Shalom Nagar

Shalom Nagar (; 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 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''.

Early life

Shalom Nagar was born 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, while ''The Jerusalem Post'' reports 1938. Nagar came from a religious family. His father died and he was abandoned by his mother, consequently living on the streets from the age of seven, according to his son Boaz. He later moved to Israel; this was at age 14 according to ''World Israel News,'' and in 1948 according to the BBC, ''The Times of Israel,'' and ''Haaretz''. After living in temporary transit camps, he settled in Rosh HaAyin. At 18, Nagar joined the elite Israel Defense Forces' Paratroopers Brigade. It was at this time that he abandoned his traditional Jewish beliefs and became secular. After military service, he worked for the border police and joined the Israel Prison Service.

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. 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. 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. Nagar guarded Eichmann for six months, and was always in the presence of other guards.

Nagar said he had been randomly selected to carry out the execution after Eichmann's sentencing to death in December 1961. Though he was on furlough at the time and he did not want the duty, he was convinced to accept it after being shown pictures of Holocaust atrocities against children. In 2005, he told Jewish magazine ''Mishpacha'': "It so appalled me that I agreed to do what needed to be done". Such was the secrecy around the execution that Nagar's commander collected him for the duty by bundling him into a car while he was walking in the street with his wife, Ora Nagar, and their infant son. Nagar 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.

The execution by hanging took place sometime between 30 May and 1 July 1962 in the Ayalon Prison. This was the only judicial execution ever held in Israel. Nagar described arriving at the gallows when Eichmann already had the noose around his neck and was stood 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 he looked into Eichmann's eyes before stepping behind a screen to pull the lever. After an hour, Nagar took the body down from the scaffold. He said 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". Afterwards, it was Nagar's job to take the corpse for cremation in an oven symbolically built by a concentration camp survivor. He struggled; his hands were shaking and he had difficulty walking unaided.

Eichmann's ashes were later scattered at sea, beyond Israel's territorial waters. It was planned that Nagar would take them to the port, but he was so traumatized by the hanging that he was escorted home, and a police van transported the ashes. In the following years, Nagar suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares, and feared Eichmann was following him.

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. He claimed to have been the first to suggest that settler leader Moshe Levinger and the fourteen families who originally settled in Hebron be given living quarters converted from King Hussein's former stables. In the 1980s, 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".

Nagar's identity as Eichmann's executioner was kept secret for 30 years due to fear of reprisals, until it was discovered and revealed by Israeli journalists in 1992. They had been researching a radio program on the anniversary of Eichmann's death, reviewing prison records and talking to former prison employees. At this time, Nagar was living at Kiryat Arba, an urban Israeli settlement in the West Bank, in which his was one of the founding families. 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. Nagar was present at the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in 1994. This led him to move away from the area with his family.

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 (an institute for Talmudic study). The paper describes the "Jewish study hall" as being "anything but quiet", with "piles of books scattered all over and 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".

By his mid-seventies, Nagar was working as a kosher slaughterer in Holon. Gabriel Erem, writing for Jewish News Syndicate, 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". Nagar died on 26 November 2024, with reports placing his age at 86 or 88. He was survived by his wife Ora, and three of their four children.

Depiction in media

Nagar was the subject of a 2010 documentary, ''Hatalyan'' ("The Hangman" ), by Avigail Sperber and Netalie Braun. The film won the Best Documentary award at the Haifa International Film Festival. Renee Ghert-Zand wrote for ''The Forward'' that after seeing ''Hatalyan'', "it is hard not to think 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".

A German-language novelization of his story, ''Nagars Nacht'' ("Nagar's Night"), has also been published and translated into English as ''Eichmann's Executioner''. ''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".

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Nagar, Shalom

1930s births
Year of birth uncertain
2024 deaths
Prison officers
Executioners
Yemenite Jews in Israel
Adolf Eichmann
Yemeni emigrants to Israel
Israeli military personnel
People from Rosh HaAyin
Paratroopers