For 50 years, the makings of a first-rate spy story lay buried in the archives of one of the world’s most secretive organizations: Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
The first and only person to be killed in a civil court execution in Israel to date, Adolf Eichmann is a name every man, woman and child of Israel would recognize. An architect of the Holocaust responsible for the transport of millions of victims of Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, Eichmann escaped capture at the end of World War II by fleeing under an assumed identity to Austria. In 1950, he moved to Argentina. His trial was a media sensation broadcast throughout the world — it exposed the realities of the genocide for the general public for the first time — yet a surprising number of Americans are unfamiliar with his name, and fewer still knew the details of his capture until recently. The mission to capture Eichmann and bring him to justice, dubbed Operation Finale, was classified top-secret until 2011.
“Many people think of the Holocaust as this one, monolithic event that happened at Auschwitz,” says Ellen Rudolph, executive director of the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood. “The museum’s goal was to tell a different side of the story, one of espionage, ingenuity and a small piece of justice.”
The artifacts were collected and displayed by a former operative of Mossad inside the agency’s own walls, where it could only be accessed by other agents. It later moved to the Beit Hatfutsot (Museum of the Jewish People) in Tel Aviv. Thanks largely to a visit by Maltz Museum founder Milton Maltz, the tale of Operation Finale has come to the United States.
“This was really the first time that any of these objects have left Israel, and it’s really a first for the Mossad to partner with an American museum to bring an exhibition like this to fruition,” says Rudolph.
It’s also a first for the museum, which had never taken the lead in organizing such an ambitious project. The 4,000-square-foot exhibit runs in Cleveland through June 12 — before traveling to as many as six cities throughout the U.S. — and includes seven original films, three interactive displays and local commentary from Holocaust survivors living in Northeast Ohio in a bold and provocative exposition.
“We’re working with … a spy agency that’s not used to sharing information, we’re working with the Museum for Jewish People that’s also young in Israel. English is not the first language for anybody,” explains Samantha Fryberger, director of marketing and communications at the Maltz Museum. “This was quite the undertaking.”
According to Rudolph, it’s been well worth the effort.
“What we do is to connect historical events to the present and encourage people to look at how we can apply some of the lessons from certain historical events to how we live our lives today and what’s happening in the world today.”
Concluding with an interactive map that prompts visitors to think about intolerance, persecution and even crimes against humanity occurring in the world today, Operation Finale is the kind of display that stays with you days and weeks after you leave the museum — though not in the death-and-suffering way many archetypal Holocaust collections do.
“I think the exhibition stirs up a lot of different emotions, and you don’t have to be Jewish to have that experience,” says Rudolph, recounting a conversation she overheard between two recent visitors. “One of them said, ‘If you can’t see the parallels between that and what’s happening in our political landscape today, you must be hiding under a rock.’ And I just thought that was very powerful.”
