Israel has carried out the death penalty just once, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was sentenced in 1962 to death by hanging. “We placed the rope on his head. I pressed [a handle] and he fell downward,” Shalom Nagar, the guard who carried out the execution, later told an interviewer.
Nagar was born in Yemen: No Ashkenazi guards were allowed to enter the prison wing where the architect of the slaughter of Eastern European Jews was held. He kept his role in the execution of Eichmann a secret for years, and said he suffered from post-traumatic stress and nightmares following the hanging.
Nagar, who later became a kosher butcher, died Nov. 26 at the age of 88. “We’re in this world as tenants,” he said in the 2010 documentary “The Hangman.” “The only thing we take with us is our good deeds.”
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