December 3, 1995
Matityahu Shmulevitz, a member of the Lehi underground and an adviser to Menachem Begin, dies at 75 one day after collapsing during a chess game in Tel Aviv.
Matti Shmulevitz was born in Lodz, Poland, and made aliyah in 1938 with other members of the Beitar youth group when he was 17. He joined the Ha-Irgun HaTzevai HaLe’umi B’Eretz Yisrael (“National Military Organization,” known as the Irgun or Etzel). In 1940, after the Irgun decided to employ restraint against the British during World War II, Shmulevitz and a few others left to join the new Lochamei Herut Yisrael (“The Warriors for the Freedom of Israel,” known as Lehi or the Stern Gang). Lehi’s primary mission was to target British troops and bases in Palestine in the hope of ending the British Mandate.
Shmulevitz was arrested by the British and sentenced without a trial in 1941 for his militant actions. He was sent to a jail near Kibbutz Mizra in the Jezreel Valley before being transferred to Latrun. He spent seven months digging a tunnel under the electric fence of the Latrun camp, then escaped with several others November 1, 1943.
A year after his escape, under the alias Raphael Birnbaum, he was wounded and again captured in a shootout with British police. During the gunfight, Shmulevitz wounded a British officer. In June 1944 he was found guilty of carrying illegal arms and firing at a British officer. Still only 24, he was sentenced to death and jailed in the Acre prison. He responded to the verdict by standing and singing “Hatikvah.” Public outrage eventually forced the British to change the sentence to life imprisonment.
On May 4, 1947, Begin and the Irgun organized a massive jailbreak from Acre. Shmulevitz and other Lehi and Irgun prisoners, including Tzipi Livni’s father, Eitan, collected key information about the prison and passed it to his comrades on the outside. During the escape, Shmulevitz was wounded, captured and returned to prison. He escaped again in February 1948 by posing as a sewer worker.
After the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948, Shmulevitz was arrested again and sentenced to eight years in prison. The Israeli State Council, the precursor to the Constituent Assembly, pardoned him in February 1949.
Shmulevitz joined the Herut party in 1972, and Begin appointed him to be the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office in 1977. In that capacity, he was in charge of distributing compensation to settlers who were evacuated from the Sinai under the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
