‘Israel’s Titanic,’ Misdirection, and Today’s News
Just weeks ago, a brand spanking new submarine, the INS Drakon, began its service in the Israeli navy. What few of us remember is another submarine with a similar name, the INS Dakar, that disappeared in the Mediterranean in January 1968.
Everything about the hunt for the INS Dakar, known as “Israel’s Titanic,” while nearly 60 years old, seems current, particularly when it comes to chasing wild rumors and conspiracy theories encircling the Jewish community today.
I have spent the last ten years researching how the INS Dakar, a World War II British submarine bought by Israel and refitted in England, was lost on its maiden voyage home with 69 sailors on board. In the book I am completing and with a film in development, I have tried to understand the fear, the anguish, and the utter devotion behind what remains Israel’s greatest naval tragedy.
For Israel, then a country of roughly two million, everyone seemed to know someone connected to the Dakar crew. Like the families of those murdered and kidnapped on October 7th, the Dakar widows, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters kept their loved ones front and center in the Israeli media – in this case for decades. They constantly pushed the navy to hunt for the sub.
Family members continually gave media interviews. They argued and confronted officials, from Moshe Dayan on down. Just find our sons. Bring them home, they demanded.
“Why did the navy not escort the Dakar?”… “There are devices to find them? Why can you not use such a device?” …“How could you send the submarine in an area with hostile forces? ”
In parallel with the navy’s efforts to search for the submarine, psychics, those who believed in the paranormal, offered answers for the navy – and they professed, for the families as well.
The newspapers, hungry for information on the missing submarine, allowed the rumor mill and conspiracy theories to flourish.
A woman named Margot Klausner, founder of Israel’s largest film studio, was a fierce believer in the occult and the spirit world. She offered to conduct seances for the Dakar families, claiming she could help the navy find the lost submarine and crew.
Approaching midnight on March 1, 1968, only five weeks after the Dakar disappeared, Klausner held a séance for two wives of the lost crew. She hosted the meeting in the salon of her Herzliya apartment.
It started late on Friday evening and wound its way past midnight into Saturday morning. Sixty-nine families were grieving. Perhaps she truly felt she could provide answers to a few of them.
With Klausner that night were three individuals. Naomi Ra’anan, wife of the Captain, Yaakov Ra’anan, and Yochi Cohen, wife of Nissim Cohen, Second Coxswain, or Chief Petty Officer. Also attending was Avraham Ben Zev, more familiarly known as Zabo, a Chief Petty Officer who served under Ra’anan in his previous command aboard the INS Rahav. Zabo was part of the Dakar crew but was transferred out at the last minute to man the newly purchased submarine, the INS Dolphin, a former Royal Navy sub, the HMS Truncheon.
At the Ouija board’s center was an arched formation of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Immediately underneath the letters were the number series 1 through 9, along with a zero at the end. The upper left corner was labelled with “Yes” in Hebrew. “Maybe” in the center. The upper right with “No.” The bottom center of the board was “Shalom,” goodbye.
Yochi Cohen, Naomi Ra’anan, Zabo and the medium placed their forefingers just atop an overturned glass cup, the size of a large shot glass. Participants were to suspend their fingers above the glass and not touch it.
The room was totally dark. Participants could barely see much beyond the table.
Coaxed along by suggestions and questions asked by the medium, the glass somehow moved along the board. Each time it came to a rest on top of one of the Hebrew letters, Klausner, taking notes, would add the newly selected letter to the one that came before it, eventually forming a word – or sometimes gibberish.
It was 12:30 am on March 2. Klausner first tried to reach the Dakar Captain, Yaakov Ra’anan, without success. She then continued by trying to contact Yochi’s lost husband, Nissim Cohen.
Nissim Cohen was among the first group of submariners trained in England. One of Nissim’s most important and unofficial tasks was to act as both father and disciplinarian to the crew. He had to wake them, talk to them if they slacked off or fell asleep on the job. He probably knew the crew better than any of the officers on the sub.
“Is that you, Nissim?” asked the medium.
As the medium allowed the overturned shot glass to hover over selected letters, Klausner, guided by the medium’s suggestions, moved the glass toward the upper left-hand corner of the board.
“Yes” was the answer.
Would you like to speak about your wife?
The cup slid to “No.”
…About the Dakar?
“Yes.”
At this moment, Yochi became suspicious.
The room, she said, was extremely dark. It was difficult to see anything. She suspected the medium of somehow manipulating the glass, even though no one around the table was supposed to touch the tumbler.
She suddenly walked away from the table and stepped out into the apartment’s courtyard. Her participation ended at that moment. The séance continued, leaving Zabo and Naomi with the medium and Klausner taking notes.
“Please, what happened to the Dakar?” the medium continued.
Under the hand of the medium, the cup moved back and forth, landing on a series of ten letters that meant nothing. Gibberish.
“We cannot understand, please we want to understand,” pleads Klausner.
Again, gibberish.
“Is that a code?” she asks.
The cup slid to the upper right of the board.
“No,” the spirit answered.
“Why can we not understand? Try to speak so that we can understand,” she continues.
A useless crop of letters, making no sense.
“Let’s start [all over] again,” the medium commands.
A simple three-letter Hebrew word forms: “Murder.”
“Who murdered, please focus?” begs the medium.
“Russians,” returns the Ouija board.
The séance continued for another hour or so. Neither of the two women believed in what they heard, yet they came. So did other Dakar family members.
They sat in front of Ouija boards. They listened to the strange dialog composed by the medium. They felt duped and upset at the failed attempts to try to talk with their loved ones. The sessions appeared to them manufactured, with weird, unfamiliar messages. While no one tried to unmask a charlatan, the Dakar family members who attended generally felt the entire show was a trick or a stunt.
When it came to tapping into the occult for answers, the case of the missing INS Dakar was not at all unique. Israel’s police had used mystics to help locate a missing person. The IDF had employed them to locate kidnapped soldiers. Often, it is the mystic who will reach out to the officials first.
While reports in the media did not reach the volume and pitch of today’s social media rants, they upped the anger meter for families and drew away precious time from the Israeli navy in its pursuit of the missing submarine.
The Dakar story is certainly more complex and more intriguing than this brief article permits. I found many of its lessons profound and am finishing this project with great respect for Israel and its navy. It is certainly far more about the unusual talents, which include a world-class submarine hunter, a skeptical group of scientists and one navy diver who dedicated most of his career to locating the sub.
I do not want to oversimplify the Dakar story. What I want to do is leave you with a thought: We live in a world of immense distraction, most of it served up by devices that rest in our pockets. The Dakar story and the persistence of the families and the Israeli navy to find the submarine, was a pursuit that included many twists and turns. The navy, to its credit, constantly fought to overcome the screaming headlines as well as the psychics and their pronouncements, ultimately achieving its goal.
Leonard Fuld is completing a book on Israel’s search for its lost submarine, as well as developing a documentary, Misdirection: A Tale of Disappearance, Devotion, and the Search for Israel’s Lost Submarine. To view a short trailer, go to: https://theshooq.org/project/misdirection/
