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Sylvia KlingbergFrom the Facebook page of Ian Brossat
The life of Sylvia Klingberg, who died this month in France, revolved around two spies. One of them was her father, Marcus Klingberg, who has been described as Israel’s greatest traitor after he revealed state secrets to the KGB. The second, Ehud “Udi” Adiv, her lover and for a brief period her husband, was a prominent member of a Jewish-Arab espionage and terrorism network.
To her friends, she was a “revolutionary beauty.” But her enemies called her by derogatory names that are unpublishable.
Her father Marcus, or Marek in Polish, was born in Warsaw. He served as a doctor in the Russian army during World War II. His parents, siblings and grandparents were murdered at Treblinka during the war. Sylvia’s mother, Wanda, was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who escaped death by assuming a false Christian identity in Warsaw. Her parents and siblings also died in the Holocaust.
Sylvia’s parents met after the war and immigrated to Sweden, where she was born in 1947. About a year later, they immigrated to Israel.
“My mother wasn’t happy with the decision,” she said in the past. “She was exhausted from the war and the dislocation, but my father wanted to immigrate. He was very Jewish, and wanted to participate in the War of Independence.”
Her father enlisted in the Israeli army as a doctor and later worked at the newly established Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tziona, south of Tel Aviv. Her mother worked in the academic world as a microbiologist.
In 1965, Sylvia graduated from Tichon Hadash High School in Tel Aviv and began working for the left-wing newspaper Haolam Hazeh under Uri Avnery. There, on Tel Aviv’s Glickson Street, she met leading radical-left divs of the time and herself became a familiar div in left-wing circles in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Acquaintances described Sylvia Klingberg as opinionated and determined. In her father’s memoirs, “The Last Spy,” which he wrote with lawyer Michael Sfard, he related: “She couldn’t accept the idea of the Jewish state and realized that Zionism necessarily creates a racist and undemocratic regime.” Later she joined the anti-Zionist left-wing organization Matzpen, “which made a lot of noise without any relation to its numbers, and...