‘Half-Breed’: The secrets of Miss Israel contestant born to an Arab father and a Jewish mother

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“You haven’t gotten to the juiciest part of the story,” one reader commented on Facebook in reaction to a story published several months ago in Haaretz about a juicy topic in its own right: Jewish women who had fallen in love with Arab men during the period of the British Mandate.

The writer of the post was referring to the portion of the article about beauty queen Lili Dajani, whose father was Arab and her mother Jewish. The Facebook comment went on to recount a tale that it is difficult to imagine could really happen.

It began with a “mixed” marriage in Palestine, followed later by a romance with a Mafia capo in New York. It ended with a murder.

Following up on the Facebook tip, we embarked on an archival search of legal documents, news investigations and book-length memoirs to piece together the entire story. It actually deserves nothing less than to be made into a Hollywood thriller.

The turbulent chapters of Lili Dajani’s life began for all intents and purposes in 1960, the year that she first made headlines over two events. The first is reported in Haaretz’s then-popular “Woman and Home” section, where she appeared in a picture alongside the reigning Miss Israel, Aliza Gur, and runner-up Gila Golan, who held the title Miss Tel Aviv. Dajani was second runner-up and Miss Jerusalem, and that same year, she represented Israel at the Miss International beauty pageant in California.

Haaretz readers weren’t made aware of the true story behind Dajani: She was referred to in the story as Lili Man, which concealed her family background.

Lili Dajani, right, in a 1960 Haaretz photo.Haaretz

“That ordinary name was quickly invented to conceal a much more picturesque name,” Uri Avnery’s magazine Ha’olam Hazeh would later write. It emerged that the woman’s weekly La’isha, which had organized the Miss Israel beauty contest, came up with a Hebrew name for Dajani by shortening her mother’s maiden name, Rechtman, to Man. La’isha hadn’t wanted to use her Arabic last name. Ha’olam Hazeh explained that this was due to concern that it “would ruin her chances of winning” if the public knew that she was “the daughter of a mixed Arab-Hebrew marriage,” as it was described.

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The second major event in the life of the young model occurred that same year, when she won instant fame after being mentioned in Dan Almagor’s song “Yael, Yael,” which was sung by the army’s Northern Command ensemble: “Yes, all the soldiers/in the Jezreel Valley/know the Shekem tent/and its server/a sergeant by the name of Yael/a pretty, smiling soldier.”

That’s how the song begins, but the lines that follow are the ones that are relevant to Dajani’s story: “When they rode down the highway/they whistled at her fast/like Lili from the Kfar Bilu bypass/they stopped for a minute/for a glass of soda/or even a bottle of cola …”

“Lili of the Kfar Bilu bypass” is our story’s protagonist. “A familiar and likeable figure to all the soldiers who stopped there on their way south. A beautiful and smiling young woman” is how Almagor would describe her in an interview years later with Prof. David Assaf’s blog Oneg Shabbat.

“She was the thing there. The soldiers all talked to one another about her. Their cars swerved closer to get a peek,” he told Ha’olam Hazeh. “On the Bilu bypass, between Rehovot and Givat Brenner, there was a kiosk. And at that kiosk, so it was said, there was this brunette with sexy eyes and a fantastic body, an other-worldly beauty. Many said it was just a story, a kind of urban legend that sprouts up sometimes. But those who went to check out the rumors found that there really was a girl who fit the description. They kept coming back.”

After she was second runner-up in the Miss Israel contest, Ha’olam Hazeh ran a profile of her, which provided other details about “Lili of the Kfar Bilu bypass.”

The cover of Ha’olam Hazeh featuring a story about Lili Dajani as the daughter of a Jewish mother and Arab father, under the headline ‘half-breed.’Ha’olam Hazeh

“The soldiers from the area who passed in their trucks had a special cheer of their own. Every time their vehicles passed by the house on the bypass, they would shout, ‘Li-li, li-li, li-li.’ Sometimes a car would stop in the middle of the night. Soldiers would sneak up under her window and serenade her. High-profile soldiers viewed her as the girl of their dreams. She was so beautiful and graceful,” the article stated.

“Every day, when soldiers left the camp for their morning run, their sergeants would egg them on by promising, ‘You want Lili? Run faster and we’ll take a break by her [kiosk].'”

The kiosk was run by Dajani’s mother, Chava, who was the sister of Rehovot mayor and Knesset member Shmuel Rechtman. Chava’s husband, Dr. Issa Dajani, was 14 years her senior. She had met him when he was working as a dentist at the school she attended. He was the son of the mukhtar, the local Arab leader of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City.

As it does today, this marriage between a Jew and a Palestinian raised eyebrows. In 1942, two years after they were married by a qadi, a Muslim religious judge, the couple moved to Gaza, where Dr. Dajani opened a dental clinic to serve British troops. Just before the establishment of the State of Israel, his life was threatened after he was accused of collaborating with the Jews, and the couple moved to Rehovot, where Chava’s parents lived.

During the 1948 War of Independence, the couple was separated for a while after Issa was arrested by men from Hassan Salameh’s Palestinian Holy War Army. Chava assumed that her husband had been killed and declared herself a widow. But he later returned.

“I didn’t know anything about the Arab people, but knowing my father, and his kindness, loyalty and character, I’m proud to be the daughter of the love of members of two different peoples,” Lili Dajani would later say.

A deal with the devil

Her standing as a beauty queen and model prompted both media coverage and harassment. “Lili Man was only Israel’s runner-up for beauty queen, but she has a fan like no other beauty queen in the country,” the newspaper Maariv reported in 1962. “That fan’s love of her is so intense that a magistrate’s court judge in Rehovot had to issue an arrest warrant.” It quoted the man himself as saying, “I have no life without Lili Man. I dream about her all the time.”

The Maariv article described Dajani as married, but that belongs to the next chapter in her turbulent life, which unfolded overseas. As fate would have it, the three young women from the Haaretz “Woman and Home” story all left Israel for the United States. But, unlike the two others – Miss Israel and her first runner-up – Dajani left the glittery world of celebrity for something a little less glittery.

In 1961, she married Martin Gellar, a young American manufacturer of swimsuits. She informed her mother of the marriage by telegram. But the marriage didn’t last long. In 1963, Ha’olam Hazeh reported that the couple was about to divorce. Not long after that, Dajani met a Jewish doctor by the name Eliezer Shkolnik in whose abortion clinics she was working as a nurse.

Shkolnik was married at the time and, according to several reports, his affair with Dajani led to the breakup of his marriage. According to one report, he married Dajani in 1971. In the meantime, the abortion business prospered and expanded to include several clinics, making the couple very wealthy. Dajani, who invested in real estate, traveled by limousine and wore expensive jewelry.

In the mid-1970, the authorities raided the clinics and revoked Shkolnik’s medical license. According to a New York Times report at the time, investigators had uncovered serious problems in the way in which the clinics operated.

“One woman, the department said, received an abortion from Dr. Shkolnik, only to discover a couple of months later that the abortion was incomplete and that she was three-and-a-half months pregnant,” the newspaper reported.” In another case, it said, the clinic had tested a sample of male urine and found the patient pregnant.

Not long after that, Dajani met another man, whose business dealings were even more dubious than Shkolnik’s. He was Mafia capo Gregory Scarpa, a member of the infamous Colombo crime family. His resume included scores of unsolved murders, which earned him the moniker “angel of death.” Scarpa was not only a mafioso but an FBI informant.

Gregory Scarpa Sr.Joyson Noel

That meant that in exchange for bringing down his partners in crime, he was protected from arrest. The deal was tantamount to a license to kill because the authorities simply looked the other way as long as he was willing to pass along information on New York’s organized crime scene.

And while he was in a relationship with Dajani, Scarpa was married and had an “official” girlfriend as well. Nevertheless, in 1975, he and Dajani would marry in Los Angeles. Shkolnik, who still loved Dajani, made what would end up being the mistake of a lifetime in trying to take revenge on Scarpa. He informed the Internal Revenue Service of Scarpa’s various tax violations, information that found its way to the FBI. Instead of arresting Scarpa, they warned him about Shkolnik.

In December 1980, Scarpa’s son, Gregory Scarpa, Jr., was dispatched to kill Shkolnik at his Forest Hills home in New York. This was to be the son’s admission ticket into the Mafia. It later emerged that the father had supplied Shkolnik’s address and photo, with the message “Do this for me” written on the back.

Gregory Jr. carried out the killing with a fellow mafioso who was later also killed on Gregory Sr.’s orders. The gun used in Shkolnik’s killing was thrown into a New York sewer.

Scarpa Sr. died in prison in 1994 of AIDS. Scarpa Jr. is currently serving time in prison. Scarpa Sr.’s FBI handler, Lin DeVecchio, was indicted in the early 2000s for his role in four homicides – including Shkolnik’s – but was cleared. Even so, the judge said the relationship involving Scarpa Sr., DeVecchio and the FBI amounted to a “deal with the devil.”

And what happened to Dajani? She is living in Los Angeles and is said to be about 80. All attempts to interview her for this article were unsuccessful.