Whiiiiiing! Zaaaaah! Across the fine gray stairs the Arab bullets began to whine. The withdrawing English had assured London that all Jews would be massacred within three days. The Arabs believed they could overrun the area in two. From all sides a constricting, dense, concentrated pressure began to strangle the Jewish quarter and during the first half-hour of fighting many Jewish families had evacuated the houses nearest the lovely stairs. Arab spotters cried, “They’re falling back.”
Zaaaaaah! Unnnnnnh! The bullets splattered into the mud walls of the Jewish houses and after an hour of fighting no Jews could be seen on the other side of the flight. The Arab commander, knowing what a psychological shock the capture of a bridgehead across the stairs would be, gave the order to move out, and in company force the assault was launched. “Itbah il Yahoud—Slaughter the Jews!” cried the Syrians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese as they leaped across the open space.
In the next few minutes Jewish boys and girls seemed to appear from everywhere, for MemMem Bar-El, anticipating this Arab move, had his people well stationed. Moving out from a deserted house Ilana Hacohen fired with deadly calm. Little Vered in her boxlike hat came darting in with her submachine gun spurting. Gottesmann and Bar-El loomed up from a pile of rubble, throwing grenades, while from a roof smiling Nissim Bagdadi fired with cruel effect. The astonished Arabs fell back. They tried to drag their wounded across the stairs, then abandoned them.
“Cease fire!” Bar-El shouted, and the Jews retired. Along the stairs there was no sound but the whimpering of a young Arab from Mosul. And in the Arab quarter men were whispering, “Girls were fighting. With guns.” That night each side acknowledged that if there was going to be a massacre of Jews in Safad, it would not come easily, as in the past.
In the days that followed, MemMem Bar-El issued orders which mobilized the Jewish population of Safad for the task of fortifying the outer rim. Trenches were to be dug connecting vantage points; houses had to be torn down to deny them to Arab snipers; roadblocks were required; and one hundred and seventy-three armed Jews dug in to hold off the assault of some six thousand Arab fighters. Every man and woman had a job to do, and Bar-El sustained in the town a kind of stubborn optimism.
But he failed to impress Rebbe Itzik, who refused to participate in the ungodly work. Each dawn he and his ten fur-hatted elders repaired to the Vodzher synagogue to contemplate the imminent destruction of Safad, and from a repetitious history they were able to select precedents for the manner in which a doomed body of Jews should behave in the last minutes before they perished. Judaism was the only religion with a specific prayer to be uttered “when the knife was at the throat, when the flames were at the feet,” and through the centuries this final reiteration of belief had been used “to lend sanctification to the Holy Name of God.” Peculiar grace had always been accorded those who died at alien hands while still proclaiming belief in the oneness of God, and Rebbe Itzik determined that when the Arabs finally overran the Vodzher Jews a new chapter would be added to the glorious record of Jewish martyrdom.
He was therefore disturbed on Monday morning when he found at his synagogue only seven Jews. “Where’s Schepsel and Avram?” he asked. He noticed that Shmuel was the other absentee. One of the old men said, “They’re breaking rocks,” and the little rebbe rushed out of the synagogue to locate his followers. He found them working under the direction of MemMem Bar-El, breaking rocks taken from demolished houses. The resulting stones were to be jammed in between boards, thus providing bulwarks that would stop rifle bullets. Many cartloads of stones were needed to protect the Jewish houses facing the stairs, and the three Vodzher Jews were doing the job with sweat pouring from beneath their fur hats.
“Schepsel!” the rebbe cried. “Why aren’t you in synagogue?”
“I’m working to hold back the Arabs,” the old Jew replied, and no argument that Rebbe Itzik could advance sufficed. Three of his battalion were gone.
Later that morning he received an additional shock, for he found Ilana Hacohen, gun over shoulder, organizing the young girls of his congregation into a defense team, whose job it would be to carry stones to the old men and to provide meals for the Palmach.
“Come back, little Esther!” he called, but the girls had found a more inspiring leader, and the old man shuddered when Esther shouted to him, “Ilana says that when the next rifles come I can have one.” The girl, Avram Ginsberg’s daughter, was thirteen.
But when Ilana had her girls well organized she did an unexpected thing: she stopped by Rebbe Itzik’s home intending to explain what was being accomplished in defending Safad, for the MemMem had growled, “See if you can win the old goat over.” When she pushed open the door to the shoemaker shop she was met by the rebbe’s old wife, a Russian peasant woman who was cooking soup. Ilana tried to speak to her, but the rebbetzin knew only Russian and Yiddish, and Ilana refused to use the latter language. In a moment the rebbe appeared, surprised to find the armed sabra sitting in his home. The meeting was bizarre, for as an ultra-orthodox rebbe he deemed it improper either to touch or to look at a woman other than his wife, so that when they finally spoke it was as if each sat in a separate room.
“We drove away four Arab sorties last night,” said Ilana in Hebrew.
“It is the will of God that Israel should be punished for its sins,” he replied in Yiddish.
“But not by Arabs.”
“In the past God used Assyrians and Babylonians. Why not Arabs?”
“Because the Assyrians could defeat us. The Arabs can’t.”
“How dare you be so arrogant?”
“How dare you be so blind?”
On Wednesday, during the third day of their renewed discussion, Ilana had the distinct impression that in some contradictory way the little rebbe took pleasure in what she was doing, for apropos of nothing that had been said he cried, “The daughters of Israel are fair,” and to her surprise she replied, “We’re trying to build an Israel you will be proud of.” He looked at his folded hands and said, “Can you accomplish this if you are so arrogant? Why don’t you marry the tall Ashkenazi?” And her stubborn reply, in Hebrew, distressed the old man: “We are married.”
Nevertheless, the slight rapport increased when Ilana brought Vered with her, and the rebbe came upon them as they were eating the rebbetzin’s herbs and boiled water. “Of one thing I am proud,” the little man said.
“The barricades we’ve built?” Ilana asked.
“No,” Itzik replied. “The fact that in all Safad, when food is so scarce, no Jew operates a black market.”
“If he tried,” Vered said, “MemMem would shoot him.”
“How old are you?” the rebbe asked, looking out of the corner of his eye at her almost childlike appearance.
“Seventeen,” Vered replied.
“Is your father religious?”
“Yes. He doesn’t know where I am.”
“His heart must ache,” the rebbe said, muttering a prayer over the two girls.
Then the rapport was shattered. On the evening of April 23, the beginning of their second Shabbat in Safad, MemMem Bar-El felt in his bones that the Arabs were due to attack, and he feared that the attempt would be made on Saturday, when it was logical to suppose that the Jews would be at worship, so on Friday afternoon he summoned all available hands to erect an additional barrier; and the Jews were silently moving boards and rocks when Rebbe Itzik loomed out of the growing darkness.
“What are you doing on Shabbat?” he demanded in Hebrew.
“Building a wall,” Bar-El replied.
“Stop!” the little man cried.
“Rebbe, go home to your prayers!” Bar-El pleaded. The outraged rebbe sought to prevent the men from continuing their work and it became apparent that his protests might alert the Arabs, so the MemMem clamped his hand over the little man’s mouth, swung him around and passed him along to Nissim Bagdadi. “Get him out of here,” Bar-El ordered.
The Iraqi Jew, weighing at least twice as much as the r
ebbe, easily carried him away from the urgent work and lugged him to the shoemaker shop, where he called for Ilana, telling her, “Keep him home. We’ve got to build a wall.” So Ilana went to the rebbe’s house and sat with him, grimly silent, until the emergency work was completed. Toward dawn the old man predicted in Yiddish, “God will curse that wall. God will curse any army that works on Shabbat.”
But the real crisis came with Passover, when Arab pressure was heavy and MemMem insisted that two critical rows of houses be strengthened with bulwarks, even if other houses had to be torn down to provide the rocks. Work commenced on the eve of Passover, and Rebbe Itzik, hearing the hammers and the shovels, became frenzied. He ran among the bending workmen, the fringes of his shawl brushing across their eyes and reminding them of their own fathers at prayer on this holy day. He pleaded with them to desist from profaning the day, but they pointed out that Rabbi Goldberg and Rav Loewe, recognizing an hour of peril, had granted full permission to transgress either Passover or Shabbat. “So we’re working,” the men replied.
Now the decision of Rabbi Goldberg and Rav Loewe was one honored by nearly two thousand years of Jewish history, for the Greeks and the Romans, knowing of the Jews’ refusal to move on Shabbat, had always tried to select that day for their major offensives and by this tactic had won easy victories until the rabbis of Akiba’s time had pronounced the principle that when a man or a nation was in peril of its life any provision of the Torah might be put in abeyance, except those regarding murder, incest or apostasy. MemMem Bar-El, relying upon that judicious precedent, had appealed to the rabbis for a declaration that the present siege was such a mortal moment and they had agreed. The soldiers could work. But to Rebbe Itzik the law was holier than the preservation of an unborn state which had no right to exist, and he stormed the streets calling down imprecations.
“Get him out of here,” Bar-El pleaded, and again Ilana was given the job of keeping the old man at home; and in these moments of tension occurred a most regrettable incident, one that Ilana would often wish had been avoided.
She and Bagdadi led the rebbe home, fending off a few of his devoted followers who wanted to know, “What are you doing with our rebbe?” Bagdadi returned to the front, where the work continued. In the shoemaker’s room, where Rabbi Zaki the Martyr had offered his common sense to the people of Safad, Ilana sat with the blue-eyed Rebbe of Vodzh and balked almost all he tried to do.
“I should be at the synagogue,” he protested.
“You were at the synagogue,” she said, “and you left to make trouble. Sit down.”
“Do you think that God will bless a state that works on Passover?” he threatened.
“We’ll get the state, then we’ll worry about God and His Passover,” she replied.
The blasphemy was horrible. “Unless we go back to the old ways, any Israel you get will be ashes in the mouth.”
This kind of reasoning disgusted Ilana and she asked, contemptuously, “Rebbe Itzik, do you really believe that obsolete ideas generated in Poland three hundred years ago represent the will of God?”
“What do you mean?” the old man sputtered.
“The uniform you wear. There was never anything like that in Israel. It’s straight out of the Polish ghetto.”
“The fringes …” the rebbe cried.
“That coat,” she interrupted with amused disgust. “That didn’t come from Israel and we don’t want it here. That fur hat. That blackness. That gloom. All from the ghetto.”
Rebbe Itzik stepped back, appalled. This brazen girl was challenging the symbols of his life, the honored traditions of ten generations of holy men in Vodzh. “This is the dress of God,” he began.
“Don’t tell me that!” she cried, cutting off his claim. “It’s a badge of shame forced upon us by Gentile overlords.” It was then that she lost her control for a moment, so appalled by what this frightened little man proposed doing to her impending land of Israel. Unfortunately, she chanced to look at the rebbetzin, standing by the fire—where Elisheba of Gretz had stood, caring for her three orphaned children who had later accomplished so much in Israel—and in a moment of fury Ilana brushed her hand across the old woman’s head, knocking her hair to the floor. The rebbetzin stood in shame, her bald-shaved head exposed in all its knobs and veins. Her wig lay on the stones.
“May God forgive you,” the rebbe whispered in a voice of anguish, terrified to think that any Jewish girl would do such a thing. He stooped, picked up the wig and returned it to his wife. The rebbetzin placed it clumsily on her bald head, then felt for the edges to adjust them to her temples. She looked pathetic and ridiculous and her husband gave the wig a small twist, setting it right.
“Get out of here,” he whispered hoarsely in Yiddish.
But Ilana, having done the thing, refused to move. “Where is such a custom in Talmud?” she cried. “In medieval Poland they used to shave the heads of brides so that Gentile noblemen wouldn’t demand to sleep with them on the wedding night. To make them ugly … repulsive to everyone but their husbands. So to this day you make your brides shave their heads to make them ugly—then you buy them wigs to make them beautiful. What kind of Mickey Mouse is this?”
“Get out of here,” the rebbe whispered again. “A Jewish girl who would insult an old woman. What kind of Israel are you building?” With unexpected force he pushed the Palmach girl, the bobbed-haired sabra, from his house.
Ilana stood in the dark street for some minutes and heard from nearby houses the sounds of Passover celebrations, conducted in this hour of travail. What had she done? She saw the baldheaded rebbetzin, with her wig in the dust. Suddenly she pressed her face into her hands and shivered, for she was spiritually alone.
She was standing thus when Gottesmann came back from the building for some food, and he pulled her hands down from her face and saw that she was crying. “What’s happened, Lan?” he asked.
“I struck …” She could not form the words, but her husband guessed that they had to do with the Vodzher Rebbe, so he kissed his wife and told her to stay where she was. Gently pushing open the door he entered to speak with the rebbe, and after a while came back, very soberly, saying nothing, to take Ilana’s hand.
“Where are we going?” she inquired.
“To apologize.”
“No!” she protested.
“You come here,” he whispered with fire in his voice. He dragged her back unwillingly and placed her before the old rebbetzin. “My wife wishes to apologize,” he said in Yiddish.
Silence. Twist of the arm. Silence. Another twist. Then in Hebrew, “I’m sorry …”
“In Yiddish,” Gottesmann whispered.
“I’m sorry,” his wife repeated in Hebrew. He twisted her arm again, hurtfully, and she said for the third time in Hebrew, “I’m sorry. In the street I cried for shame.” She pulled her arm away from her husband’s grip and covered her face.
Gottesmann, mortified by the scene, was about to take his wife from the room she had insulted when the old rebbetzin intervened. “Children, it’s Passover,” she said. “You shall greet Elijah here.” And she forced both Gottesmann and Ilana back into the center of the room to help her celebrate what she suspected would be her last Passover. “Find the leaven!” she whispered with the excitement of her youth, and Gottesmann felt a great lump rise in his throat as he realized that this old woman on this Passover of doom had secreted bits of leavened bread about her house, even though she could not possibly have known that she would have visitors. So, halfway between panic and fantasy, he poked into obvious places and cried, like a child years ago in Gretz, “Mother! I’ve found some leaven you overlooked,” and with embarrassment, as if she were a careless housewife, she burned it in the fire, as the Torah commanded.
Thus the house was purified. She brought her guests rickety chairs and served the pitiful shreds of food she had set aside for this holy feast: the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread, but no meat, for Safad was starving. She had, however, managed to find two
beets, from which she had made one weak cupful of the traditional red soup symbolizing the Red Sea: in old Russia she had made bucketfuls for Passover. Then her husband tied his belt tightly, put on his sandals and took a stave, so as to be ready for immediate departure should the Lord command, and the four celebrants wrapped bits of unleavened bread in small parcels to be slung over their backs as if they, too, were fugitives fleeing Egypt. And finally the rebbe poured a little Safad wine into their glasses, after which he prayed, “ ‘Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive until this moment.’ ”
To Gottesmann the moment was unbearably painful. The last Jewish feast he had attended in Gretz with his large and illustrious family had been the Passover of 1935. His Great-Uncle Mordecai had read kiddush that night and fifty-five glasses of wine had been poured, for Scholem the novelist, for Yitzhak the professor of chemistry, for Rachel who had pioneered social work in Hamburg, for five rabbis, two poets, three musicians and a handful of honest businessmen. It had been a Passover of singing and sorrow, for Gottesmann’s father had foreseen what must transpire and later that week had sent his son Isidore to Holland. Fifty-five glasses had been filled with wine that night as the great family sang, “ ‘One kid, one kid for two zuzim,’ ” and of the fifty-five all but two were to die in the holocaust. “ ‘Who has enabled us to reach this moment,’ ” the Vodzher Rebbe prayed, and Gottesmann felt that he could not accept this moment; he experienced a recurrence of the dizziness that had overtaken him that morning in the heart of the Arab villages. Very carefully he placed both hands about his wineglass to control their shaking.
When the prayer ended the rebbetzin left the table and opened the door slightly, so that a stranger passing in the street might have access, while her husband poured a fifth glass of wine and placed it aside, should the stranger enter; and then began one of the profound, sweet moments of Jewish life, which that night saved Gottesmann’s sanity. At Passover, which is a joyous feast celebrating the deliverance of Jews from Egyptian bondage and their flight into freedom, it was customary for the youngest male child of the family to ask in a song-song voice four traditional questions whose answers would explain Passover, and having no male children the rebbe and his wife and Gottesmann turned to Ilana, as their loved child, and she blushed.
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