A photograph of the grandfather of former Mossad chief Meir Dagan—showing him wrapped in a tallis and humiliated by the Nazis moments before his execution—was displayed in his office, and he would regularly show it to visitors.

Meir Dagan, who served as the chief of the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, passed away on March 17, 2016, after battling cancer.

Meir Huberman (later Dagan) was born on a train on the outskirts of Kherson, between the Soviet Union and Poland, during World War II to Polish Jewish parents who were fleeing Poland for the Soviet Union to escape the Holocaust.

His maternal grandfather, Rabbi Ber Erlich Sloshny, H’yd, was killed by the Nazis in Lukow in 1942 after being publicly humiliated. In 2009, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published two photos of Nazi soldiers standing next to a kneeling Sloshny shortly before they shot him.

He is seen kneeling before the Nazis in what was known as the “horse and rider” position—a method used by the Nazis to degrade Jews. The photograph was reportedly found by a local Polish youth and later passed on to Jews who returned to the town after the war.

During his term as Mossad chief, Dagan kept one of the photographs hanging in his office and showed it to everyone who entered his office. “Look at the man kneeling before the Nazi soldiers,” Dagan would tell his visitors. “That is my grandfather before he was murdered. I look at this picture every day and promise that such a thing will never happen again.”

As head of the Mossad, Dagan was tasked with preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and viewed the image of his grandfather as a symbol of the significance of the battle against the Iranian threat.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)