The Mercenary, the Mossad, and the Rabbi of Bethlehem

Before he flew in private planes between war zones, before he plotted coups of smuggled diamonds for African rebels, Simon Mann attempted to convert to Judaism. He did so, too, under the guidance of one of Jerusalem’s most eccentric rabbinic figures, Rabbi Mordechai Elefant, who introduced himself as the ‘Rabbi of Bethlehem, and look how great the last Rabbi of Bethlehem was.’

It came to pass in the 1980s, in a Jerusalem sukkah overlooking an Arab town, in the sort of spot where the two might sip whisky and smoke cigars. Mann, the Old Etonian, the son of an England cricket captain and a decorated SAS officer himself, was aristocratic pedigree in human form. He passed away earlier this month at 72.

Their encounter was arranged by one of Mossad’s more colourful operatives, David Kimche, who had something of a propensity for rather surreal phone calls. Kimche, according to Elefant’s unpublished memoirs, called the rabbi one day and said, ‘There’s a British officer with me, and he wants to marry a Jewish girl. Jewish him up.’ To this, Rabbi Elefant agreed.

Mann wasn’t religious, nor did he pretend to be. Elefant, never one to mix words, told him flatly that conversion wasn’t a box to tick for marriage. Still, he assigned a tutor.

Elefant met Mann’s alleged MI6 handler and contact, Tony Buckingham. ‘I know why he thought we were MI6, but we weren’t,’ Mann would subsequently respond to the accusation. He brought cigars from Luanda and flew Elefant over Africa with private jets.

Elefant later claimed that he even turned into a sort of renegade intelligence source, providing information from Mann to the infamously violent rebel commander of Angola, Jonas Savimbi: ‘He couldn’t figure out how I knew.’

Elefant was even drawn into Mann’s diamond-smuggling business, returning with jewels following each meeting with the warlords.

Mann never completed the conversion, slightly unsurprisingly. He would remain a gentile and a gun-for-hire. But for a moment, one of the world’s most infamous mercenaries sat under a sukkah in East Jerusalem, shared cigars with a rabbi, and spoke about war and repentance.

Elefant seemed to have sensed that holiness is not always presented in recognisable packaging. A man like Mann was still a man worth talking to. Elefant was the sort of man who chased sparks wherever they landed.