by Adam LeBor
In 1945, at the age of eighteen, Frank joined the Polish armed forces, serving more than two years as a meteorological observer in the air force. At the boarding house where he was billeted, he met a courier for the Polish underground who travelled back and forth between Poland and the Polish government-in-exile in London. From a distance, the courier had seen the extermination of Jews at a death camp. There was still no word from Frank’s parents. When the courier described what he had seen, the smell, the smoke and the piles of corpses, Frank realised they could not have survived. When he was released from the army, Frank studied architecture at Manchester University. There he realised that he was an exile, displaced from a city, Danzig, and a homeland that no longer existed. He was neither a Pole, nor a German, nor British.
Once Frank graduated he was unwilling to stay in England, and unable to go home to Danzig. He decided on Israel. He was not a devout Zionist, but he was a young man ready for adventure. In 1952, Frank went to the Jewish Agency in London to offer his services. ‘I was not so much committed to the Jewish state as I was at a loose end. I had read in a magazine that if you were an architect, they would get you a job in an architect’s office, and so on,’ he recalls. Frank travelled by ship from Venice to Israel and duly started work at an architect’s office in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv in the early 1950s was certainly much sunnier than Manchester, and life was pleasant. He found a flat on Rothschild Boulevard, where the Chelouches lived. ‘I was fairly well paid and it was very easy to meet people. There were cafes, and the girls were nice looking. I had a very busy social life, and I liked the Mediterranean climate and ambience.’
Still there was something strange, even unsettling, about Tel Aviv. The modern Hebrew city was now capital of the Hebrew state. But underneath the apparent normality, disturbing currents swirled. The Holocaust cast a long and dark shadow. The threat of extermination was still real. The Arab armies could return at any moment, to restart the 1948 war. ‘Tel Aviv was a bit crude, rough and ready. I thought Israel was a peculiar country. Very unbalanced, even primitive, with a lot of postwar neurotic and displaced people. I could not speak Hebrew, so I used English. You could go into a shop and speak English because the owners did, and then somebody would shout, “Speak Hebrew!” Sometimes I spoke German. There would often be someone who had been in the camps screaming: “Don’t speak German!”. The country was traumatised by the Kasztner affair. It all felt unstable.’1 When Frank saw Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Herut Party, addressing his followers in downtown Tel Aviv, it reminded him of Danzig and the young Revisionist Zionists who modelled themselves on Italy’s fascist movement. ‘There was a demonstration with Begin on a soapbox, screaming at the crowd, with a lot of Herut thugs. To me they were fascists. They made a clever alliance with the disenfranchised Sephardim, small shopkeepers and petty bourgeoisie.’
The world’s horror at the Nazi genocide hastened diplomatic recognition of Israel. But it took many years for the Holocaust to be internalised as part of Israel’s national identity. In Israel’s early years Holocaust survivors did not feel particularly welcome. There was little interest in hearing their stories. Many Israelis who had spent the Second World War in the comparative safety of Palestine felt guilty when confronted with camp survivors. They did not know how to deal with these new immigrants, most of whom, not surprisingly, were suffering severe psychological problems. One unspoken – and sometimes even spoken – question was: ‘How did you manage to survive when so many died?’ Other Israelis, sure that they would have fought, asked, ‘Why did so many go like lambs to the slaughter?’ Some, especially among the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews, accused the Zionists, in Palestine and Europe, of ‘abandoning’ the Jews, although it was hard to see what the Yiskuv —in international terms a weak and powerless community could have done to stop the Nazi extermination.
Many survivors’ accounts of the horrors they had endured were simply not believed, which only added to their trauma. They had the tattoos of their camp numbers surgically removed from their arms, or kept them hidden under long sleeves. One man told his son that it was his telephone number at work. Yet as Tom Segev notes, there were miracles too. Parents met children they had believed were dead, in chance encounters in shops or cafes. A radio programme called Who Knows broadcast survivors' details in the hope that a relative would still be alive and bring them together.2
The answer was to rebuild the Holocaust survivors as Israeli New Men and Women. The first step was to change their names, a symbolic rejection of the diaspora and its values. Frank was soon pressured to Hebraise Meisler. For those in public life, or who held a senior position in the state, this was virtually compulsory. Golda Myerson became Golda Meir. David Gruen became David Ben-Gurion. Changing names was an integral part of Jewish history. Most of the German-sounding names, of Central Europe’s Jews had no Jewish roots. They had been adopted in the late eighteenth century, as part of the Habsburg Empire’s process of emancipation. Those who could not bribe the official Austro-Hungarian name-changer were usually given the choice of Gross, Klein, Schwartz or Weiss - Big, Small, Black or White. Those who could were allowed more mellifluous choices, such as Rosenfeld – ‘field of roses’, Silberberg – ‘silver mountain’ or Goldberg - ‘golden hill’. The new Hebrew names served the same purpose as the Habsburg ones they often replaced, as did those given at Ellis Island to new immigrants to the United States: they were symbols of a new identity, and statements of loyalty to the host society. Jews from Arab countries had Arabic names, which were easier to Hebraise, or were often sufficiendy Semitic to pass as ’genuine’ Israeli ones.
Soon after he arrived in Tel Aviv, Frank Meisler met David Ben-Gurion and his wife Paula. She told Frank he should change Meisler to Mazaar. ’In those days if you came to Israel and your name was Grunberg, you changed it to Harari, which means mountain. Some relatives of mine had changed their name to Mazaar. Paula Ben-Gurion was a busybody.’ Frank remained, and remains, Meisler, proud of his Ashkenazi Jewish name and the hint of an accent from Mittel Europa. ‘I was brought up in a fragmented environment and I took that to be a natural part of my existence. I was not, let’s say, an uprooted German Jew who is immediately looking for new soil in which to put down roots. I came from a town which had no roots. Danzig was a free city. The people around me were Poles, White Russians, Nazis, Jewish Poles, Polish Poles, Kashubians, and God knows what. There you were everything, or you were nothing.’3
And Israel in the 1950s was a place where Jews, especially the young and the talented, could be everything and anything. Like the United States or Australia, it was a place where people went to reinvent themselves, and few questions were asked if the job got done. Frank recalls: ‘I had a friend from Australia who told me he was an architect there, a sheep-shearer, a baker and had planted eucalyptus trees. There was no structure, you did what you wanted. Israel was like that. If you wanted to be an architect, then you’d study to be one and not expect great honours. Wherever you went, people would ask you where you came from, what you did and how much you were paid. If I told the man selling me a bagel how much I earned, he would drop it, and say, ‘What am I doing here, selling bagels, I should be an architect!”’
"Israel was a young and vibrant country in a state of flux, with tremendous opportunities, not least for party apparatchiks. Frank had two jobs, the first in private practice, and the second in a government office. There he shared space with an 'employee' whose sole function was to report back to his party bosses. 'He did nothing except keep people in line, and make sure they followed the correct political thinking. He was a stooge. Both Mapam and Mapai were corrupt. The ruling elite thought the country was a kind of grocery shop, and you just helped yourself to sugar or rice or whatever you wanted.' On the weekends Frank-often travelled to Jaffa.
A century earlier the British artist David Roberts had also visited Jaffa on his tour through the Levant and the Holy Land. The Arabs he had painted were gone, as were their descendants. But the azure sea stil
l lapped at the beach, and Jaffa’s translucent light always entranced. Frank loved to sketch the port and its surroundings. Like most Israelis in the early 1950s he did not think much about the Palestinians. ‘They were innocent days. The legend was that the Arabs had left, abandoned their buildings, and the Jews came and took them over. There were Arabs in Ajami, but I was not aware of them. The Arabs did not seem to exist. People did not see them, except as a nuisance. Golda Meir said there was no such people as the Palestinians. Where was she, did she need new glasses? But I was shallow then, and I did not know the background.’
In Cairo, the young Mary Hayon had a clearer understanding of the new politics of the Middle East. Mary was twenty years old in 1948, when Israel was established. The Hayons were an old Sephardic family who had lived in Jerusalem for generations, but had moved to Cairo after 1918. Mary, who now lives in Tel Aviv, is a trim and sprightly lady, fluent in Arabic, French and English, as well as Hebrew. Like Fadwa Hammami and Frank Meisler, she grew up in a world now vanished: in her case cosmopolitan pre-war Egypt. The country’s great cities such as Cairo and Alexandria were melting pots, home to Greek and Italian traders, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, White Russians, Armenians and Circassians, Coptic Christians and Muslims. Jews had lived in Egypt for millennia. Most of Egypt’s eighty thousand Jews were Sephardim, but there was an Ashkenazi minority. Many had arrived in the nineteenth century, when Muhammad Pasha, Egypt’s ruler, invited them to settle, to help modernise the country. They were industrialists and politicians, bankers and businessmen. Prominent heads of families were called ‘Bey’ or ‘Pasha’ in recognition of their contribution.
Mary’s family was not part of the elite, but they had a comfortable life. Her father owned a pharmacy on Ibrahim Street, in the middle-class suburb of Heliopolis. ‘There were Sephardic ministers and members of Parliament, literary salons, a real intellectual life. I went to a Jewish school, and then one run by Irish nuns.’ Among Mary’s classmates was a young woman called Dina Abdel Hamid, who later married King Hussein of Jordan. ‘She was a beautiful girl, very sweet. But you couldn’t really be normal friends with her. She was never let out alone. She came to school with a servant and he would sit waiting for her outside the class. He brought her to school and took her home. We would say to her, “Princess, you go first, your slave is waiting for you.”’
Before 1948 Mary could travel with ease from Cairo to Palestine and back. An overnight train ran from Cairo to Ramle. There was no border, as both Egypt and Palestine were under British rule. Egypt’s Jews were seen as an integral part of society but the war with Israel changed everything. Mary was working for the newspaper Le Progrés Egyptien, many of whose staff were Jewish. ‘I did not feel anti-Semitism when I was growing up. It started after 1948, once Egypt and the Arab countries were beaten by little Israel. But even when I lived in Egypt I did not feel that it was my country. We knew that we would eventually come back to Israel. When you know that, you don’t feel at home somewhere else. Even though I was born there my roots were not there. My parents were not born there. They had no stories to tell me about Egypt.’
In the second half of 1948, a series of bombs in Cairo’s Jewish quarter killed more than seventy Jews and injured over two hundred. The exodus of one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities began.4 Mary Hayon decided to emigrate to Israel in 1951, and the following year a group of army officers, including Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Farouk in a bloodless coup. Egypt’s transformation into a Socialist state began with the destruction of the old multi-ethnic society; the Jews and other minorities were easy scapegoats. Nasser appeared to take Israel’s continued existence personally. He had fought in the 1948 war, and his battalion had been trapped for weeks by Israeli forces. The Jews, Greeks, and Italians who ran much of the economy packed their bags. Businesses closed, capital flowed out of the country, poverty and unemployment soared. Nasser’s policies quickly transformed Egypt’s ethnic mosaic into a near-homogenous nation-state. Xenophobia and anti-Semitism flourished. Mary recalls: ‘It changed after Nasser took power and became much nastier. If you mentioned Israel you had to say “the so-called state of Israel”. My parents were frightened. We could not communicate directly. We wrote to each other through a third party in France.’
Mary had been drafted into the Israeli army when she arrived in Jerusalem. One day, soon after she was demobbed, she met a relation while out walking. He was a distant cousin of her grandfather, handsome, vigorous and good-humoured, with thick black hair and a ready smile. ‘I was not happy in the army, my parents were still in Cairo. He asked me out to dinner. I thought, why not? He came from a very good family. That’s how it started, it went very fast.’ Soon afterwards, Mary’s boyfriend proposed. She accepted, and became Mrs Shlomo Chelouche. But the young newlyweds would not stay long in Jerusalem. A little over a century earlier, Shlomo’s great-grandfather, Avraham Chelouche, had travelled from Oran in Algeria to Palestine. Soon it would be Shlomo’s turn to travel back to north Africa. There he and Mary would run a perilous clandestine operation, bringing the Jews of north Africa to Israel.
14
Repopulating Jaffa
1950s
I looked for Jews who wanted a change.
Shlomo Chelouche, on his mission in north Africa
in the 1950s to aid Jewish emigration to Israel
By the summer of 1951, Ahmad Hammami had sold his last Persian carpet, while Nafise and her daughters had no more jewellery left. Ahmad had tried everything he could to restart his citrus or dry goods business in Lebanon, but it was an impossible venture for a refugee without funds, proper papers or permits, the citizen of a country that no longer existed. With the resilience of youth, Hasan Hammami adapted more easily to life in exile. He enrolled at the American University in Beirut, and quickly found his feet in a very different world to that of pre-1948 Palestine. ‘Coming from a conservative Islamic background in Jaffa, where I went to an all-boys Catholic school, I was suddenly surrounded by the most gorgeous girls in the world,’ says Hasan. He studied hard, learnt to tango and to rumba, and to ski. But Hasan was also the eldest boy, and as the family’s funds drained away he knew what had to be done. ‘With no hint from anyone, I understood that my responsibility was to get a job to support my parents and siblings.’
He turned down job offers in Libya and Kuwait, and moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to work as a translator for Aramco on a salary of $110 a month. He sent $100 to his parents, and kept $10 for himself. Like Beirut, Dhahran was also a culture shock, but one a good deal less pleasant. ‘I lived in a shoddy work camp, and experienced real racism for the first time in my life. Everything – facilities, services and salaries – was divided into three classes, and we were the lowest. Even the water fountain was reserved for Americans, although I drank from it.’ But there were weekends at the beach with his new friends, and Hasan earned extra money teaching French. The strict masters at St Joseph’s in Jaffa had taught Hasan well. Better still, he was eventually granted Saudi citizenship, with a proper passport, and this would open up new possibilities for work and study.
Mary Chelouche could not understand why the young man she had just greeted had completely ignored her. How many Israeli Jews could there be walking the streets of Casablanca? They had met socially, but now he had walked straight past her without even a smile. By the early 1950s, Mary and Shlomo had relocated to the Moroccan port city, travelling on French passports. The kibbutz movement, Israeli political parties, government departments, the Jewish Agency and American Jewish organisations had all opened offices there, planning the emigration of Morocco’s 265,000 Jews.1 Mary worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, while Shlomo was working undercover for the Israeli government, setting up a complicated series of fund transfers so that Moroccan Jews could move their assets out of the country when they finally left for Israel. Mary’s friend did not acknowledge her because he was an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, which arranged the details of the cla
ndestine emigration.
Morocco, like the rest of the Arab world, did not recognise Israel. There were no official relations between the two countries, but there were covert links. The Moroccan royal family did not share the visceral anti-Semitism of many Arab leaders. Moroccan Islam was more tolerant, influenced by its close ties to Spain, where the Jews had enjoyed a golden age under Islamic rule before the Catholic reconquista and their expulsion in 1492. Many Jews then emigrated to Morocco, although they were forced to live in special quarters of the city, known as the mellah. During the Second World War, King Muhammad V had resisted the demands of Vichy France to deport Morocco’s Jews, replying, ‘We have no Jews in Morocco, only Moroccan citizens.’ The fortunes of the Jews had waxed and waned under Islam, but Moroccan Jews were integrated into society and enjoyed considerable religious and legal autonomy. Most did not want to leave.
It is one of the darker ironies of Jewish history that political Zionism, the European movement which aimed to ensure the Jews’ peace and security, greatly imperilled the ancient Jewish communities of the Middle East. The establishment of Israel destroyed the fine balance between Jews and Muslims in the Arab states. Islamic tolerance of Jews did not extend to them founding their own country. Across the Arab world many Jews feared for their future in the new independent, post-colonial regimes. The upsurge in nationalism bred anti-Semitism and xenophobia. The ancient and prosperous Iraqi Jewish community was viciously persecuted: Jews were sacked from their jobs, large numbers were arrested, tortured and jailed, and their properties confiscated. Zionism was declared a criminal offence, and a Jewish businessman was hanged in public for selling trucks to Israel. In 1950 and 1951 Israel organised operations Ezra and Nehemiah to airlift out 120,000 Jews, 95 per cent of the community. The Jews were permitted to leave Iraq with little more than the clothes in which they travelled.