by Ruth Gruber
There were, of course, people who were reluctant to pull up roots. Rabbi Sassoon remained their leader, continuing to speak openly against Israel and against the Jews who had deserted their ancient homeland. But the lives of those who stayed became more and more endangered, until 1969, two years after the victorious Six-Day War. The Arabs were so inflamed by Israel's victory that they hanged nine Iraqi Jews in the marketplace in Baghdad.
In Israel, the Iraqis integrated swiftly into their new life, largely, I think, because they came with their leaders—their educators, doctors, lawyers, financial wizards, and social workers. Dr. Meir Sassoon came with his wife and family and soon found a job. Shlomo Hillel, who helped organize the secret rescue, was born in Baghdad in 1923 and came to the Holy Land when he was ten years old; he became minister of police, then speaker of the Knesset and a delegate to the United Nations. He and his German-Jewish wife, Temima, moved into my building, where our friendship began.
It was fascinating to see how many Iraqi Jews, like Shlomo Hillel, married German Jews in Israel. Though both groups integrated well, in the totem pole of immigrants they were a rung below the Russian and Polish Jews who had preceded them, until the schools and Army integrated them all.
An Iraqi Jewish woman arrives in Israel on a top-secret airlift, 1951.
Iraqi Jews, living in Israel, patiently wait for their relatives to arrive.
My husband, Phil, and I traveled through North Africa with an old friend, Lou Horwitz, the director of the JDC for North Africa, and with Rafael, a jovial multilingual friend of Lou's, who was both our interpreter and guide.
Just as we approached Matmata, Tunisia, a village where both Jews and Arabs lived in caves dug into the sides of hills, the gasoline line in our car became clogged. Rafael stayed to work on the car while we climbed up to the marketplace. Then Phil went into town to help Rafael bring up the car. He was gone barely five minutes when Lou and I were accosted by two long-robed, barefooted Arabs. One of them carried a police stick and a threatening knife. They motioned us to stand with our hands against the wall, and began yelling at us. With no one to interpret, I had no idea what they wanted.
Their yelling became louder and more menacing when suddenly bells began to ring from a mosque, summoning the devout to prayer. I took a deep breath. From the corner of my eye, I saw our captors reverently place their weapons on the ground, kneel, rest their foreheads on the ground, and start praying. Around us, the sounds of donkeys, camels, and horses filled my ears.
Phil and Rafael returned with the car. The two Arabs motioned to Lou and me to get in the front of the car, and they then climbed into the back.
After talking with them, Rafael explained, “They're taking us up the mountain to the French military outpost.”
“Are we being arrested?” I asked.
“I don't know,” he said.
When we arrived, a young, slim-waisted commander of the French Foreign Legion in full pantaloons and gold-trimmed jacket met us. He listened to the Arabs carefully. “I apologize profusely for discommoding you,” he said. “They couldn't figure out who you were. I think you may have frightened them.”
He invited us into his office and then set us free.
Some 4,500 Jews lived in an unbroken mirror of history on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, 1951. Djerba was said to be the enchanted island whose perfumed lotus flowers made Ulysses forget his wife and home. Djerba residents prepared their children for the journey to begin a new life in Israel.
What differentiated that North African exodus from the others was that the leaders either went first or, like captains of a sinking ship, went last.
My husband, our friend Lou Horwitz, our guide Rafael, and I sailed to Djerba on a small fishing smack.
Waiting for us as we docked was Mrs. Trabelsine, a massive woman with soft skin, silky black hair, and huge eyes, wearing a red-and-gold-striped robe, earrings, bracelets, and great hooped anklets. Her bare feet were intricately tattooed with henna dye.
She led us to her home. The dominant note was timelessness. There was neither plumbing, nor electricity, nor movies to teach the islanders the odd ways of the outside world. The age of anxiety and confusion had not yet reached Djerba.
On Djerba, where the Jews filled two villages, there was no anti-Semitism. “Yet,” Mr. Trabelsine told us, “at least 80 percent of the people here want to leave for Israel.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“All around us are Arab countries. These countries hate Jews. We think the hatred will come here next. We have to leave while we can get out.”
Mothers and babies assembled in a courtyard before they were allowed to enter a baby-bathing center in Tripoli, 1951.
Phil and I traveled to Morocco in 1951, while on our working honeymoon. We visited schools, hospitals, workshops, marketplaces, and people's homes as we traveled from Casablanca through Rabat and Fez to Marrakech. This was Churchill's favorite vacation spot, where he painted landscapes. We were as enchanted by the Arab children we met as they were curious about us.
Marrakech, 1952. Arabs generally fled from my camera. This beautiful but modest Arab woman recognized that we were no threat and allowed me to photograph her.
Ourika, 1952. My thirst for adventure was tested one night in Morocco when our car broke down in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Suddenly, the sound of horses' hooves interrupted the dark silence. Arab horsemen were riding so swiftly that the earth trembled. The wind was blowing through our open windows when Lou whispered to me, “Unless someone happens to come by and find us, we're in serious trouble. I don't know how much money you and Phil are carrying, but I'll wager it's more than these Arab horsemen will make in a year. If they get any idea that Americans are in this car, the least they will do is rob us blind.”
The sound of the horses' hooves was beginning to fade when a man driving by in a car discovered us. The driver stepped out, yelled at the horsemen in Arabic, and the horsemen rode off. The driver worked on our car and finally got it started. My heart stopped pounding.
Moroccan Jewish women traditionally cover their heads with colorful scarves. Mothers rarely separated from their children.
Marrakech, 1952. Everywhere we went in Morocco, we found people packing up, preparing to leave. Most of the wealthy people left for Paris; the others left for Israel. Often, I asked the people, “What do you hope to find in Paris or in Israel?”
Their answers were straightforward. A successful entrepreneur in the import-export business told Phil, Lou, Rafael, and me at a lavish dinner in his home, “We feel we are really French Jews. We will make a better life for ourselves and for our children in Paris.”
“But you're doing so well here,” I said.
He put his finger on his lips. “It is growing too dangerous to stay.”
Another Moroccan Jew, who was leaving shortly for Israel, spoke passionately. “Israel is our land. Our people have lived in Israel for over three thousand years. The Lord gave it to us. It's all in the Bible. We were there long before Christians came and much longer before Muslims came. Yet we are still regarded as strangers. We belong in Israel.”
Unlike the adults, the children in the ghettos of Casablanca did not fear our cameras. They raced through the streets to be photographed.
Casablanca had recent historical meaning because Roosevelt and Churchill met there in 1943 for one of their summits. There were beautiful white villas for the rich Moroccans. The poor Jews had their ghetto; the Arabs had theirs.
During the war, many Greek Jews were saved by a Greek prime minister who said that they were not really Greek citizens but Sephardic Jews. He issued them special passports for travel to Casablanca, and they survived.
Aboys' school, Casablanca, 1952. American Jews, through the JDC, sent teachers and doctors to help prepare the boys for the life they would soon lead in Israel.
Though “Casablanca” means “white house” in Spanish, the prevailing color of the town when I first visited it in 1944 was a di
smal brown. The houses were brown, the donkeys were brown, even the dust-ridden air was brown. Only the djellabas, the long robes worn by men, and the kaftans, worn by women, were white. Only in the wealthier areas of Casablanca were some houses actually white.
The boys receive instruction in the language and culture of Israel.
The Jewish university in Casablanca, called the Alliance Israelite University, one of the finest schools in Casa.
Caring mothers had to feed their children on mere scraps of food on the streets of Casablanca.
Catholics ran a boys' school in Meknes, Morocco, a city founded in the eleventh century.
Vocational training, here in a school in Fez, Morocco, was vital for rebuilding the world.
The Ingathering of Jews from Romania, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia
1951–1986
Our country is only three years old,” Ben-Gurion told me at teatime with his wife, Paula, in the spring of 1951. He sounded as amazed as I was at the speed with which ships and planes were coming in loaded with immigrants. “We've already grown from 650,000 in 1948,” he said, “to one million. If you come back in five years, we'll have five million.”
There were no more hurdles in Israel, no more British warships barring this flood tide of immigrants. The very first law passed was the Law of Return. It declared that any Jew from any country in the world was welcome. No one asked if the newcomers were blind or sighted, strong or maimed, rich or poor. The moment they stepped on Israeli soil, they were citizens.
To meet a ship at Haifa or a plane at the airport, as I did frequently; to watch Israel's young women soldiers from the Women's Army Corps, called Chen (which means “charming”), run up the gangway to help carry babies in their arms or guide the faltering steps of the old or the blind; to catch a lump in your throat as you see families uniting; to watch strong men and women sob as they embraced parents they had not seen for ten years or more; to know that the years of running from anti-Semitic countries and Arab riots were over, to be safe in their own land—this was for the refugees, as it was for me, the essence of Israel.
I spent weeks breaking bread and drinking tea with the newcomers, visiting schools and youth centers, farms and factories, hospitals and clinics. It seemed obvious that a country that had so hurriedly rescued a million refugees could solve all the problems of integrating them. There were thousands who needed public assistance. They were the unemployed and the unemployable—people who had eaten the bread and worn the clothes of poverty.
Eliezer Kaplan, Israel's first minister of finance, who laid the foundations for Israel's tax structure, told me at dinner one evening, “What we need mostly is money to help take care of all these newcomers.”
“I know you need money,” I said, “but what are the problems you have that money alone can't resolve?”
“Taking people from the fifteenth century,” he said thoughtfully, “and teaching them to live in the twentieth. Taking people who have no skills and teaching them to work. Taking people who have no idea what a bathroom is for, no idea how to use knives and forks, and teaching them how to live. We are having a revolution here. A social, economic, technological, and, most important of all, human revolution.”
With scarce housing, the Israeli government did what most countries do in a crisis: they opened huge camps and housed people in Army tents. One day, during a heavy rainstorm, I entered a tent outside of Haifa. A woman wearing the long skirt and blouse of Morocco, with a scarf tied around her head, pulled up her skirt to show me the mud and dirt that came up to her knees. I left her tent, determined to help her and others get decent housing.
As usual I telephoned Ben-Gurion's aide, Nehemia. “I have to see BG,” I told him. BG was our favorite name for Ben-Gurion.
Nehemia called back a few minutes later. “He will see you at four p.m.”
“BG,” I began, sitting across from him at his desk, “I've just come from one of your biggest camps, the one near Haifa. A woman showed me that she was standing in mud up to her knees.”
He sat up in his chair. “Yes? Go on.”
I leaned forward. “Of all the countries in the world, you should not be putting newcomers into camps. Many of these people have been running away from camps. I was connected with a camp in Oswego in upstate New York. It was a former Army camp called Fort Ontario. It had real buildings, not tents. We gave those refugees everything they needed except freedom. They were only allowed to leave the camp for a few hours at a time. In your camps, the people are free to go at any hour. But where can they go? They have no homes, no protection against the weather. In Oswego, I discovered that life in a camp can drive people to madness, even suicide. No matter where you set it down, a camp is a camp is a camp.”
“Write me a report,” Ben-Gurion said.
I spent the whole night writing a long report and ended it by saying:
I learned that not one member of your cabinet has visited a single camp. Camps are never good for human beings. People deteriorate amid the abnormality of camp life. In the camps in Germany and Cyprus, at least there was hope—if they survived, the Holy Land lay ahead. In your camps here in Israel, there is no hope—unless action to shut them down is taken immediately.
I brought the report to Ben-Gurion the next morning and watched him read it, occasionally nodding his head. He called Nehemia. “I want this report translated into Hebrew. And I want every member of my cabinet ordered to visit at least one of the camps.”
He came around his desk and shook my hand. “You are a beria. Do you know what that means?”
I couldn't resist laughing. “My mother is a beria. She's a good housekeeper.”
He waved his hand, annoyed. “That's not what I mean! I mean, you did a good job!”
“BG,” I said soberly, “thank you. I'm going to write about these horrible camps in the New York Herald Tribune. It will also run in the Paris Herald Tribune, and people all over America and Europe will know about these tents.”
His answer was typically Ben-Gurion. “Good! I want the truth known.”
A few months later, Moshe Sharett, Israel's foreign minister, and I were the keynote speakers at a United Jewish Appeal convention in Atlantic City. On the dais, Sharett, sitting next to me, whispered, “Because of you, I had to visit those terrible camps.”
“Did you make any changes?” I whispered back.
“A good part of the government is working on it. We're building new development towns all over the country and planning 30,000 new homes.”
The story of absorbing new immigrants continued to occupy me as I covered the Romanian Jewish immigration in the early 1950s. Ana Pauker, the Communist Jewish dictator of Romania from 1947 to 1952, considered by many to be the most powerful woman leader in the world, agreed to allow her Romanian Jews to sail from her ports to Israel. But pressure from the British, who did not want to jeopardize their relationship with the Arabs and their oil, forced her to shut down the emigration.
Fortunately, the neighboring state of Bulgaria opened its doors and most of the Romanian Jews, as well as Bulgarian Jews, sailed from Bulgaria to the promised land. Covering their arrival night after night, I focused my camera on their joy as they descended from the ships and flung their arms around the relatives waiting for them.
In 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt phoned me in the hotel in Tel Aviv where we were both staying. “I'd like you to take me to a new development town. I want to see how the new immigrants are being absorbed.”
“When do you want to go?” I asked her.
“Tomorrow morning.”
That evening, I visited the development town and met with some of the leaders, who had come primarily from Arab lands.
“Tomorrow morning,” I told them, “I am bringing Mrs. Roosevelt, the widow of the great American president Franklin Roosevelt to meet you.”
In Tel Aviv, in the morning, with an interpreter who spoke many of their languages, Eleanor Roosevelt and I drove into the development town. The people were all out on the ro
ad—there were still no sidewalks—and each woman held a plate in her hands with food I was sure Eleanor Roosevelt had never seen.
With her usual grace and her uncanny ability to reach people, she did what only she would do. She went from one woman to another, tasting the food, and through our interpreter, said, “It is delicious.” The people began to ululate and then cry out, “The Queen of America has come!”
In the years I had spent getting to know her, I had never seen her so radiant. She talked to the people, asked them how they were living, if their children were in school—many of the same questions she had asked the refugees in Oswego in 1944.
Finally, it was time to go. In the car, she suddenly looked sad.
“Did anything happen?” I asked. “Did someone say something to hurt you?”
She shook her head. “I wish I had done more during the war.”
I put my hand on hers. “You tried, but it was government policy that said, ‘First we have to win the war, then we can take care of the refugees.' You couldn't change that policy.”
Three years later, in July 1955, Helen Reid called me to her office. “I know you're leaving soon for Israel to cover the immigrant story. I hope you take a lot of photos. I want to meet you there and have you take me around.”
“It would be a joy.”
A few weeks later, at three a.m., she stepped off the plane at Ben-Gurion Airport. I ran to greet her on the tarmac. She hugged me. “You don't know how excited I am. I can hardly believe I'm here.”