Shalom Nagar

Shalom Nagar (Hebrew: שלום נגר; 1936 or 1938 – 26 November 2024) was a Yemeni-born Israeli prison guard best known for executing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Nagar immigrated to Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces' Paratroopers Brigade. After working in various security roles, he joined the Israel Prison Service. He was stationed at Ramla Prison when he became one of 22 guards assigned to Eichmann during his trial and imprisonment. Chosen at random, his role as executioner was kept secret for 30 years due to security concerns and revealed only in 1992. Later, Nagar worked as a prison guard in Hebron and as a kosher butcher. He helped establish the Kiryat Arba settlement but left after the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. His story was featured in the 2010 documentary Hatalyan ("The Hangman") and inspired the novel Eichmann's Executioner.

Shalom Nagar
שלום נגר
Shalom Nagar in 2010
Born	1936 or 1938[1] Yemen
Died	(2024-11-26)26 November 2024 (aged 86 or 88)[1] Israel
Occupation(s)	Prison guard, kosher slaughterer
Known for	Executing Adolf Eichmann
Spouse	Ora Nagar
Children	4

Early life

Shalom Nagar was born into a religious family in Yemen in the mid-to-late 1930s. Sources differ as to the exact year: Haaretz and The Times of Israel report his year of birth as 1936,^[2][3] whereas The Jerusalem Post reports 1938.^[4]

The New York Times described details of Nagar's early childhood as "sketchy", but noted that in interviews he said his father died when he was seven.^[1] In a 2004 interview with the Jewish magazine Mishpacha, he recalled his father searching for caves in which to hide in the event of a Nazi invasion of Yemen.^[5]

In the same interview, Nagar recounted that after his father's death, his mother remarried, and her new husband did not fulfill a promise to take in her children. Some of his siblings were married off or taken in by other relatives, with Nagar mentioning three brothers and two sisters in total.^[5] Nagar consequently lived on the streets from the age of seven, according to his son Boaz.^[6] To avoid being forced to convert to Islam in a state-run orphanage, Nagar said that he "made sure to find shelter among the Jews,"^[5] sleeping under market stalls in Sanaa,^[7] wrapped in his father's goat-skin tallit (a prayer shawl) and working odd jobs, including as a porter.^[5]

Nagar made his way to Israel in 1948.^[2][3][8] He told Mishpacha that he and one brother travelled on foot through the desert to Aden, and covered each other with sand at night for warmth. In Aden they boarded airlifts organised by the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency. He recalled that his payot (sidelocks) were cut off as, he was told, in Israel there was no need for them to be used to distinguish Jews from Arabs.^[5]

Nagar and his brother were taken to Kibbutz Shefayim. He later said they were shocked at the lack of religious observance and gender separation, and feared it was an attempt to convert them. Describing his reaction, he said, "no washing, no brachot, no head coverings, what kind of Jews were these?"^[5] He and his brother ran away to the Rosh HaAyin transit camp, and Nagar was subsequently sent to Kfar Haroeh. At the age of 16, Nagar joined the army,^[1] and two years later, he joined the elite Israel Defense Forces' Paratroopers Brigade.^[9] At this time he abandoned his traditional Jewish beliefs and became secular. After completing his military service, he worked for the border police and joined the Israel Prison Service.^[2][5]

Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann in the yard at Ayalon Prison in 1961

Main articles: Eichmann trial § Sentence, and Adolf Eichmann

Nagar was working at Ayalon Prison in Ramla in the early 1960s when the war criminal and Nazi Party official Adolf Eichmann was held there during the trial for his role in the Holocaust.^[2] Nagar was one of 22 handpicked "Eichmann guards". The prime minister at the time, David Ben-Gurion, ensured that the Eichmann guards were Sephardic, as he felt that Ashkenazi Jews whose families had been killed in the Holocaust would be motivated to harm the prisoner. In the 2010 documentary Hatalyan, Nagar said that as a Yemenite, he did not know who Eichmann was until he had to guard him.^[10]: 7:55

Guards who survived the concentration camps were banned from the prison's second floor, where Eichmann's cell was located. Before this rule was clear, Nagar recalled, he once swapped duties with a guard who had an identification tattoo on his arm. At the door of Eichmann's cell, the guard rolled up his sleeve and confronted Eichmann, who responded by shouting in German. From then on, Nagar later said, the instructions were clear: "no switching or we'd get court-martialed".^[5]

Suicide watch was a key duty. These guards were also charged with testing food given to the prisoner, for fear someone would try to poison him. In Hatalyan, Nagar said that when he asked his commander, "Why do I have to taste the food?", he was told, "If we lose one Yemenite, it's no great loss".^{[10]: 11:15} Nagar guarded Eichmann for six months, and was always in the presence of other guards.^[2]

After Eichmann's sentencing to death in December 1961, according to Nagar so many people wanted to be executioner that a lottery was held to decide who would do the job.^[8] At the time he was selected, Nagar was on furlough and did not want the duty.^[2] In 2004, he told Mishpacha magazine that he was the only one who refused the role, but was convinced to accept it after being shown pictures of Holocaust atrocities against children. He is quoted as saying, "I was so shaken that I agreed to whatever had to be done".^[11] In contrast, in Hatalyan he said that ultimately he was ordered to carry out the execution, quoting his commander as saying "It's an order. The lot fell on you. You'll do it".^{[10]: 20:25}

Such was the secrecy around the execution that, according to Nagar, his commander collected him for the duty by bundling him into a car while he was out walking with his wife, Ora Nagar, and their infant son in their Holon neighbourhood. Nagar said he was concerned that she would believe he had been kidnapped, so they returned to say he had been called in as the prison was short staffed.^[2][5]

The execution by hanging took place around midnight on 1 June 1962 in the Ayalon Prison.^[a] This was the only judicial execution ever held in Israel.^[8] Nagar described arriving at the gallows when Eichmann already had the noose around his neck and was standing over a trap door. While an official account states that there were two people who pulled a lever simultaneously to carry out the execution, Nagar did not recall anyone else being there. He said that he looked into Eichmann's eyes before stepping behind a screen to pull the lever.^[2][5] After an hour, Nagar took the body down from the scaffold. He told Mishpacha that the loud gasping sound of air being released from the corpse's lungs made him feel that "the Angel of Death had come to take me too".^[2][5] Afterwards, it was Nagar's job to take the corpse for cremation in an oven symbolically built by a concentration camp survivor. He later said that he had difficulty walking unaided and trembled so much that the body rolled from side to side as he pushed it into the oven.^[2][8][5]

Eichmann's ashes were later scattered at sea, beyond Israel's territorial waters.^[3] According to Mishpacha, it was planned that Nagar would take them to the port of Jaffa, but he was so traumatized by the hanging that he was escorted home, and a police van transported the ashes. Nagar's clothes were bloodied from where the rope had torn Eichmann's skin.^[3] He recalled that his wife was hysterical at the sight of this, and thought he had been beaten up in a fight, saying that there is no blood at a hanging. Nagar responded, "Wait until morning and you’ll hear the news". The following morning, Kol Yisrael broadcast a brief, one-line announcement of the execution, without naming Nagar.^[5]

Nagar was given a two-week vacation and sent to complete his high school equivalency exams, subsequently returning to work as the prison's switchboard operator. He had to pass Eichmann's cell to get to his office. Such was his fear of this that he said that he had two guards escort him every day.^[5] He once tried it alone, but fell down the stairs when he was startled by his own shadow on a glass door, thinking it was Eichmann's ghost.^[7] In the following years, Nagar suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares, and feared Eichmann was following him.^[2][8] In Hatalyan, Nagar said of this period: "After that I became religious. I started wearing a yarmulke and going to synagogue, praying, putting on tefillin, keeping the Sabbath. I went to study ritual slaughter. And I kept at it. I felt better".^{[10]: 24:50}

Later years

After his time at Ramla, Nagar worked at a prison in Hebron. He was one of the first Israelis to guard imprisoned Palestinians under the newly formed Israeli Military Administration.^[15] He later recounted that the wardens and officers there would sometimes physically abuse prisoners, and gave an example of when guards forced a father and son to physically fight. Discussing the incident in Hatalyan, he said that this broke his heart, and incidents like that made him cry. As deputy warden at the prison, he dismissed guards involved in this activity, and recounted allowing the prisoners out in the yard against protocol. He said of the prisoners, "I pity them, even if they're terrorists [...] Man shouldn't feel superior to his fellow man. Don't look down on even the simplest man".^{[10]: 31:00}

During this period, Nagar developed close ties with the area's religious settlers. He was among the earliest settlers in Kiryat Arba,^[16] an urban Israeli settlement in the West Bank, where he purchased a plot of land and lived for several years with his wife. Nagar claimed to have been the first to suggest that settler leader Moshe Levinger and the 14 families who originally settled in Hebron be given living quarters converted from King Hussein's former stables.^[15][5]

In 1986, Nagar was asked if he would carry out the execution of Ivan Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor extermination camp. He refused, later saying he had "had enough trauma".^[3][17] Nagar retired from the Prison Service later that year, having worked there for at least 26 years.^[5][18] At this point, Nagar regrew his peyot and a beard, and was encouraged by Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak to join a kollel (an institute for Talmudic study). He then split his time between his studies and working as a kosher slaughterer, having become a certified shochet. He slaughtered chickens for kapparos, and sheep for special occasions at Sephardi yeshivos across the country.^[5]

Nagar's identity as Eichmann's executioner was kept secret for 30 years due to fear of reprisals from neo-Nazis, until Israeli journalists discovered and revealed it in 1992.^[8] They had been researching a radio program on the anniversary of Eichmann's death, reviewing prison records and talking to former prison employees.^[11] He said that he was sworn to secrecy over the execution, but after Mossad chief Isser Harel had published a book about Eichmann's capture he felt he had nothing to fear, saying: "Besides, I was involved in the great mitzvah of wiping out Amalek", referring to a biblical commandment in Judaism to erase the memory of an enemy nation of the Israelites.^[5]

Nagar was present at the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, in which 29 people were killed by a far-right Zionist extremist,^[19] in Hebron in 1994.^[15] Soon after, he moved his family back to Holon,^[5] later that saying that he was unwilling to continue to live "in that kind of situation". In Hatalyan, Nagar said that he still did not understand why Baruch Goldstein carried out the shooting: "It pains him that Jews are being killed, but it doesn't pain him to kill Arabs? Arabs were created in God's image too."^{[10]: 54:40}

According to the Jewish Herald-Voice, when a German media outlet asked to interview Nagar in 2004 he insisted that the interview take place in his kollel. The paper described the "Jewish study hall" as being "anything but quiet", scattered with books and filled with loud, argumentative voices. When the German reporter asked why he wanted to be interviewed in such a noisy environment, Nagar responded that he wanted any television interview, likely to be watched by millions of Germans, to show that the Jewish people were thriving on the values, culture and traditions that "Hitler and Eichmann [...] wanted to decimate".^[2][20]

In his mid-seventies, Nagar was still working as a kosher slaughterer in Holon.^[9][15][21] Writing for Jewish News Syndicate, Gabriel Erem described Nagar as "soft-spoken" and "pious". Erem described in 2021 hearing of Nagar's poor medical condition and modest home, and rallying descendants of Holocaust families to finance "a suitable, medically supervised, first-rate senior home for the last living hero of an era".^[22] Nagar died on 26 November 2024, with reports placing his age at either 86 or 88.^[2][3][4][8] He was survived by his wife Ora and three of their four children.^[6]

Depiction in media

Nagar was the subject of a 2010 documentary, Hatalyan ("The Hangman" Hebrew: התליין), by Avigail Sperber and Netalie Braun. The film won the Best Documentary award at the Haifa International Film Festival.^[8][21] It is dedicated to the memory of Nagar's son Noam,^{[10]: 00:50} and includes footage from his funeral.^{[10]: 50:45} Renee Ghert-Zand wrote for The Forward that after seeing Hatalyan, she thought of Shalom Nagar as "the Forrest Gump of Israel". She explained: "Like the character played by Tom Hanks, Nagar improbably finds himself in the midst of historical events and meeting famous (infamous, really) people". She concluded that "the look in Nagar's eyes [...] suggests more to this real-life character than religious platitudes and an affable nature".^[15]

A German-language novelization of his story, Nagars Nacht ("Nagar's Night"), has also been published and translated into English as Eichmann's Executioner.^[23][24][25] Library Journal said of the translation: "The weaving of past with present, fact with fiction brings Eichmann alive and even humanizes him, a feat that impressively expands our understanding of the Holocaust".^[26]

Notes

1. According to a 1963 eyewitness account from William Lovell Hull, the hanging took place at 12:02 am on 1 June.^[12] Contemporaneous reporting in The New York Times, written on 31 May and published on 1 June, describes it as taking place "just before last midnight".^[13][14] Obituaries of Nagar subsequently placed the time of execution between 30 May^[8] and 1 June.^[3]