Illustration
צילום: ויז'ואל/פוטוס
Taste of freedom, finally
Yoram Kadesh was king of Israeli market stalls in India. He didn’t know that his British friend had hidden drugs in her luggage. He never believed she would point the finger at him. He spent three and a half years in prison, while love of his life got married to another man. Only now has the court ruled that he is innocent
Yoram Kadesh had already stopped believing. After three and a half years in a suffocating, foul-smelling cell in a Bombay prison he had begun to accept the fact that he had many long years ahead of him behind bars.
Abnormally thin and very pale from long days without sunlight, Kadesh and his brother Roni arrived at court in Bombay to hear the verdict on the drug smuggling charges against him. In court, the brothers’ hopelessness quickly turned into supreme happiness. “I find the defendant not guilty,” declared the judge, and released Kadesh.
“I don’t believe this has happened,” said the astonished Yoram, hugging his brother. “I was afraid that justice would not prevail and that I'd spend my whole life in jail. I went to jail innocent and I’ll leave jail still innocent.”
Yoram is not without bitterness for the lost years that were taken from him through no fault of his own, for the distance from his beloved family in Israel, and for his Dutch girlfriend who left him while he was in prison and married somebody else.
“He is finally smiling,” says Roni in a phone conversation from Bombay. “You really can’t understand what a tough time he went through. Yoram was destroyed. In recent weeks he has been under terrible pressure. He had to convince everyone that he wasn’t guilty and not everyone believed him. Now, finally, he feels that he can hold his head high.
Prison, drugs and Yoram
Kadesh was born 39 years ago and grew up in a moshav in the south of Israel. Following his discharge from the IDF he went to Los Angeles, where he worked as a diving instructor, and then to India to travel. When he returned to Israel he worked with his brother Aryeh and also managed a nightclub in Tel Aviv. In the years prior to his arrest Yoram met an Indonesian clothing designer on a trip to the Far East and started to work with him, with Kadesh responsible for exporting the clothing to Europe and India.
Yoram’s businesses were thriving. A large portion of the clothing sold in Israeli market stalls throughout India and Europe belonged to his company. In November 2002 he went to India to oversee his business, and from there he was scheduled to fly to Holland to visit his girlfriend, but something went wrong.
Yoram, according to his family, got into trouble because he tried to help a friend at the airport. The night before his flight, they say, he ran into a 22-year old British woman he’d met during his stay in the Far East. The last night before the flight they were in the same hotel, and they went to the airport together even though they were planning to take different flights.
“He told us that he’d checked in,” says his sister, and when “he saw that she was being delayed, he went on his way and kept looking back to see what was happening with her. He saw her speaking with police officers, and he couldn't understand what was happening. When he came and stood next to her to help her, they opened her bag and found drugs. When they asked her what it was and who had given it to her, she pointed at him.”
Kadesh was immediately arrested, along with the British woman. She continued to protest her innocence and to say that Kadesh had planted the drugs in her bag. Eventually, when Kadesh was found innocent, the court found her guilty and sentenced her to 10 years in prison. The fact that Kadesh was connected to her in the trial caused an almost unbearable situation, with Kadesh’s family having to bump into her family. Nevertheless, say his relatives, they do not hold a grudge against the woman, and they prefer to focus on their joy at Yoram’s release.
My girlfriend’s wedding
“In his first weeks in prison he was in a bad way,” says his sister Channah. “He didn’t have a corner to sleep in. Being in the same room with Muslim prisoners did not improve his mood. We spoke to the consulate and asked them to move him elsewhere. The pressure helped, and he was transferred to the white collar wing, but there, even though the conditions were better, they were still very difficult.”
Indian Jail (Archive photo: Mickey Peled)
By the time Yoram had been in prison for six months, Channah could tell from the few letters she received that he was on the verge of a breakdown. She decided to fly to India to spend time with him. “This was after the beginning of the trial and he wept a lot. He said he was sorry about everything and that he preferred to die.”
Channah and Yoram continued their correspondence. In one of his letters Yoram asked her to tell his friends in Israel and abroad what was happening with him, “if I still have any friends,” as he put it. Channa’s voice reveals how heartbreaking it was for her to read his letter. “It should be said to their credit that his friends all called constantly,” she says, “even his Dutch girlfriend, who was very worried after he didn’t answer her e-mails and didn’t understand where he’d disappeared to. Then, in one of his letters, he asked us to explain to her what had happened, and to say that she shouldn't wait for him.”
“A year ago,” says Channa, “the Dutch woman came to visit him in jail and it was one of the saddest and most difficult moments he’d had. She came to tell him that she was getting married, and asked for his blessing. It was a very charged situation. Yoram was helpless. He had begun to internalize the fact that this is India, and that he might be going to jail for 10 years, even if he hadn’t done anything,” says his sister.
Now, his family only hopes that Yoram will quickly overcome his trauma and get his life back on track. And they have cause for optimism. “After the verdict,” says Roni, “he told me, ‘now I’m going to make up for everything I’ve missed. Three years of my life have been lost, and I intend to take advantage of every moment in my new life that I’ve gotten back.’”
