Raphy Star: “We decided we were going to teach Henry a lesson – I can’t remember what the lesson was about, but with Henry it’s not difficult to imagine why.”
Late one evening in early 1965, at the Betar summer, camp near Ballarat, three senior madrichim (Raphy Star, Louis de Vries, John Goldlust) together with a guest “martial arts expert” (Robert Le Tet) concocted a daring plan to bundle a sleeping Henry Burstyner into a car, drive him some distance from the camp, leave him on a dark, deserted road without most of his clothes and have him walk back to camp. Brilliant idea! What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot it would seem – especially when you are dealing with the wily, quick thinking and devilishly innovative Henry Burstyner. Several decades later these events are recalled in a series of video interviews I conducted in 1988 with two of my fellow “kidnappers” and with the “kidnappee” himself. As Louis de Vries observed, it was we, rather than Henry, who received a valuable lesson that night: “We realized that Henry is a person of whom you cannot get the better.”
–John Goldlust
Interviewees: Raphy Star, Louis de Vries, Henry Burstyner
Interviews conducted and video produced by John Goldlust
