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| By Nurit Wurgaft | "Haaretz", March 18, 2007 |
'The detainee understands he must not undress in the yard'
Can you recite the "Shema Yisrael" prayer? "Hear Oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one." Can you continue? "No." Are you Jewish? "You are my brother. He is the God of Moses, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I am telling you the truth. A Jew does not lie." This Judaism test was part of an interview given last December by custody tribunal adjudicator, attorney Dan Liberti, to a Nigerian who had been incarcerated in Ma'asiyahu Prison and who considered himself Jewish. According to regulations, illegal migrant laborers who face deportation must be interviewed once a month. In his ruling, Liberti noted that being able to recite three sections of the Shema prayer is the most common commandment observed by man toward God and that it is recited at least twice daily, morning and evening, by every Jew. "The detainee, however, does not know what the letters look like and did not even make the effort to study the contents of the prayer since the last time he was asked about it," Liberti wrote. The previous times was four months earlier. "Therefore I have determined that the detainee is merely a Nigerian subject who is pretending to be a Jewish convert." That same detainee (who has meanwhile been expelled from the country) belongs to a small group of Nigerians who claim to have a connection with the Jewish people. Israeli law makes it impossible for illegal migrant laborers to convert, and it would not have helped him to convert - since nobody from the Orthodox world, or anyone else, appealed for his release. It is not clear what would have happened had the Nigerian known the prayer, but this little discussion was indicative of something. It seems that Liberti, who is religious and wears a skullcap, enjoyed the conversation, since the subject was close to his heart. That may be the reason why he brought up the subject again in another discussion which had nothing to do with Judaism, with another Nigerian detainee from the same group that had been called to give evidence. What is that on your head? "A skullcap." What is written on it? "Nahman from Braslav, a strong and holy Jewish rabbi." This man had also failed the Shema examination but Liberti continued: Did you lay tefillin today? "Tefillin? Don't you remember, I was detained in the street and didn't have tefillin with me?" Do you also wear tefillin on the Sabbath? "Yes, I pray from Friday evening until the Sabbath goes out wearing my tefillin." And when do you don the tefillin? "I put them on whenever I want to pray. I don't know whether you're talking about the tefillin or the talit [prayer shawl]." One can understand that, in dealing with custody issues, Liberti and the other adjudicators sometimes need to employ unusual tactics. They have already seen and heard everything and their instructions are to return and question these people every month. Even though their decision relates to whether to free someone from prison and under which circumstances to do so, they are obliged to work independently, without a lawyer on either side, sometimes without translation. Usually the text of their decisions is the same, with minor changes: "I am not convinced that the illegal stay of the detainee stems from a bona fide mistake or mishap." Very occasionally, the same text is written on a positive note and the person is freed and can get another chance. It is not simple deciding who receives a chance of that kind, when the sole source of information is the person whose case they are discussing. In this way, when a detained Indian citizen opened his remarks by saying, "I never worked in Israel at all," it was clear this could not be the case since he had spent eight months here and must have had to survive on something. Later it became clear to custody tribunal adjudicator Elad Azar that "apparently the detainee fell victim to an attempt to exploit him on the part of a manpower agency which brought him to Israel and demanded a fee of $1,000 to allow him to meet his lawful employer. When he refused to pay, the detainee found himself without an employer and without a visa." He registered a complaint with the police and tried to get legal employment through another manpower agency but was turned down by them, he said, because he did not know Hebrew. Azar criticized the Indian man's failure to arrange his affairs and said that "in such circumstances, there is no point in releasing the detainee who has proven that he cannot find a legal employer for himself." In order not to make him feel completely desperate, Azar left an option: If a legal employer is found with the assistance of a hotline for foreign workers, for example, he would consider releasing the man. Custody tribunal adjudicator Sara Ben Shaul-Weiss also criticized the social skills of a Thai worker whom she ordered released after she was convinced he was entitled to find a legal employer. The release was conditional on a relatively low bail of NIS 1,000. When the Thai citizen asked to be released from posting the bail, on the grounds that he had no money, Ben Shaul-Weiss wrote: "I cannot agree to the request, simply because someone who cannot find a friend to post bail for him until he finds an employer with permits will not be able to find himself an employer if he is set free." Azar has a total lack of trust in the documents and papers that African migrant laborers show him. In one decision, following a hearing at the Hadera lock-up for illegal workers, he states: "It is not possible to rely on birth certificates or ID cards submitted by African citizens since it has already been proven that they cannot serve as real evidence. I do not believe there is a need to prove in every case in which a birth is brought to the religious tribunal, that the document is false when, in any case, a cloud of suspicion surrounds these documents' authenticity." Ben Shaul-Weiss also does not believe the claim of the Nigerians (who said they were Jewish) that they were persecuted in their country for belonging to the Movement for Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra - MASOB. She turned down their request to be released from jail and to go to a third country, saying: "Criminals and transgressors who are about to be tried also try to escape the arm of the law and I do not see any reason why the court should lend them a hand. So long as it is not clear to me what the detainees are running away from, each and every one of them, I cannot lend a hand to the escape of (at least, apparent) transgressors to a third country." A young man from Ghana who came to Israel last year and was detained at the border and incarcerated in Hadera, had to be hospitalized at a mental health facility twice during his detention. In a medical report following his release from the second round of psychiatric treatment, it was stated that he no longer required psychiatric observation but that "the continued stay in prison might cause a worsening of his mental state, as happened. We recommend finding an alternate place in which to detain him or sending him back to his country of origin." At that time, it was not possible to send him back to Ghana and the adjudicator, Ruth Greenberg, had difficulty accepting the suggestion. "The medical opinion describes a normal person without disorders. Despite that, an addition to the opinion contains a sentence which seems to contradict what was written previously. Namely, that keeping him longer in detention could cause a worsening of his condition. The doctor will have to explain," she wrote. In all fairness, it must be said that sometimes the reality in the special detention facilities for illegal workers is quite strange. This is what one detainee said during the hearing about his continued detention: "It isn't true that I was drunk when I was arrested. I had merely been at a party. I understand that I must go to my country, but I'm not prepared to do that. I really have no problem if you send me away, I'll be back in an instant. I don't know why I'm in the waiting room [a separate room - N.W.] and not in the general hall. I behaved well and everything is okay." Ben Shaul-Weiss writes in her decision to continue detaining him: "It appears to me that the detainee is hiding more than he has revealed. He refuses to explain why he was put in the waiting room (after he managed to fight with all the other detainees in his room, announced that he had to go home to eat supper and urinated into a drinking glass)." In another case, the official statement, "the detainee understands he must go back to his country," was accompanied by, "the detainee understands that he must not undress in the yard."
