by Debra Rubin
NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex

January 6, 2009

An 85-year-old Monroe man has pleaded guilty to passing classified documents to the Israelis several decades ago.

Ben-Ami Kadish, a former U.S. Army mechanical engineer, pleaded guilty on Dec. 30 in federal court in Manhattan before U.S. Magistrate Theodore H. Katz to one of the four charges of conspiracy he originally faced.

At the court hearing, Kadish said he believes he was promised no prison time when he is sentenced on Feb. 13.

Formerly a civilian engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, Kadish had been free on $300,000 bail since April on charges he “borrowed” classified documents from the facility’s library between 1979 and 1985 and took them home to be copied by a diplomat at the Israeli consulate. The documents supplied to Israeli government agent Yossi Yagur included information about nuclear weapons, a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet, and the U.S. Patriot missile air defense system.

Kadish, who was born in Connecticut but raised in what was then Palestine, fought in World War II with both the Americans and British and later served with the Hagana in Israel. He and his wife are residents of the Ponds adult community

Yagur, now retired and living in Tel Aviv, is the same agent who obtained information from convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for selling military secrets to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the Navy.

Cantor Eli Perlman, religious leader of the Jewish Congregation of Concordia — where Kadish and his wife, Doris, are members — said he believes the Pollard incident is behind the government’s prosecution of Kadish.

“I think they’re using it to keep Pollard in jail,” he told NJJN on Dec. 31. “There are people who do much worse things and go to jail for a short period of time and come out. Why else would they go after an 85-year-old man more than 20 years after it happened? It makes no sense. I’m sure he was guilty, but why did they go after him? Israel is our only ally in the Middle East. I don’t know what else the government is getting out of this. There’s something they’re not telling us.”

Perlman said he did not know Kadish well, but said he and his wife had come to the synagogue twice in the last six months. Perlman said, “They did what they had to do” and left without anyone reacting to their presence.

“I was happy about that,” said Perlman, adding that it appeared to him that there is an even greater push in the Jewish community to get Pollard pardoned in the waning days of the Bush administration than in the past.

“In the last seven or eight days, I must have received 30 e-mails asking me to urge President Bush to pardon Pollard,” he said. “In all my years I’ve never before seen anything like it.”

Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com

--TOP--