Hayim was born on July 4, 1916 in Austria to Yitzhak and Rachel. Afterwards, the family moved to Germany. As a youth, he joined the Bar Kokhva sports movement as he studied in high school, but the rise of the Nazis put an end to that. In 1934, his family made aliyah. Hayim joined the British Police in 1934, completing his studies at the police academy. He served in Safed and later was assigned to the Haifa Police’s “beaches and borders” unit. At this time, he assisted illegal aliyah across the Syrian border, as well as from ships at anchor in Haifa Bay. He did all of this while wearing the uniform of the British Palestine Police. In 1935, he was transferred to the Tel Aviv municipal police. He was promoted to desk sergeant. In 1937, he joined the intelligence service of the IZL; in 1941, he moved to Lehi, where his nom de guerre was Margalit.
One time he managed to get into the safe of the assistant to the district superintendent, who was Jewish; Hayim removed the secret files, which had a list of IZL members, and he passed it on. Hayim was suspected by the Tel Aviv region commander of membership in the underground, but he managed to convince him of his innocence. As the desk sergeant in the North Tel Aviv police station, he managed to get a box out of storage in Jaffa which contained five hundred bullets. He passed 450 of them to the regional commanders of Lehi, IZL and the Hagana in Neve Shalom. The board recommended that he be promoted to officer rank, but the Hagana’s opposition quashed this.
In 1947, he was put in charge of a unit of fifty Jewish policemen, which was attached to the British Mobile Police Force. Their base was in Sarona. Because Hayim had such good relations with the British officers and commanders, and because he had such good English, he discovered information about patrols and various operations. Since he had no way to communicate with his Lehi contact, he passed on the material to the head of intelligence services of the Hagana in Tel Aviv, Ephraim Krasner (Dekel). Hayim had other opportunities to help, both in gathering intelligence and in releasing the youths who had been captured in the midst of an operation (Wingate Night) with hand-grenades; he neutralized the grenades and filled them with dirt, without his supervisors noticing. As desk sergeant and patrol supervisor he could gather information and pass in to the intelligence services of IZL and Lehi.
Hayim married Esther Skolnick, and they had three children and seven grandchildren. Esther always stood by Hayim’s side, and she at times was the one to find a way to transmit information to the appropriate recipients. When the State was established, Hayim was automatically transferred to the Israel Police and made an officer. He completed his service in 1971 with the rank of superintendent and retired.
