by Ruth Gruber
It was still dark as we drove up the Hills of Judea. “One always goes up to Jerusalem,” I told her. “In Hebrew, it's called aliyah, the going up. The going up to the Golden City on the Hill.”
“Aliyah,” she repeated. “It sounds like a prayer.”
Dawn was beginning to gnaw at the darkness as we entered Jerusalem. In that early morning light, the city spread before us with its ancient stone houses, narrow, winding streets, and crenellated walls. “I've been waiting to see this for years,” she said. I thought I saw tears forming in her eyes.
After helping her settle into her suite at the King David Hotel, I joined her, sitting on the terrace. We were both silent, staring down at the Old City of Jerusalem. Finally, she spoke. “What are the plans for the day?”
“The government,” I told her, “is bringing water to the Arab people in Nazareth for the first time in history. Would you be too tired to go?
“Absolutely not.”
“We should be ready at eight this morning.”
Exactly at eight, we were in the dining room. She had changed from her white Chanel suit into a cool white cotton skirt and blouse. On her head was a matching white beret made for her by Frederick, the most famous milliner of the day. The beret was her trademark.
After breakfast, we waited for Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who had succeeded Ben-Gurion, to pick us up. The King David Hotel lobby was buzzing with visitors as we sat in comfortable armchairs. Helen, always the journalist, said, “Tell me something about the new prime minister.”
“He's a well-trained, cosmopolitan diplomat. He came from Russia as a child and went to school here. He speaks seven languages fluently, including Arabic. His English is flawless, and he has made friends with leaders around the world.”
In half an hour, Sharett, in a spotless white suit, appeared. “Mrs. Reid,” he said as he took Helen's hand, “it is such an honor for us to share this day with you.”
I watched Helen study his face as she accepted his welcome. He was handsome, with white hair, a carefully tended white mustache, and dark brown eyes shaded by heavy eyebrows,
“Your Paris Herald Tribune,” he told her, “is our guide to what's happening in Europe and the Middle East.”
She smiled graciously. “You're very kind.” In minutes we were in Sharett's limousine, driving down the Hills of Judea. By midmorning we had reached Nazareth, the biblical Arab city where Jesus had grown up. Israeli flags were flapping in the wind as we entered a huge outdoor amphitheater. Arab men in djellabas and striped kaffiyehs sat on long benches, side by side with Jewish men in white shirts and blue shorts. Water, I thought. Water is bringing Jews and Arabs together in Nazareth.
Sharett led us toward the dais, a long table covered in a white cloth with bottles of orange juice and Israeli soda called Gazoz. He introduced us to his wife, Zipporah, who was as tiny as Helen, with a ruddy face and gray hair knotted in a bun. We met the Arab mayor of Nazareth, several Arab and Jewish dignitaries, and the first two Arabs elected to the Knesset. It was as if we were seeing the future we dreamed of, the future of cooperation and peace.
Sharett then escorted us down from the dais to chairs in front of the speakers' table. I felt he wanted us to hear every word and to become a vital part of this unique day.
The speeches began. Sharett was first, talking of the water and the coming elections for the Knesset. He was followed by Bishop Hakim, a Greek Orthodox bishop, who quoted Genesis.
An attractive Arab woman in a fashionable blue-flowered dress walked to the microphone. In perfect English, she said, “I am a housewife. No longer will we have to go to the Well of the Virgin to draw water. Now we will have water in our taps. No longer will we have to carry water on our heads. Now we will be able to go to the beauty parlor and get permanent waves.”
Sharett waited for the laughter to subside, then walked toward a large wheel decorated gaily with blue-and-white crepe paper. Helen and I jumped up, the better to see him turning the wheel. A torrent of water rushed through three giant steel pipes. Arab and Jewish children ran to the water, shouting and drenching themselves under the miraculous spray.
The next ten days flew by as we traveled across the country, interviewing people and shooting rolls of film. Each day was a new adventure. We were in Haifa one evening at the Megiddo Hotel when Haifa's mayor, Abba Hushi, dropped in.
“Is there anything special you would like to see?” he asked.
“I know your elections are coming up,” Helen said. “I would like to see how you vote.”
Early the next day, the mayor drove us to a polling place where Arabs and Jews were voting together, putting slips of paper into boxes marked for the parties they favored.
“Many of these Arabs and many of the new immigrants,” Abba Hushi said, “are learning the essence of democracy.”
“Some of them,” Helen observed, “look as if they're entering a sacred place, a place of worship.”
Abba Hushi was pleased. “It is sacred. We are the only democracy in the Middle East. In Haifa, we have very good relations with our Arab neighbors. We live next to each other in harmony.”
We spent the next hours visiting schools, hospitals, the oil refinery—the fabric of a carefully run city.
Helen shook Abba Hushi's hand to say good-bye. “Come to America,” she said, “and I will make you mayor of New York City.”
Helen's stay was winding down when we drove to the Sharon Hotel in Herzlia, a modern city outside of Tel Aviv. Ben-Gurion and Paula were vacationing there.
Knowing this would be the most important of all the interviews Helen had held, I stuffed my bag with a fresh notebook and rolls of film that later, printed up, filled a whole album.
BG and Paula were waiting for us on the hotel deck. Helen extended her hand to BG, vigorously. “You must be so proud of all you've done in seven years,” she said.
He shook his head. “It's just a beginning.”
“But you've done so much.”
“We had to,” he said. “It was a question of life.”
I sat beside her, writing their words in my notebook. A waiter arrived and took our orders for tea. “Before the state,” BG said, “we had to bring our people into the country under the restrictions of the British mandate. Then, in 1939, the British White Paper stopped all Jewish immigration. So we brought them in on all kinds of ships. We had ships like the Exodus 1947 and we had to fight not only the Arabs, but also the British warships.”
“Do you think you will have peace with your Arab neighbors?” Helen asked.
Ben-Gurion lowered his head as if the problem of peace weighed heavily on him. Then he looked at Helen. “We must have peace. But there is no one to negotiate with in Arab lands. They have military dictatorships like Egypt or feudal cliques like Iraq. But little by little we will get there.”
Helen went on, “I understand that you have decided to live in the Sde Boker village in the Negev Desert. I wonder why.”
“I did it for Paula's sake.” He looked at his wife. “I felt it would be good for her health.”
Paula, a former American nurse, interrupted. “For me, a woman of sixty-one, Sde Boker in the desert is a very hard life. Not for him.” She looked at BG. “He sits, he writes.”
“Paula,” I said, “he couldn't do what he does without you.”
“Don't be silly,” she insisted. “I made him already. I made him long ago. Now, he can do whatever he wants.”
Helen laughed, then turned to Ben-Gurion. “I have one more question. What can you say to the American people?”
The Mediterranean sun shone on his white hair. “What can I say to the American people?” He mulled over his answer. “Preserve three things: your strength, your wisdom, and your goodwill toward all nations.”
Helen shook his hand. “This has been the best journey of my life.”
In the summer of 1974, I took my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Celia Michaels, to the Soviet Union. Thousands of Soviet Jews were fighting for the right to
leave Russia, a country that did not want them, while they yearned to take refuge in Israel, a country that did.
Learning that we were going to the USSR, Clive Barnes, the American dance critic, asked us to bring medicine to Valery Panov, the premier dancer of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet.
“He's not allowed to dance or work,” Barnes told us. “He's been in jail. His crime is that he's a Jew. He's sick, and the Russians won't give him any medicine. Right now, he's on a hunger strike.”
Celia and I filled our bags with the medicines Barnes had given us and then added our own assortment of Bibles, prayer shawls, books, and magazines to give to the dissidents and to assure them they were not forgotten. Friends warned us that we might run into trouble with the Soviet customs, but we felt that carrying medicine to a sick dancer and bringing Bibles and prayer shawls to people no longer allowed to work was worth the risk. We had no problem.
In Leningrad, a trusted friend of the Panovs escorted us into the shabby courtyard of a Leningrad apartment complex. “There's a special signal that Valery has,” he told us. “He only opens his door if you give him the signal.”
The friend spoke the secret words, and the door opened. A slim, slight figure of thirty-four, with dark curling hair, a well-trimmed mustache, and a handsome Vandyke beard, stood in the doorway. Behind him stood his twenty-three-year-old ballerina wife, Galina Rogozina, a tiny blond woman, poised and graceful.
They led us to chairs in a small bright room, whose walls were hung with photographs of the two of them in ballet flight. The hunger strike had taken its toll. They both had the pallor of starvation on their faces.
“More than a thousand dancers, actors, and artists all over the world,” Celia told them, “have signed petitions asking the Soviet government to allow you to leave.”
“It doesn't help,” Panov said. “The government never answers their petitions. They are squeezing me to death.”
For more than a year and a half, Panov told us, they had been harassed, bugged, and followed by the KGB, the Soviet secret police. His telephone had been cut off, his mail was read, censored, and often confiscated. The moment he announced that he wanted to leave Russia, he was fired, forbidden to dance, forbidden even to go near the Kirov Theater. His rearrest was always imminent, because as a nonworker he could be charged with parasitism.
Galina, who was not Jewish, was implored by the Kirov director and the Communist Party official in the ballet company to divorce her husband and continue as prima ballerina. Instead, she resigned as an act of protest.
Months later, the petitions and pressures won. The Panovs were given permission to leave for Israel, where they were welcomed, given an apartment, and were soon working again in Europe and America.
In 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union opened the floodgates. Now there are close to one million Russians living in Israel. I have not included any photos of them because, in order to obtain a visa in 1973, I had to describe myself as a housewife, not as a journalist who had written and lectured about the desperate plight of Jews yearning to be free.
For years, there had been a trickle of black Jews from Ethiopia. Many were sent to the Holy Land by Emperor Haile Selassie to be educated, then return to Ethiopia as teachers. But the mass exodus of Ethiopian Jews began in earnest when, in the early 1980s, young people secretly trekked out of isolated villages in the highlands. They risked their lives on the long journey, crossing mountains and rivers to reach Sudan. Along the way, Ethiopian soldiers, police officers, and bandits tracked them down. Some were captured and held as slaves; others were killed. The fortunate ones made it to Sudan, where Israeli planes flew them to Tel Aviv.
I was determined to learn more about this top secret rescue. It took weeks of knocking on the doors of leaders in Jerusalem, to no avail. A friend in the Foreign Office told me why I was being barred from covering this story of rescue: “You must understand our need for secrecy. No one is allowed even to see them land here. The Marxist government under Mengistu Haile Mariam, following Russia's example, has barred all emigration. Any publicity can end the whole rescue operation.”
In the end, it was Prime Minister Shimon Peres who gave me the permission I needed to watch the Ethiopian Jews enter Israel. I promised him I would not publish a single word or photo until the story could be told. I rushed to the airport, was escorted to the cordoned-off area, and stood in awe as 250 black Jews, wrapped in huge white-and-desert-colored shawls, came down the gangway, as if they were walking out of Genesis and Exodus.
I then made two trips to Ethiopia in 1985 and 1986 with a group led by Barbara Ribakove Gordon, the founder and executive director of NACOEJ—the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry. The first trip was during the drought that killed millions. The second was during the rainy season, when we climbed mountains, slipped down in the rain and mud, and kept climbing again until we reached the Jewish villages in northern Gondar province. There, we distributed medicines, notebooks, ballpoint pens, clothes, and money to keep the people healthy and alive until they were rescued.
Elsie Roth, a Midwestern nurse, trained several of us to become paramedics. We learned how to squeeze antibiotic drops in the eyes of mothers and children to prevent them from going blind with trachoma. Soon women and children came from neighboring Christian villages, pointing to their eyes and asking to be treated also. We turned no one down.
Before coming, our NACOEJ group had stopped in Israel to take photos of the young people who had succeeded in escaping from Ethiopia. I promised to find their families in Ethiopia and give them these photos. In one of the villages, a mother held the picture of her daughter against her chest and told me sadly, “She is in Israel and I will never see her again.” But within one year, mother and daughter were reunited in Israel.
The Ethiopian exodus continues even today. Now there are more than 100,000 living in Israel without hunger and without fear. Of all the nations in the world, Israel alone has sent white men and women to bring black men, women, and children out of Africa, not to be sold, but to be saved.
A few weeks before Ben-Gurion died on December 1, 1973, I went to see him in Tel Aviv. Learning how close he was to death, I wanted to record his last words of wisdom. The modest house in Tel Aviv was staffed entirely by young soldiers in uniform. I could understand his wanting the military to take care of him in these last days. This was his Army. These were the young men he loved. They were his family.
A young soldier escorted me up to Ben-Gurion's room. He was lying on a narrow bed, under a high white quilt. The room was bare save for a small table and chair. It was as if the life had already been sucked out of this room. Paula had died in 1968 and was buried in their Negev village, Sde Boker. His grave beside her was waiting.
“Sit down,” he commanded me.
I pulled the chair closer to the bed.
He caught sight of me testing my tape recorder. “Put that thing away!” he barked.
“But I want to have your voice,” I protested.
“You don't need my voice. I hate those things.”
I dutifully closed my tape recorder and put it back in my bag. I also decided not to photograph him in these last days of his life. Filming him dying would be repugnant to him. So I pulled out a fresh notebook and pen and got ready to write. He looked relieved.
“Master,” I asked, “will there ever be peace between the Jews and the Arabs?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where will it come from?”
“Egypt.”
“Egypt,” I repeated. “That's where the Faydayeen [Egyptian terrorists] come from. They throw bombs in day-care centers and people's homes!”
“Forget that.” He brushed my words aside with his hand. “A whole generation is rising. They know that we can live together. They have diseases we cured fifty years ago. Their women give birth to a thousand babies a year, and eight hundred of the babies die. Our doctors can help keep their babies alive. And they have minerals in their soil that we need.”
“Peace, BG,” I repeated. “Will there ever be peace?”
“Not in my time, but in yours and your children's. There will be peace.”
I printed those words on my brain. I sat there in silence, looking at this dying leader. Thoughts rushed through my head. How much I owed this short, gray-haired dynamo. By his actions he had shown me how a truly idealistic leader can change his country, change the course of two thousand years of history, and change the world.
His legacy to me was that he promised there would be peace in my children's time. Despite terror and missiles and war, I still hold to that vision.
A Youth Aliyah village in Natanya, Israel, offers a boarding school for children in need, 1951.
Seated at the right, Moshe Sharett, Israel's first foreign minister, signed documents that became the law of the land in 1951. In 1954 Sharett became the second prime minister, succeeding David Ben-Gurion.
An alarming sign in Israel warned of dangerous road conditions ahead, 1951.
Pioneers laid pipes in the Galilee, the northernmost villages in Israel, in 1951.
Railroads were reestablished by 1951. I was in the Galilee when Arabs were throwing rocks, bombarding the villages. Everybody had to build a safe place underground with beds and food.
Nomadic Bedouin Arabs, photographed from the train going from Jerusalem to Beersheba, 1951. Many Bedouins moved to Beersheba, where their children could be educated and their sick could be healed.
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth, pictured here in 1951, has become one of Israel's most prominent institutions for research in preventing diseases. When the members of UNSCOP were in Israel, they were invited to Rehovoth by Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Dr. Weizmann had his office there. He asked me and several members of the committee to stay for lunch.
He was his usual charming self and a great host. He said, “Ruth, stay on when they go back to the King David Hotel.” In his office he said, “Do we have friends on the committee?”