Zvi was an exception to this. He was convinced that his hometown was not where he wanted to live out his life. Like all Jewish youth at the time, he spent a few years studying at the local yeshiva prior to his bar mitzvah. Cognizant of his family’s hardships, he began working to contribute to the family income immediately following his bar mitzvah. By the outbreak of World War I, he was regarded as a successful merchant, particularly in comparison to other merchants in Ćmielów. As the battles raged between Russia and the Allied Powers on the one hand, and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and its allies on the other, Zvi not only continued to engage in commerce but also began smuggling supplies across the front lines, always attentive to the needs of each side and capable of supplying whatever they lacked.
By the age of 17, Zvi had become his family’s primary breadwinner. During this period, he became painfully aware of the laws regarding compulsory military conscription, which he sought to avoid at all costs. The business relationships he had cultivated during the war helped him evade the army for a while. Finally, he fled to Vienna, convinced he would not be drafted while residing in the Austrian-Hungarian capital, which was the enemy of his Polish homeland.
Zvi’s flight and the fact that he was not a citizen of Austria-Hungary precluded him from continuing to engage in his former business and he was forced to accept whatever work he could to survive. He spent two years working in a coal mine, performing oppressive physical labor. Zvi’s solid constitution and great physical strength clearly helped him survive, but he also may have benefited from the fact that, unlike his fellow workers, he regarded mining as only a temporary occupation.
During his time in Vienna, Zvi began to realize his Zionist ambitions. During his youth in Poland, he had joined the local branch of the Mizrachi religious Zionist movement. Unlike his father Hanoch, who joined the movement but never intended to fulfill its Zionist ideology personally, Zvi had boyhood dreams of immigrating to the Land of Israel, but had been too young to fulfill them. Now, in Vienna, he joined the same religious Zionist faction that his father had belonged to. His fellow members espoused a socialist worldview that influenced their understanding of Zionism. Later, in 1922, they established an independent movement known as Hapoel Hamizrachi (the Mizrachi Workers),3 with which Zvi would continue to identify until his dying day.
Zvi’s unequivocal faith in Zionism found dramatic expression in a series of letters he wrote – after being arrested for residing illegally in Vienna – to one of his brothers, who had settled in the United States. After his arrest, Zvi feared that, despite the war, the Austrian authorities would repatriate him to Poland, where he would be forced to serve in the military. Refusal to serve, he was sure, would land him in prison. Therefore, while still under arrest, he sent a letter to his brother in America explaining his predicament. He wrote of his fear of being handed over to the Polish army, the dire conditions of his imprisonment, and the fact that he was now being forced to work in the same mines where he had worked previously, but without pay. Zvi asked his brother to urgently send him money so he could bribe the Austrian officials to release him from jail.
Zvi’s brother agreed to send the money. He also promised him the funds to travel by ship to the U.S. and to acquire a work visa, as well as an additional sum to enable him to start out in the country. Furthermore, his brother assured him, when he arrived in New York, he would be welcome to live with him in a small residential unit he maintained in his own home.
“Come here,” Zvi’s brother implored. “You’ll live like a king.”
Zvi, however, had no interest in moving to the U.S. Instead, he explained to his brother in no uncertain terms, he sought to immigrate to Palestine. Regardless of his ultimate destination, he still needed his brother’s financial help to get out of prison. Responding immediately, his brother made his assistance conditional upon Zvi’s immigration to the U.S.: he would gladly send him whatever he needed if he were to agree to move to the U.S., but would be unwilling to provide him with the funds necessary to free himself from jail and immigrate to Palestine. In a fiery reply, Zvi the Zionist declared that despite the great hardship he currently faced, he would, “get along without him.” He also informed his brother that if he did not drop his condition for sending him money, he would never speak to him again. His brother remained adamant and, despite the great difficulty involved, Zvi finally managed to get released from prison on his own. His relationship with his brother was unsalvageable. Zvi never forgave him. They never spoke again.
•••
Now Zvi embarked upon a new, Zionist chapter in his life. Along with the other members of the local Mizrachi chapter, he decided to go beyond participating in local Jewish nationalist activities and to take all possible practical steps towards immigrating to Palestine. They began training as agricultural workers to prepare themselves to fulfill their socialist beliefs by establishing agricultural settlements in the land of Israel. Living in the capital of Austria, whose rulers had recently forged an alliance with the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, Zvi was able to go one step further. He applied to the Turkish consul in Vienna for a permit to immigrate to Palestine with his parents and two of his brothers. Although the consul was aware of his Zionist beliefs, he granted Zvi’s application and issued the visas.
Britain’s conquest of Palestine from the crumbling Ottoman Empire during World War I derailed this plan and initially prevented the Hurvitzes from using their Turkish visas. Undeterred, Zvi continued to contemplate how to fulfill his Zionist ideals. The Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, offered new hope to Zvi and his comrades. The end of the war was followed by a new wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine – known in Israeli and Zionist historiography as the Third Aliyah. At the same time, in both the British Mandate of Palestine and Britain, Zionist institutions were established with the aim of advancing the implementation of the British government’s formal promise to establish a Jewish homeland.
Together with his fellow Mizrachi members, Zvi immediately requested an immigration permit from the new British consulate that had opened in Vienna. He was surprised when the British consul informed him that his country would honor the immigration permit he had received from the Ottomans and that he could move to Palestine immediately. The other members of his group also received permits. One summer day in 1919, with official authorization in hand, Zvi and his fellow Zionists arrived at the port of Trieste and boarded a ship bound for the land of Israel.
•••
Zvi’s initial destination was the Jewish agricultural village of Hadera, situated midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. This had been his group’s plan before they even left Vienna, based on the assumption that they could receive agricultural training in Hadera. However, because of its secular way of life, they had no intention of remaining there. Zvi and the other members of his group wanted to establish an agricultural settlement of their own where they could live in accordance with their religious beliefs.
Officials from the Zionist institutions in Palestine promised that new sites to establish settlements had already been allocated to them and they would be able to move to them soon. One site was an agricultural settlement in the Zvulun Valley, near Haifa, which, in time, evolved into Kfar Hassidim. The other was in the western Jezreel Valley, approximately two kilometers southeast of Kiryat Tivon, and became known as Sde Ya’akov after 1927. To the group’s great dismay, the move to the settlements was delayed. The months they had expected to spend in Hadera turned into years.
In the meantime, Zvi experienced a major milestone that changed his life. He met his future wife, Tzvia (Zippora) Eizenhammer. Their initial encounter was extraordinarily romantic. Tzvia, who hailed from Vilna and had come to Hadera for agricultural training, first met Zvi – the man of her dreams – when he was perched high up in a tree. When he arrived in Hadera, he and some other members of his group were assigned the grueling task of drai
ning the swamp that surrounded it. Like many of his coworkers, he was bitten by Anopheles mosquitos in the swamp and contracted malaria. One day, feverish and disoriented, Zvi scrambled up a tall eucalyptus tree and refused to come down. Drawn by his hoots and shouts, a group quickly gathered to try to convince him to descend. One of the spectators was Zippora, who quickly fell in love with the sick young man. When he recovered from his illness, he requited her love.
•••
Like thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Zippora’s ancestors appear to have arrived in Lithuania during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like the Hurvitzes, the Eizenhammers sought the better life that the Polish nobility had promised all Jews who settled in their kingdom. The Eizenhammers spread throughout the country. Zippora, her parents’ fourth daughter, was born in 1908 in Vilna, a city that over the years had come to be known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania (Yerushalayim de Lita) and emerged as one of the world’s largest Jewish religious and spiritual centers. Vilna is perhaps most closely associated with the anti-Hassidic movement known as the misnagdim that the Vilna Gaon established.
Zippora’s parents, who were relatively wealthy, ran a grocery store on the main street of the Jewish quarter near their home. Their neighbors still belonged to the anti-Hassidic stream of Judaism and maintained the lifestyle typical of its adherents at the time. Nevertheless, the winds of the Haskala (the Jewish enlightenment movement) blowing through the Jewish communities in Europe succeeded in penetrating the walls of the Eizenhammer home. Zippora’s parents spoke Hebrew in addition to Yiddish on the Sabbath and took a somewhat lenient approach toward the religious commandments they followed in their home. Moreover, their four daughters and one son attended educational institutions that were less strict than the traditional Orthodox institutions operating in Vilna.
Another prominent indication that the ideas of the Haskala had influenced the Eizenhammer household was the family’s approach toward Zionism. Like Zvi, Zippora was an active member of the local chapter of the religious-Zionist Mizrachi movement, which was affiliated with the socialist stream of the Zionist movement. Her parents were accepting of her ideological views. When she considered fulfilling her Zionist beliefs by settling in the land of Israel, they encouraged her to do so. After undergoing training in Vilna to prepare her for the move, she immigrated to Palestine in 1924 with two of her friends.
The three 16 year olds, who remained friends for the rest of their lives, immigrated to Palestine on their own with the assurance that the rest of their settlement training group would soon join them. Once the entire group had arrived, the members all joined the training program that Hapoel Hamizrachi organized in Hadera. The girls from Vilna were surprised to find that they would not be working the land like the men in their group but instead performing traditional housework.
•••
Zippora’s random encounter with her future husband under the eucalyptus tree in Hadera evolved into a passionate romance. Zvi liked the attractive young woman, who always dressed simply and modestly. Soon after their somewhat peculiar first meeting, the two became a couple. Although they did not know where they would live, they knew that they did not want to remain in Hadera. So, as a beginning, they decided to get married in Jerusalem.
The marriage took place at the offices of the chief rabbinate of Jerusalem. However, because they had neither friends nor relative in the holy city, Zvi was forced to ask a few workers waiting for their employers on a street corner to serve as a minyan (the traditional Jewish quorum of 10 adult males required for group worship) for the wedding.
“I’ll give you wine to drink,” he told the 10 workers in an effort to entice them, Zvi’s son would relate in years to come. “Come to the wedding.”
Young Zvi, who was known for his disheveled attire, had made the ultimate sacrifice: spending all of his money on a wedding suit he ordered from a Jerusalem tailor. In a twist of irony, the suit was stolen a few hours before the wedding and Zvi was forced to attend his wedding wearing normal, everyday clothes. Later, when the newlyweds were comfortably seated in the Beit Ha’am movie theater, a man wearing Zvi’s wedding suit happened to sit down beside them. After instructing his wife to scream if the man got up to flee the scene, Zvi asked the usher to call the police. When no policemen arrived, Zvi himself pounced on the thief and removed the suit from his body with his own two hands, sending him out into the street wearing nothing but his undergarments.
After the wedding, Zvi and Zipporah returned to Hadera and joined a settlement group affiliated with Hapoel Hamizrachi. Unfortunately, the chemistry of the group did not work for the young couple. Despite the fact that they had been allocated a plot of land in Hadera, they decided to settle elsewhere.
In 1927, the Hurvitzes joined a small group of pioneers to establish the predominantly secular moshav4 of Kfar Yehoshua. There, however, Zvi quickly got the impression that some of the residents were not inclined to work hard and, with no intention of doing so in their stead, decided to move on. Looking back, he was clearly not cut out for collective life, despite the socialist ethos that his fellow Hapoel Hamizrachi members had tried to instill in him.
“He was annoyed by people who didn’t work,” Eli would later recount. “He used to say: ‘Why should I be everyone’s mule? I don’t want to work for other people.’”
•••
The Hurvitzes’ next stop was Jerusalem. There, however, Zvi was unable to find the kind of work he wanted and, once again, they moved on shortly after arriving. They now moved from place to place as Zvi was offered jobs at agricultural settlements where they thought things would work out better for them. They first went to Motza and subsequently to Kfar Uria in the Judean lowlands. Zvi worked as a shepherd and performed odd jobs, while Zippora worked in the communal kitchen. After only a few months, they moved again, this time because Zippora was pregnant. In November 1928, their eldest daughter Ruth was born in Jerusalem, prompting the young couple to seek greater stability.
The Hurvitzes remained in Jerusalem for the next seven years. They made their home in the city’s Bukharian quarter, which Jewish immigrants from Bukhara built in 1894. Although their neighbors did not share their social and cultural leanings, it was a relatively inexpensive area in which to rent an apartment. Here too their openness worked to their advantage. They enjoyed close relations with their Bukharian neighbors, whose doors were always open to the “Ashkenazis from Hadera.” As far as Zvi and Zippora were concerned, their neighbors were always welcome in their home as well.
From a cultural and political perspective, the Hurvitzes’ home in Jerusalem could be described as traditional and Zionist – a compromise of sorts between Zippora’s religious beliefs and Zvi’s slow but steady drift away from religion. He always considered himself a member of the Hapoel Hamizrachi religious Zionist movement and took pride in this affiliation. As was customary for Jews in the new and rapidly expanding Zionist community in the British Mandate of Palestine referred to as the new Yishuv, they spoke Hebrew instead of the Yiddish they had grown up speaking in Europe. Jewish tradition was also an important part of everyday life in the Hurvitzes’ home. They kept kosher, celebrated the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and never smoked or travelled on the Sabbath. That, however, was the end of it. Looking back, their son Eli would characterize them as, “holiday Jews and lovers of tradition.”
As the years passed, members of the Hurvitz household adopted increasingly secular behavior and became “true Israelis,” in the words of their eldest daughter. Zippora wore pants instead of dresses and long skirts; Zvi attended soccer games on the Sabbath and once in a while even missed the Sabbath morning prayers in the synagogue. Saturdays were typically spent exploring Jerusalem. The Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City were among their regular destinations. On rare occasions, they left the city to visit friends and relatives in Tel Aviv or Sde Ya’akov, but never for long periods of time. Once a year, they would v
acation by the Sea of Galilee. This was the extent of their travelling within Mandatory Palestine. They never considered taking a trip outside the country.
At home, the Hurvitz family adopted the unique culture of the new Zionist Jewish community in Palestine. They replaced the reading of the Torah and religious texts with secular newspapers and books, with an emphasis on history. Instead of following debates of learned religious scholars and the gossip of the synagogue, they took an interest in Jewish-Zionist politics. Debates were typically moderate and often revolved around the Jews’ relations with the British and the Arabs, toward whom the Hurvitzes had positive feelings. Respect was afforded to the officials, the people, the soldiers, and the leaders of the British Empire and the forms of rule employed within it, although criticism of the policies of the British government were also frequently voiced in the Hurvitz home. The Arabs were thought of as neighbors, not as enemies seeking their destruction, and the household’s fundamental view on this subject remained almost completely intact over the years, even during periods of tension and violence. The hostility for their Arab neighbors that was typical of many of the Jewish settlers in Mandatory Palestine was foreign to the Hurvitzes, whose liberal values were too resilient to be influenced by the violence and bloodshed of the times.
The Hurvitzes’ two-room apartment always seemed to be full of people. Neighbors came and went. As time passed, Zvi’s business partners also became regular members of the household. Friends and family visited frequently, sometimes staying for more than a day or two. The hospitable couple would even give them their bed and made room for them at their table.
Eli Hurvitz and the creation of Teva Pharmaceuticals: An Israeli Biography Page 2