 During his two years in Abu Ghraib prison, he expected to be sentenced to death for smuggling Iraqi Jews out of the country to Iran, where they were then taken to Israel.He managed to escape from prison and travel to Israel, arriving in May 1950.Giladi reports that upon entering Israel in 1950, he was "asked where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do," and that he volunteered to go to Dafna, a farming kibbutz in the Galilee.