Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  An hour later, a young man entered the Seminar. He was taken immediately to Menachem Orshansky, a burly dark-mustached man who represented the Haganah in Bet Hakerem. The men and women of Bet Hakerem had not yet officially joined the Haganah. Orshansky, who had been an officer in the Russian army before the Revolution, had escaped from Russia, joined the Haganah, and now commanded the volunteers in Bet Hakerem’s defense unit.

  He called the people together in the auditorium. Papa, still feverish, insisted on going despite Mama’s protests. The two hundred people—men, women, teenagers, toddlers, infants—assembled on the second floor. Raquela sat in Mama’s lap.

  Orshansky stood in front of the auditorium, lifting his hand for silence.

  “We have a messenger from Haganah headquarters. They sent him to find out if Bet Hakerem needs help and to tell us what’s happening in Jerusalem and Motza.”

  The young man, scholarly-looking with thick glasses, stood next to Orshansky. “Jerusalem is secure!” he said.

  Relief swept through the room.

  “We were lucky in Jerusalem. We had not only the British police, who really tried to quell the riot, but also the Haganah. And we had a group of Oxford students—Christians—who happened to be in the Holy Land. When they saw what was happening, they asked the police for guns. Those English students were incredible. They helped save Jerusalem.”

  “Thank God,” Papa said, in a hushed voice, to Mama. “But if only we could find out if my mother is safe.”

  Raquela envisioned her grandmother, Señora Vavá, sitting on the windowsill, looking down at the Old City. Had Arab mobs, bursting out of the Jaffa Gate, broken into her grandmother’s house, just outside the walls of the Old City, the way the Arabs of Deir Yassin had broken into Bet Hakerem? She felt numb. Señora Vavá had to be safe.

  The people were murmuring, asking questions about what had happened in Jerusalem. Orshansky interrupted. “Sheket—quiet. Now we want to hear about Motza. Our messenger was there; let him tell you.

  The bespectacled messenger began talking rapidly. Raquela tried to listen, though some of the words were unfamiliar to her.

  “Yesterday, Friday morning, when the people of Motza heard about the riots in Jerusalem, a few of them said, ‘Let’s go to Jerusalem and ask the Haganah for protection.’ But they didn’t go. Do you know why?”

  The people shook their heads in silence.

  “The sheikh of Colonia, the Arab village next to Motza, came himself on horseback and swore by Allah that if any Arabs came up from Jerusalem and attacked them, he would return with his own Arabs and defend them. Were they not his good friends? Did they not buy all his fruits? The people of Motza were reassured.”

  Raquela saw Papa breathing hard.

  The messenger’s voice was the only sound in the crowded hall. “The Arabs did not come from Jerusalem. They came from Colonia. Yes, the sheikh himself was leading them. They knew all the houses. They broke down the doors. Murdering, looting, burning.”

  Raquela burrowed into Mama’s body. Mama tried to stand up, and whispered, “Let’s go back to the synagogue, Raquela.” But Raquela seemed unable to move.

  “They smashed their way into one of the rest homes, butchered the owner, his son, his two daughters, and two guests from Tel Aviv. One of them was Rabbi Solomon Schlacht, eighty-five years old.”

  A cry ruptured the hall. Raquela put her hands over her ears.

  “Where were the British?” Papa called out.

  “Where were the British?” Orshansky mocked. “Where are the British in Bet Hakerem? True, they were in Jerusalem. But they’re still trying to be ‘neutral.’ They allow the Arabs to carry as many rifles as they want. We’re arrested if they catch us with even a rusty old pistol.”

  Papa’s breath seemed strangled. Cold sweat gathered on his forehead.

  The Haganah messenger went on: “Word came to headquarters that Motza was burning. A group of us jumped into a car and drove up the mountain to the village. The moment the Arabs saw our car, they fled down the ravines, carrying all the loot they had stolen. The minute they see our guns, they run. They attack only defenseless Jews.” His voice changed. He spoke slower now. “We tried to put out the fires. We went into the houses. Whole families were dead.” He paused, looking around the hall. “Do any of you know the Makleff family?”

  Raquela saw the look of horror in Mama’s eyes.

  “I do,” Mama called out. “One of the girls was my classmate; we taught together.”

  He looked straight at Mama. “The Makleff family have been murdered. Only Moti, their nine-year-old son, is alive. He hid under a bed and watched the massacre of his father, his mother, and his entire family.”*

  All night in the darkness the families sat in their makeshift compounds, talking. What was happening in other parts of Palestine? Were the Arabs rioting in the north? The west? The desert?

  This was the second serious riot. The first one had started when a handful of Arab terrorists protested the Balfour Declaration.

  The Balfour Declaration! On November 2, 1917, as the First World War I raged on, British prime minister Lloyd George, grateful to the Jews for their part in the war and sympathetic to the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland, authorized his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to proclaim to the world, “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

  The Balfour Declaration was celebrated with joy throughout the Jewish world; the dream of returning to the Promised Land, revived by the Viennese-Jewish playwright Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, was to be fulfilled. Both Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour were deeply religious men, steeped in the Bible. According to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the distinguished scientist, statesman, and leader, the two men “understood as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and faith.”

  The allies, meeting in San Remo, Italy, in 1920, had confirmed the pledge given in the Balfour Declaration. In the Middle East, once part of the Ottoman Empire, British and French rulers replaced the Turks, and in 1922 Great Britain was given the “mandate” by the League of Nations to administer Palestine and establish the “national home for the Jewish people.”

  A small fringe of the Arab community went on a rampage, denouncing the Mandate. “There will be no Jewish homeland in Palestine!” they shouted. But they had little influence on the masses of Arabs who lived side by side with the Jews. For these Arabs the words “no Jewish homeland” had little meaning. Their own needs were crushing: to fight starvation, disease, blindness, to keep their babies alive. Under the Turkish rule there had been almost no medical care, and there were inadequate medical services under the British. Medical care came from their neighbors, the Jews, who were determined to wipe out the dread diseases and to keep Jews and Arabs alive.

  Moreover, the Arab fellahin who worked for Jews in the towns and farms were paid the same wages as Jewish workers, often two or three times more than they received from Arab employers. The effendis, their cheap labor threatened, went into the coffeehouses and mosques to incite mobs of Arabs with the promise of rich loot if they killed the Jews. Still, most of the fellahin refused to join the mobs. And for a few years there was relative peace in the land.

  Why, now, this second riot?

  Sleeping fitfully under the quilt, Raquela heard voices around her. “Why should they attack us in Bet Hakerem?” Papa was saying. “We didn’t steal this land. We bought it from the Greek patriarch of Saint Simeon Church, in Jerusalem. It was wasteland.”

  Papa had often told Raquela how Bet Hakerem had looked when he first saw it, seven years ago, in 1922—a barren mountain with not a single human living there, inhabited only by jackals and cratered with huge boulders bleached white in the sun. Jeremiah had walked on these hills.

  The men in the blacked-out synagogue, now talking in whispers, were the very pioneers, teachers, scholars, poets, who had left their work in downtown Jerusalem each afternoon and tugged pickaxes three
miles to these hills to break up the boulders and build their homes. Their dream was to make this newest outpost of Jerusalem like the Holy City of King David’s day, when each man could sit beneath his fig tree in his own vineyard. Indeed, they named their colony Bet Hakerem, “house of the vineyard.”

  The house Papa built on his allotted two dunams, which equaled half an acre, was typical: a simple stucco cottage with a pink-tile roof, a porch in front, a small patio on the side, and a garden in which he planted the calla lilies he loved and a tree for each of his three children.

  The little colony was surrounded by Arab villages, most of them friendly. The hostile ones, like Deir Yassin, were a few small groups within the Arab community.

  Why, then, this new riot?

  Sitting together on the floor of the synagogue, the people pieced together the events of the last few days. A week ago, they reminded one another, some two hundred boys and girls had come from Tel Aviv and marched to the Wailing Wall, raising the blue and white flag of Zion. It was to protest harassment by Arab agitators who for months had marched their camels and goats in front of the Wall; they had played cymbals and beat drums to drown out the prayers of the worshipers.

  The young people from Tel Aviv had come to ask the British to do something—to make sure the Jews had their full right to the Wall. They demanded protection to pray before the holy place where Jews had prayed for two thousand years.

  The Arabs had used the peaceful demonstration as their excuse; they spread rumors throughout the country: “The Jews have held a warlike demonstration against us.” Arab newspapers carried the headlines PROTEST! COME TO JERUSALEM!, AND DO WHAT MUST BE DONE!

  A week before, on Friday morning, August 16, a mob of Arab Moslems had left their mosques and begun marching and shouting. The people at the Wall heard them in time and fled through the streets of the Old City. The shamus remained at his post to guard the prayer books and the prayer shawls. The mob attacked him, tearing off his clothes and beating him. Then they ripped the prayer books, made a fire, and burned the holy books and the prayer shawls.

  The next day, Shabbat, a young Jewish boy, retrieving his soccer ball in an Arab garden, was stabbed. The neighborhood erupted; Arabs and Jews were injured. A few days later, the young boy died. Thousands of Jews joined the funeral cortège as the shocked parents walked beside the body of their son.

  The procession was moving down Jaffa Road when gangs of Arabs broke into the Jewish quarter and attacked the mourners. British and Arab policemen mounted on horseback charged into the crowd, brandishing clubs, chasing people in all directions. The men carrying the boy’s body were beaten on the head, forced to put the body down and to run from the police. Amid all the running and beating and yelling, the body of the young boy was left alone. Hours later, his family crept back through the quiet streets to bury their son.

  Sunday afternoon Orshansky called the people to return to the auditorium.

  “Raquela,” Mama had said, “you go play with the other children.”

  Most of the parents had decided to keep their children out of the auditorium; yesterday’s experience had given too many of them nightmares.

  Raquela and a handful of children played their favorite game—racing up and down the wooden planks where someday there would be stairs. But soon she grew tired of the game and tiptoed to the back of the auditorium. She saw Orshansky; his eyes were bloodshot, his mustache bristled. She heard him lash out, “There is not one Jew left in Hebron!”

  “Impossible!” someone shouted.

  Jews had lived in Hebron since the days when Abraham had come and pitched his tent. Here David had reigned for seven and one-half years before he made Jerusalem his capital. Here the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their wives, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, were buried. Hebron was one of the four sacred Jewish cities: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias.

  Orshansky rustled notes in his hands. “Headquarters has just sent us the facts about Hebron. Many of us have relatives and friends there; you will know their names. You know the pharmacist, Ben Zion Gershon. The man who healed hundreds of Arabs. Sixty-five years old. On Shabbat, a gang of Arabs broke into his home. First they cut off his nose and hands. Then they pierced his eyes. They broke the skulls of three of his children, caught his oldest daughter and raped her.”

  Raquela saw Mama sitting against the wall, her face white with horror.

  Orshansky was bitter. “I’ll read you one more. Someone all of us have heard of and whom many of us know—the chief Ashkenazic rabbi, Rav Jacob Joseph Slonim. They broke into the house of his oldest son, Eliezer Dan Slonim—the only Jew in Hebron the British allowed to have a gun for protection. The Arabs chopped his hand off before he could shoot. They killed him, his wife, and his five-year-old son. His wife’s parents were visiting; her father was the chief rabbi of Zichron Yaakov. They were both killed.”

  The room seemed to grow suddenly dark.

  “An eighty-year-old woman, Mrs. Paya Hillman,* the mother of a rabbi, lived in a room in the young Slonim’s house. When they saw the Arabs butchering the Slonims, seventeen people huddled in one room to escape. The Arabs broke in. The old Mrs. Hillman fell to the floor and pretended she was dead. To test her, the Arabs cut her left arm from the elbow right through her hand. She lay there, not moving, not uttering a sound. The Arabs, convinced she was dead, then slaughtered the others and threw them on top of her. Finally, when all was silent in the house, she called out, ‘Get off me. You’re killing me.’ Nobody moved. They were all dead. She lay there bleeding, her head bruised from the boots of the men they had thrown on top of her. Finally, a policeman entered the house and found her moaning. They took her to a hospital in Jerusalem.”

  “What about the rabbi?” Raquela heard Papa’s voice. “Rav Slonim? Is he alive?”

  “The Arab mob moved from young Slonim’s house to his father’s house across the road. They pushed open Rabbi Slonim’s door, screaming, ‘Kill the rabbi! Kill his family!’” Suddenly the noise stopped. The rabbi’s Arab landlord rode his horse up and down in front of the house, shouting to the mob, ‘Over my dead body will you enter this house.’ The rabbi was saved, with his wife and his eight-year-old daughter Rivka.† But he is a broken man.”

  “How many Jews were killed in Hebron?” a woman asked in an anguished voice.

  “Sixty-six murdered,” Orshansky said. “Fifty-eight wounded. Those are the figures we have so far.” He paused. “You’re wondering about the British. When the Arabs attacked, their war cry was ‘Al dawlat ma’ana—the government is with us.’” He looked around the room. The people were silent. “Finally the British officer in Hebron called for police to come in from Jerusalem. Twelve British police and twelve Royal Air Force men arrived. Just twenty-four additional men, and they were enough to drive the Arabs off. Now the police have rounded up not the Arabs but all the Jews of Hebron, more than six hundred, and locked them in the police station. For protection, they say.”

  “Where are the people now?” Josef Weitz, Ranaan’s father, asked.

  “Taken to Jerusalem. Forced to leave everything—books, jewels, family heirlooms—abandon everything to the Arabs. The British have told the Jews they will never again be allowed to live in Hebron.”

  Hebron! The word spread like brushfire through the room.

  Orshansky’s face contorted with anger. “If we need any proof to the world that we can rely only on the Haganah, these riots have shown it. Wherever the Haganah intervened, even with only two or three men, the mobs fled. There was no Haganah in Hebron. The Jews were afraid our men would provoke the Arabs. ‘We’ve been living with Arabs for hundreds of years,’ they said. ‘They’ll do us no harm. We go to one another’s weddings and festivals. We treat their sick in our Hadassah clinic. They’re our friends.’

  “The Haganah didn’t go to Hebron.” Orshansky’s words became a bitter lamentation. “No, we didn’t go to Hebron. Look what happened!”

  Raquela stole out of the auditorium and fled b
ack to the security of her featherbed quilt. She kept hearing the words—Hebron, Motza, Rabbi Slonim—and seeing the Makleff boy in Motza. But she was the boy, hiding under the bed, watching Arab men cut off Mama’s and Papa’s heads.

  Papa found her under the quilt, sobbing hysterically. He lifted her and held her tightly. “We’re safe here, my darling. What you heard—it’s just a few bad Arabs. The Haganah knows how to make them run away.”

  Raquela’s sobs began to subside.

  Papa stroked her hair. “Most of the Arabs are good. Look at Aisha. She would never do these bad things.”

  Raquela lay in his arms, still trembling.

  * * *

  *In 1952, Moti Makleff became chief of staff of the Israel Army.

  *Mrs. Paya Hillman was the great-grandmother of Ambassador Chaim Herzog, former President of Israel.

  †Rivka Slonim later became Mrs. Yosef Burg, whose husband was minister of the interior in the Rabin government and minister of the interior and police in the Begin government. Their son, Avraham Burg, became speaker of the Knesset.

  TWO

  SEPTEMBER 1929

  For two weeks the families lived inside the fortress-school. Occasionally Mama slipped home to get a change of underwear for the children, but with the little grocery shop closed, food soon ran out. Zayda came one morning, walking the three miles with baskets of fresh fruits and bread and jars of chicken soup that Bubba had cooked. The Haganah men guarding the highway to Bet Hakerem tried to stop the little bearded man in black Hassidic garb, warning him of the dangers. He laughed. “God will protect me.”

  The people in the unfinished synagogue crowded around Mama and Papa. They shared not only the food but also the news Zayda brought, for there was not a single telephone in all of Bet Hakerem.

  Another day Zayda slipped past the Haganah lines and brought the good news that he had made a special trip to Señora Vavá’s house. He had found her unharmed, concerned only about her children and her grandchildren. Raquela ran into Zayda’s arms; her beautiful grandmother was safe.