Slowly but surely, Zippora grew into an accomplished housewife and her home became her castle. It was there that she raised her children and tended to the needs of her expanding household, controlling it in her own quiet but persistent manner. The everyday decisions common to all families, such as how to behave, where to go, and what to purchase, were typically hers. She treated her husband and children with the respect they deserved and cared for them with all of her heart, asking nothing for herself.
In Jerusalem, Zvi adopted a new occupation, plastering – a grueling physical vocation in which he was able to engage because of his great physical strength. At first, he worked with a group of professionals who took him under their wing. But true to form, he soon sought independence and began looking for work for himself and a group of workers he established.
He reached the pinnacle of his professional career when he started receiving plastering jobs at the elegant King David Hotel. He first began working at the elite Jerusalem institution as a contractor performing basic jobs but soon, along with his workers, came to be known as a professional with great expertise. Within a short period, they learned how to perform complex plastering jobs and were assigned most of the plastering work at the hotel, making them well-known plasterers in high demand.
Zvi’s work in large buildings, such as the King David Hotel and the Diskin Orphanage, brought home more money but did not prompt Zvi to change his ways. Despite his position of authority, he continued working on the scaffolds with his employees and continued to see eye to eye with them. As the years passed, he and a few of his partners became relatively wealthy employers of a team that at times numbered a few dozen workers. As a result, he soon began to encounter representatives of the General Federation of Workers, typically referred to in Hebrew as the Histadrut,5 who considered it their responsibility to defend the interests of the workers.
Zvi was not kindly disposed towards the Histadrut organizers. He believed that he was looking out for the best interests of his employees and that he had no need for others to encourage him to do so. He felt the Histadrut representatives were inciting his workers against him. His approach led to disputes with the representatives of the Histadrut, which in the course of the 1920s, under the charismatic leadership of its general secretary David Ben-Gurion,6 emerged as the most powerful economic and social force in Palestine’s expanding Zionist Jewish community. As a man with socialist leanings, Zvi regarded manual labor as a value in itself and took pride in his own rough working hands, which had been scarred over the years by building materials. He understood the reality of the situation and recognized the power of the Histadrut, which even then controlled extremely important forces within the Jewish economy. However, he was not pleased by its militant representatives, who viewed him as a capitalist exploiting his workers. After a disagreement, he was expelled from the Histadrut.
Chapter 2
Tel Aviv and North Tel Aviv
Eliyahu Hurvitz, whom everyone called Eli, was born in Jerusalem on the eve of Passover (April 20) in 1932, a place and date of birth that he always regarded as special. He would tell his friends that he acquired his name because his mother’s water broke when she got up from the Seder table to fulfil the tradition of opening the door to welcome Elijah the prophet (Eliyahu Hanavi).
Even though Eli grew up in Tel Aviv, which he always thought of and loved as his own city, he also felt a strong connection to his birthplace, Jerusalem. The fact that his mother had given birth to him at Bikur Holim, Jerusalem’s oldest hospital, was a source of pride. Moving to Jerusalem’s rival, the young, modern city of Tel Aviv, by the age of three and a half did not change this.
Eli’s memories of his early childhood in the Bukharian Quarter were limited primarily to the aromas of the food cooking in his neighbors’ kitchens. He spent most of his time with his mother and his sister Ruth, who was three-and-a-half years older than he. Like most children at the time, he saw his father only in the evenings and, most importantly, on Saturdays. Eli’s memories of Jerusalem also included the holidays, particularly the traditional holiday meals. Other memories of this period faded after the Hurvitzes moved to Tel Aviv. Before they moved to the first Hebrew city, they settled briefly in Sde Ya’akov, the religious Zionist moshav7 where a plot of land that had been allocated to them during their days at Hedera, was still being saved for them. But again, after a short time, it became clear that life at a relatively new rural settlement was not for them and they relocated to Tel Aviv.
The Hurvitzes moved to the city primarily because of the economic opportunities it offered. In the mid-1930s, Tel Aviv was growing dramatically. The fourth and the fifth aliyah8 almost tripled the city’s population within a decade, from 34,000 in 1926 to 120,000 in 1936, making it the largest city in the British Mandate of Palestine. The bourgeois families of European emigrants who chose urban life over rural agricultural settlements led Tel Aviv to evolve into a city with a distinctly European flavor, something which attracted many of the city’s new residents.
Tel Aviv had a lively atmosphere thanks to its many cultural institutions and diverse array of cafés, cinemas, movie theatres, shops, and event halls. Cultural happenings such as Hebrew Book Day, the traditional Purim procession known as Adloyada, special Sabbath events on Friday evenings, and the crowded beaches all contributed to Tel Aviv’s leisure culture and reputation as a unique coastal town. It is therefore no wonder that on January 12, 1934, the British authorities granted Tel Aviv the status of a city. By the time the Hurvitz family settled there, it had become not only the largest city in the mandate, but also its commercial and trade center, the heart of its light industry, and the focal point of all public, economic, and cultural services for the mandate’s Jewish population.
The Hurvitzes initially made their home in Neve Tzedek, the first neighborhood built outside the Jaffa city walls in 1887. Even though they only resided there briefly, this neighborhood remained deeply ingrained in Eli’s memory. They lived in a distinctive three-room apartment on Shabazi Street in a building with a large internal courtyard. A well in the courtyard supplied water to the building’s six apartments and one common bathroom. As a child, Eli had the impression that they lived in a particularly large apartment building. Here too the Hurvitzes developed friendly relations with their neighbors, many of whom were recent immigrants from Yemen. Eli enjoyed a special relationship with the owner of a nearby grocery store, enjoying his company so much that he turned him into an adopted grandfather and maintained contact with him over the years.
Zvi’s inability to find sufficient work and the slow development of his plastering business during this period led the family to live in a home and neighborhood that were considered economically underprivileged in Tel Aviv at the time. Eli’s parents were aware of this and made efforts to conceal their situation. There was always food in the kitchen, the children were clean and well dressed, and birthday gifts were an integral component of life in the Hurvitz home. As a result, the children were unaware of the economic hardship.
Eli began attending a kindergarten near his home in Neve Tzedek. The fact that he was an easygoing child made the transition relatively easy on everyone. He found his place in kindergarten with little effort, quickly making friends and building a rapport with his teacher. He developed long-lasting relationships with some of the children he met during this period. Overall, Eli had a happy childhood.
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Zvi’s plastering business grew increasingly successful; demand increased steadily for the team of plasterers he and his partners managed. The Hurvitzes could now afford to move to Neve Sha’anan, a nicer part of the city. This neighborhood too was home to struggling workers and new immigrants, but it was less crowded than Neve Tzedek and offered better services.
Eli and his sister Ruth barely felt the change. His memories of their new neighborhood revolved around a trauma relating to the violence that engulfed the British Mandate of Palestine between 1936 and 193
9.9 The general strike that the Arab Higher Committee called and the violent Arab Revolt that followed were felt in Neve Sha’anan and Eli’s home. On one of the first days of the revolt, Zippora and Ruth were riding on a bus with many Arab passengers when the driver, who also was an Arab, informed her that his “friends” had decided to “butcher” her “friends” and suggested, in Eli’s words, that she “get off the public vehicle quickly and take the shortest possible route home.” Horrified, Zippora and Ruth rushed off the bus. On another occasion, shots were fired near Zippora and Ruth, resulting in casualties. Ruth never forgot the blood that she saw spilled during this horrifying incident.
From time to time, shots were fired at their neighborhood. While their parents were worried, as the months passed, the children’s fears and anxieties subsided, even when the shooting was close to their home. As isolated bloody incidents became commonplace events, Eli’s family became accustomed to the new, violent reality and learned to accept it as part of their daily lives.
In one incident that struck particularly close to home, one of Eli’s classmates and neighbors was abducted and apparently murdered. The boy disappeared while riding his bicycle through the orchards between Neve Sha’anan and the old Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. The search for the missing boy lasted many days but was unsuccessful. This haunted Eli, who was six years old at the time, for years, although he kept his fear to himself and refrained from sharing it with his parents. He appears to have thought that they would not understand his feelings. After all, they had tried to teach him and his sister that they should not be alarmed by the violence. Years later, he shared how difficult it was for him at the time, explaining, “That was our greatest fear when we were children, but I never told my parents about it… I would wake up with nightmares in the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t tell them.”
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Paradoxically, the more intense the violence grew, the more successful Zvi’s contracting business became. Tel Aviv was attracting more and more of the mandate’s Jewish population. As construction increased to accommodate the growing population, so did the need for plastering. Zvi continued to work on the scaffolds; Eli later related that those who knew him used to say that he could always be found at the most dangerous spot at a construction site, “jumping from scaffold to scaffold.” His profits grew and he continued to pay his employees relatively high wages. Approximately one year after moving to Neve Sha’anan, the family moved again, this time to the corner of King George and Hanevi’im streets in what was then north Tel Aviv. This area was considered much better than their previous neighborhoods.
The relocation to a larger home in a better neighborhood was accompanied by a substantial rise in the family’s standard of living. A gradual change in the culture of the household followed. There was more food on the table and more frequent leisure activities. In many ways, the Hurvitz household continued to function as it had before, with its semi-religious traditions, kosher kitchen, and celebration of Sabbath and holiday rituals. Eli was called to the Torah when he reached bar mitzvah age, after a year of reporting willingly on an almost daily basis to a yeshiva in preparation for the ceremony. He not only learned to chant the portions of the Torah and Haftorah (prophets) assigned to his bar mitzvah week, but also studied the Haftorah portions for every week of the year and would remember them for the rest of his life. Since Eli was a bright student, he also debated issues related to the Torah portion with the rabbi and occasionally even studied a page of Talmud with him. Throughout that year, out of a sense of identification with the rabbi’s exhortations, Eli carried his yarmulke with him in his pocket wherever he went.
At the same time, the secular surroundings of north Tel Aviv had a profound impact on the Hurvitz household. This was manifested in many different ways, large and small. Family members paid increasingly less attention to some religious practices, such as the dietary regulations, while adopting their secular neighbors’ approach to celebrating some of the minor holidays. Tu Bishvat, a Jewish holiday focused on nature, became a festival in the full sense of the word, while on Purim, everyone waited impatiently for the Adloyada procession, which Mayor Meir Dizengoff led on horseback. Shavuot, the holiday that traditionally celebrates the giving of the Torah, became the holiday celebrating the ideology of labor at the Jewish agricultural settlements, and the children awaited the bonfires of Lag Baomer all year long, seeing it as an opportunity to metaphorically burn their archenemies.
The Hurvitz household gradually stopped observing the religious laws governing the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays. Zvi, for example, began smoking in public on Friday nights and Saturdays. During the early years of their marriage, he had refrained from smoking on holidays despite being a heavy smoker at the time. As time passed, he began smoking secretly with his friends. Now, he smoked inside his home on the Sabbath and holidays, and, to his wife’s chagrin, even started driving on the Sabbath. Eli behaved likewise. He did not usually desecrate the Sabbath intentionally but due to circumstances which happened to arise. In retrospect, he appears to have simply become secular without consciously deciding to do so. This change did not happen overnight, but over an extended period. He simply was pushed in this direction by many of the forces that influenced his life: his environment, his friends, and the Jewish-Zionist Scouts movement (Tzofim) that he joined. The most powerful factor in causing the change, however, was the Hurvitz household itself. Although his parents remained traditional and his mother could even be described as religious, Zvi adopted a secular worldview and Zippora was flexible enough to give her son the freedom he sought, which grew from day to day.
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The different schools Eli attended as his family moved from place to place also played a significant role in the cultural and social changes Eli underwent. Zvi and Zipporah were so impressed by the skills and intelligence that their son demonstrated that they enrolled him in school at the age of five, a full year earlier than the norm in their community. They also had much higher expectations of Eli than of his sister Ruth, who they sent to the Henrietta Szold Ledugma elementary school in the hope she would get an education and find a job afterwards. They tried to conceal their expectations by not telling him exactly what they wanted or needed him to do. Moreover, Zvi always took pride in his occupation, boasting, according to his daughter, that he was a “proud worker who had come to build the country.” Although getting an education had not been his own top priority, Zvi appreciated scholarship and study. Eli understood this. It was clear to him that his parents expected him to succeed in his studies and he lived up to their expectations without encountering any particular problems. He went to school happily and was a curious, diligent, and high-achieving student.
For the next eight years, Eli attended Carmel Elementary School, which was established in 1934 as a branch of the well-established Geula School. It was considered one of the best educational institutions in Tel Aviv. The school took its name from Carmelia, the neighborhood in the heart of new Tel Aviv in which it was located.
Children from rich and poor families studied together under the same roof at Carmel. Students wore identical khaki green uniforms, giving the impression that there were no real differences between them. It was clear, however, that the student body was dominated by the tzfoniim (Hebrew for northerners, meaning the students from north Tel Aviv). The teachers recognized their student body’s potential and talents and therefore maintained a relatively high academic level.
Carmel’s elitist image was also influenced by its iron-fist policies and Spartan methods (which included corporal punishment). The principal, Dr. Yaakov Ben Yosef, who was also a Bible teacher and an activist in the right-wing Revisionist Zionist political movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, set the tone at Carmel. He saw to it that students stood up when their teachers entered the classroom and spoke in class only when called upon. He also insisted that all acts of violence be met with substantial punishment, including a slap of the ruler for
recalcitrant students. Eli described the intimidating principal and Bible teacher in the following anecdote:
He would enter the classroom and instruct a student to stand. Then he would ask him: “How is the Torah portion related to the Haftarah?” We feared such questions. Even after we became more familiar with the Bible, we were still unable to answer them. We were not always prepared. When a student answered correctly, he would say: “Tell your parents that the principal paid a compliment to their son.” When a student answered incorrectly, he would say: “Tell your parents that their son does not know how to read.” This created much tension among the students. As we did not know what questions we would be asked, we were always forced to prepare ourselves for his lessons ahead of time.
On the whole, parents of Carmel pupils felt that their children were being educated by someone they could count on. But the parents also feared the tyrannical principal and dared not go near the school, unless they were summoned to meet with a teacher or the principal due to a disciplinary infraction on the part of their child or insufficient progress in his or her studies. In such cases, it was clear to the student that the meeting at school would be followed by an extremely unpleasant experience at home.
Eli’s parents regarded Carmel as the ideal place to educate their son and Eli liked it too. He adjusted to the school quickly, even though he was the youngest pupil in his grade. The following story of how even Eli succeeded in being reprimanded by Dr. Ben Yosef sheds light on the principal’s character. It all began with a rule Dr. Ben Yosef instituted forbidding students to arrive at school early. The school gates opened 15 minutes before the beginning of the school day and tardy students were certain to be given a significant punishment. Because Eli lived far from school, he sometimes arrived earlier than necessary. Early arrivals usually would toss their schoolbags over the gate into the schoolyard. One day, upon arriving at school early, Eli hurled his heavy leather schoolbag into the schoolyard, only to have to it squarely hit the head of none other than Dr. Ben Yosef. The strict educator did not let the incident go unaddressed. Eli received a stern scolding.
Eli Hurvitz and the creation of Teva Pharmaceuticals: An Israeli Biography Page 3