APRIL 5
Ten Days Before Passover
Chapter 1
The day dawned sunny and hot. In northwest Jerusalem the entire Belzer neighborhood bustled and hummed in anticipation of Passover. Even the secular tourists could feel it. Aproned wives and daughters scrubbed countertops, ovens, refrigerators, microwaves, and cabinets until their fingers were raw and bleeding. Dust devils swirled in the busy streets as the Hasidic residents swept from their homes all hametz, contraband leaven outlawed on this holiday. Less than two weeks until the seder. And there was still so much to do!
This morning Pinchus Berger arrived especially early at the Belz Great Synagogue. Despite the fact that his beloved wife Gittel Mirrel remained in the rehab hospital recovering from her recent breast cancer surgery, Pinchus still managed to get all eleven children washed and dressed and out the door. He personally took the two youngest to gan, and then walked the two with special needs to their schools. Of course, he couldn’t have done it without the help of the three older girls. And his mother-in-law, Henye Ruchel, who lived with them, was also a great help, if he ignored all her kvetching and unsolicited advice.
It took Pinchus over two hours to perform his new duties in the large basement room of the shul. Crawling on his hands and knees, he swept with a turkey feather under bookcases and inside cupboards, gathering tiny crumbs in a paper bag to be burnt later together with the feather. With fevered breath, he blew away dust, which sent him into paroxysms of sneezing. Finally he was satisfied that the basement area was absolutely leaven-free. He gulped down a glass of cool tap water to clear his throat from all the grit and cinders of a thousand chain-smokers. Then he headed up the stairs. He needed a cigarette before going to morning minyan.
As he inhaled the harsh smoke from the unfiltered cigarette, he took a moment to savor his good fortune. This was the first year that he, Pinchus Berger, apprentice watch repairman, had been assigned the holy duty of inspecting the basement matzah factory for any overlooked hametz.
He inhaled deeply to relish the last bitter tang of nicotine. Watching the tendrils of smoke rise up, his eyes scaled the enormous building that he was proud to call his family’s shul. The Belz Great Synagogue was the biggest synagogue in Israel. Some said, in the whole world.
The towering square building, its outer walls faced with alternating fluted columns and cavernous arches, immediately called to mind the grand monuments of antiquity, especially the Parthenon and Solomon’s Temple. But this synagogue was not in fact modeled on these ancient architectural wonders. Rather, it drew its inspiration from the original Belz Synagogue built in the Ukraine in 1843 by the first Belzer Rebbe, Sholom Rokeach, which had been maliciously destroyed by the Nazis.
And as if the synagogue’s external grandeur wasn’t impressive enough, visitors soon discovered that the building’s interior outshone its outer facade. The vast sanctuary seated close to three thousand worshipers. The
hand-carved walnut ark, twelve meters high with the capacity to hold up to seventy Torah scrolls, had even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Yet even the black-hatted regulars who attended daily prayers and celebrated in this magnificent synagogue didn’t know all its secrets. In the spring, as the holiday of Passover approached, one of the basement rooms in the Great Synagogue was quietly turned into a pop-up matzah factory. Each morning a small group of bearded Belzers in black or white coats, many with furry shtreimels perched atop their heads, trooped down to the basement to make the ritually prescribed rounds of baked wheat. Straddling both sides of a long steel table, they took turns rolling out the dough, passing it back and forth until it became large, round, and flat. They then punctured the rounds of dough with small holes, draped them over long poles, and thrust them into a fiery oven. Precisely eighteen minutes later, the matzahs emerged, appropriately kosher for Belzer seders.
This morning when he first stepped outside the building, Pinchus was immediately blinded by the brilliant April sun. At this early hour few people walked along Binat Yisas’har Street. Most were already at prayer in the many shtieblach located in the lower floors of the synagogue. Had it not been for the scrawny yellow cat that began rubbing against his trouser leg, Pinchus might not have noticed the corpse lying at the base of the wrought-iron gate. As soon as he felt the cat’s matted fur scraping his leg, he backed up against the gate. When he looked down, he saw the body of a young boy. Horrified yet curious, he bent over, looking for signs of foul play.
He judged the boy to be in his early teens. The body was lying face up, relaxed as though asleep. The boy’s face was ghostly pale, like something hidden from sunlight since birth. There were no signs of violence.
Definitely not a Belzer Hasid. No yarmulke covering his blonde hair. No corkscrew earlocks bouncing down his cheeks or hooked behind his ears. No tzitzis dangling out of his pants. The boy’s clothes—Western jeans, a light blue tee shirt, and sandals—constituted the standard uniform of young Israeli boys these days.
And then Pinchus noticed the large gold cross suspended from a golden chain around
the boy’s neck. It was not like the crosses Pinchus was used to seeing when he passed Christians on the street or sat across from them on the bus. This one had three horizontal gold bars crossing the vertical—a short one near the top, a longer one in the middle, and then another short one near the bottom of the vertical. The last bar was not parallel to the other two but angled at a slant. And on every surface of the cross were floral designs in bas-relief. What kind of Christian was he, this dead boy? And what was his corpse doing here in front of the Belz Great Synagogue? What had happened to him? And what did it mean for them, for the Belzers, that he’d ended up here?
Pinchus’s head began to spin. Would a dead body found so close to the synagogue render the holy place tamei, ritually unclean? Would they have to shut down the matzah factory? It was so close to Passover! Had the boy been murdered? By a Palestinian terrorist? Or an antisemite? Or, God forbid, one of their own, a Belzer Hasid?
Pinchus didn’t know what to do. Should he call the police? Would they completely shut down the synagogue as a crime scene? For how long? Thousands of Belzer Hasidim prayed there several times a day. Many also studied there and celebrated simchas. And what if the police discovered the matzah factory in the basement? Did the shul have a license to operate it?
Wringing his knobby fingers and moaning to himself, Pinchus swiftly made his way back
inside the synagogue to look for help. He found it almost immediately in Izzy, the elderly shammas on duty that morning. As Pinchus finished blurting out his shocking tale, Izzy firmly pressed the distressed man’s shoulder and placed an arthritic finger to his own sharp nose.
“Not to worry, boychik,” said Izzy. “I will call the police right away and report it. In matters such as these, it’s always best to call upon a lower authority.”
Chapter 2
Chief Police Inspector Sarit Levine seldom found herself in this part of Jerusalem. Kiryat Belz, the neighborhood where the boy’s body had been found, was part of a string of ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that ran in a continuous line from the western boundary of Jerusalem all the way to the Jaffa Gate in the Old City. The neighborhoods that made up this outermost end of the string perched on the northern edge of the mountain plateau that undergirded central Jerusalem. The area was densely populated by Belzer Hasidim, many of them newly arrived from the United States.
Sarit had little patience for Haredi Jews. She regarded them as backwards, embarrassing, a shanda fur die goyim. She was exasperated by their paranoia about the modern world. Their anti-scientific narrow-mindedness in the face of a world-wide pandemic seemed to her not only irrational, but downright criminal. She resented how intolerant they were of secular Israelis like herself. Although she never said so out loud, she was ashamed to call them Jews.
Soon after turning onto Sorotskin Street, the main thoroughfare of the neighborhood, her Ford Escort braked to a standstill, wedged between double-parked cars on either side. Behind and in front of her, idling cars spewed smoke into the air. Sarit waited only a few minutes, then slammed the Escort into park, threw open the door, and stepped out onto the street.
On this Sunday, just days before the first seder, the streets were clogged with black-hatted and -coated men and boys dashing off to study and pray, women in wigs and long sleeves—many of the young ones pregnant—shopping or shlepping children, boys and girls gathering separately in tight scrums to gossip or furtively eye one another, and cars honking their way through the hubbub.
Sarit leaned back inside the car and shouted at Dahlia, who had recently been promoted to sergeant. The young policewoman sat silent in the passenger seat, her slim form rigid with tension.
“Take over from here!” Sarit shouted at her. “I’ll make more progress on foot. The crime scene’s only a few blocks from here.”
Without waiting for an answer, Sarit slammed the car door shut and began marching down Sorotskin Street, weaving around the motionless cars, sometimes slamming her fist on someone’s hood, a sign of exasperation or bravado. After walking for ten minutes, she spotted the great stone block of the Belz Great Synagogue looming over the smaller apartment buildings. The enormous edifice dominated the entire neighborhood. She cut down a side street and soon found herself standing outside the synagogue’s iron gates.
Dr. Avraham Selgundo, the Medical Examiner for the Jerusalem District Police, was already at work, bent over the small corpse. He carefully lifted locks of the boy’s blonde hair, looking for signs of blunt force trauma or lacerations. A few uniforms were already at the crime scene, trying to hold back a frantic throng of Belzer Hasidim. The black-clad men, many with plush shtreimels on their heads, pushed vigorously against the red crime scene tape that encircled the ten square
meters marking the police perimeter. Greatly outnumbered, the three policemen, arms outspread as if about to take flight, pushed back. But they were steadily losing ground to the mob. Selgundo paid no attention to the ruckus boiling around him. His focus was singularly fixed on his young victim.
Slipping under the red tape, Sarit rushed toward the surging mob. Though diminutive in stature, the Chief Inspector possessed a voice as loud as a freight train horn, a natural talent she occasionally augmented with a police whistle. She now used both in quick succession, first blasting the crowd’s ears with the shrill whistle, then bellowing at the jostling congregation of bearded men.
“Stop at once! This is a crime scene!”
Contrary to her expectations, her words had little effect. In fact, they seemed to goad the men into greater frenzy. As they pitched forward, the crime scene tape stretched so thin that it threatened to rupture at any moment.
Sarit urgently motioned to the nearest cop, who raced over to her side. She pointed at his hands, then interlaced her own fingers to form a lattice. Imitating her, he knit his much thicker fingers together and held them out. Without hesitating, Sarit thrust one shiny black shoe into the cradle of the man’s hands, vaulted off the pavement with her other foot, and clambered up to the man’s broad shoulders. Instantly she felt his hands clamp tightly around her ankles.
She inhaled deeply and blew her whistle again, letting the strident note linger in the air. This time she caught the crowd’s attention. It was not clear whether they were more shocked by seeing a man’s hands gripped around a woman’s bare ankles or by Sarit’s acrobatic agility, but a hush immediately fell over the crowd.
Sarit straightened her spine and stretched her neck, trying to exaggerate her height. Even though she could feel the policeman’s hands beginning to tremble around her ankles, she showed no fear.
“That’s better, gentlemen. Now step back and let us do our work.”
Her voice was gentler than before, but still commanding. Glancing around at the dozens of black-coated men surrounding the small, still body on the ground,
she saw fear in their dark eyes. What were they afraid of? Surely none of them would commit such a brutal act in front of their synagogue. Did they know something about this crime? And if they knew something, would they share it with the police? Haredim generally didn’t welcome a police presence in their communities. They obeyed a different code of law.
“Please, Inspector, I can’t do this much longer.”
Sarit looked down at the man upon whose shoulders she stood. Sweat soaked his brow. Under his arms, damp half-circles darkened his shirt. His breath was ragged and shallow.
Sarit beckoned to a second policeman to help her down from her perch. Bending down, she grabbed his upraised hands, then leapt to the cement ground. Several of the Hasidim applauded. She paid no notice.
She walked over to the small body, which the medical examiner had carefully turned over so that the boy lay face-down. “Okay, Avraham. What have we got here?”
Selgundo lifted up a clear baggie and held it out. Inside was a large gold pendant and linked chain. When she leaned in closer, Sarit saw that it was a cross. But not the usual kind sold in tourist shops all over the city. This one had three crossbars instead of the usual single one.
“Russian or Greek Orthodox, I think,” offered Selgundo. “I used to see them in Buenos Aires among the Russian émigrés.”
“So the boy wasn’t Jewish.”
“I checked inside his pants. Definitely not a Jew.”
“ID?”
Selgundo pointed to a small, dark-red backpack near the body.
“Mostly school books. A Russian Bible. Pencils and pens. Some notebooks. His name was written inside some of the books. Anastasius Krapovsky. Also an address.”
“I’ll have Dahlia inform the family. No mobile phone?”
Selgundo shook his head.
“Any idea about cause of death?”
“You’re not going to
like this,” Selgundo said. He lowered his voice so that Sarit had to strain to hear his words. “In fact, I’ve never seen this in all my years as an ME. Though, of course, I have heard about it.”
“What?” Sarit barked at him. She hated when he played guessing games with her.
“His body is completely drained of blood. Every drop. See the ghostly pallor of his skin? But at least I can attest that it was done post-mortem. I would guess that he was killed quickly by asphyxiation.” With both hands he gently turned the boy’s head to the side and pried open one of his eyes with his two fingers. “Note the petechiae, the burst blood vessels. Unmistakable sign of strangulation. No neck lacerations, so they probably put a plastic bag over his head.”
Sarit shuddered involuntarily. She was usually not squeamish, but the boy was so young, with such delicate features.
“I’ll know more when I do the post at Abu Kabir. I’m not sure how they did the exsanguination. As I said, I’ve never personally come across such a case.”
“Why go to such lengths? Once the boy was dead, why the need to get rid of all his blood?”
Selgundo dropped his voice to a whisper.
“You must know the myth behind this kind of ritual murder.”
“What Jew doesn’t? The everlasting lie that Jews need the blood of a Christian child to make matzahs.”
Selgundo sidled up even closer to Sarit, his mouth hovering inches from her ear.
“My grandfather told me about something like this that happened back in Russia when he was a child. In 1913 a Jew named Mendel Beilis was accused of committing this kind of ritual murder. He was acquitted at trial, but the affair shook the whole Jewish community. Many Jews left Russia after that. That’s when my grandparents moved to Argentina.”
Sarit saw the dread
contorting the medical examiner’s face.
“It’s been going on for centuries,” continued Selgundo, “mostly in Europe, though I’ve heard of some cases in Arab countries too. It usually occurred around Passover, when Christians were riled up, usually by their priests, to hold the Jews accountable for the death of their Lord. Hooligans would murder a Christian child, drain his blood, and throw his bloodless corpse on the local rabbi’s doorstep. Nine times out of ten, a pogrom would follow, with Jews being murdered and burned out of their homes. That’s why that rabbi in Prague created the Golem several centuries ago, a superman made out of mud, to protect his Jews from an antisemitic blood libel and pogrom. Or at least, that’s what the legend claims.”
The crowd was again growing restless. Wanting answers. Wanting the police to go away and let them return to their prayers and books.
Sarit tilted her head toward the crowd.
“Not a word about this blood libel thing to any of them. In fact, not a word about it to anyone, especially not to the press.”
Selgundo nodded. Sarit turned to leave. Selgundo grabbed hold of her shoulder.
“There’s one more thing. I found this in the boy’s pocket.”
Sarit took the doubly folded piece of paper from the medical examiner’s outstretched hand. When she unfolded it, she gasped.
The page contained a single image, no doubt scanned from the internet. It showed a bearded young man, dressed in nondescript gray clothes. He was obviously Jewish since he sported earlocks and a bright blue yarmulke. In his hands he held a large red container resembling a gasoline canister, tipped up so he could drink from its spout. On the container, in all caps, were the words, “Goyim Blood.”
After decades as a police officer, not much shocked Sarit Levine. But this image hit her squarely in the gut. It was obviously connected to the myth of blood libel that Selgundo had just elaborated on. Whoever created this meme was so ignorant about Judaism that he didn’t even know that the word should have been an adjective, “goyish” blood, not the noun form, “goyim.” Sarit drew in a deep breath. How could she be thinking about Yiddish grammar? She now understood for the first time why some relatives of murder victims became
preoccupied with these kinds of trivial matters in the face of a loved one’s murder. Some information was so disturbing that the mind temporarily had to escape from reality.
Sarit took a picture of the drawing with her phone and forwarded it to the Diaspora Ministry for identification. She placed the original paper in an evidence bag to bring to Police Headquarters.
Pivoting on her heels, she swept her eyes in a 360-degree circle. For the first time she noticed that the crowd was segregated by gender. Behind three sides of the taped-off perimeter, the onlookers were all men. Women and girls crowded together on the fourth side. Small gaps were left where the two groups might accidentally make contact. Sarit was certain that the police hadn’t arranged for this separation. Another reason why she hated dealing with these people.
Though no one ever talked about it, the reality was that everyone in the criminal justice system had personal preferences when it came to which cases they wanted to work. ...
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