand skills. And because his parents didn't have the money to send him to the [Herzliya] Gymnasium, they decided to send him to the Max Fine trade school. "Is it alright to give myself a compliment?" he asks, "I was a good student. I was exceptional. I had a talent in my hands for gentle physiology and great accuracy, and also a sense for beauty, for esthetics and design. I knew how to build things". And he who knows how to build and to assemble apparently also knows how to take apart, to separate and to open. "There", he says, "began my romance with locks".
As a member of the immigrant camp movement, he joined the first core which in 1938 erected the "wall and tower" kibbutz of Hanita. Even this wall contributed somehow to the deed that Moshe Tavor turned into a safe cracker: "In the kibbutz they used to lock the food in a refrigerator at night, and we, when we returned from guard duty, really wanted the things that were inside. So I began to train with a metal rod, like those with a certain profile, and with special toothpicks, until I would succeed in opening the lock".
When he was in training at Kibbutz Deganya, in preparation for the movement to Hanita, came the first work of its kind which became later on the center of Moshe's professional life: a safe-cracker in the service of the State. With the quelling of the Druze rebellion in Lebanon, the French brought over large quantities of weapons to the storage at Kordany, next to Haifa. "We, with our sharp mind, understood that the place most appropriate for this weaponry was the Hagana [Jewish self-defense movement]. So we would undertake appropriations, 'rekhesh', as they called it. We worked there in a sophisticated way: there was a diary organized on numbered pages on which they wrote how much weaponry was received on such and such a day. We went to a printer in Haifa and he prepared us exactly the same diary pages. I was already familiar with covert opening and clean opening of locks. So the foreign guard they used to drive out to be entertained in Haifa, and I would open the storage lock, and from there we would bring the weapons to trucks of the Hagana. The original diary pages we would simply switch with the printings of our own: if for example it was written that on a certain day there were received '117 guns', we wrote '17 guns' and our printing we entered in place of the original pages".
http://www.historama.com/online-reso...ecracker2.html
I've translated a fascinating article about a person called Moshe Tavor who was a lock and safe breaker for the Israeli secret service, served in the pre-State Israeli underground and with Wingate; and in the Jewish Brigade; hunted and executed war criminals and brought Eichmann to Israel. An interesting read.
The article was 6 pages long and with pictures so I'm pasting a portion here (to see if this speaks to you); there's a link to the full piece down below:
Already at the national school they discovered that Moshe had unique hand skills. And because his parents didn't have the money to send him to the [Herzliya] Gymnasium, they decided to send him to the Max Fine trade school. "Is it alright to give myself a compliment?" he asks, "I was a good student. I was exceptional. I had a talent in my hands for gentle physiology and great accuracy, and also a sense for beauty, for esthetics and design. I knew how to build things". And he who knows how to build and to assemble apparently also knows how to take apart, to separate and to open. "There", he says, "began my romance with locks".
As a member of the immigrant camp movement, he joined the first core which in 1938 erected the "wall and tower" kibbutz of Hanita. Even this wall contributed somehow to the deed that Moshe Tavor turned into a safe cracker: "In the kibbutz they used to lock the food in a refrigerator at night, and we, when we returned from guard duty, really wanted the things that were inside. So I began to train with a metal rod, like those with a certain profile, and with special toothpicks, until I would succeed in opening the lock".
When he was in training at Kibbutz Deganya, in preparation for the movement to Hanita, came the first work of its kind which became later on the center of Moshe's professional life: a safe-cracker in the service of the State. With the quelling of the Druze rebellion in Lebanon, the French brought over large quantities of weapons to the storage at Kordany, next to Haifa. "We, with our sharp mind, understood that the place most appropriate for this weaponry was the Hagana [Jewish self-defense movement]. So we would undertake appropriations, 'rekhesh', as they called it. We worked there in a sophisticated way: there was a diary organized on numbered pages on which they wrote how much weaponry was received on such and such a day. We went to a printer in Haifa and he prepared us exactly the same diary pages. I was already familiar with covert opening and clean opening of locks. So the foreign guard they used to drive out to be entertained in Haifa, and I would open the storage lock, and from there we would bring the weapons to trucks of the Hagana. The original diary pages we would simply switch with the printings of our own: if for example it was written that on a certain day there were received '117 guns', we wrote '17 guns' and our printing we entered in place of the original pages".
http://www.historama.com/online-reso...ecracker2.html
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