“I will.”
“Tell him I want him there.”
“I shall quote your every word.”
This was vintage Sam Rothberg – obstinate and determined. Once he’d gotten an idea into his head he wouldn’t let go.
When I put the proposal to the prime minister the following morning, his spontaneous response was, “How can I say no to Sam? If he thinks Los Angeles is important, include it in my itinerary.” And then, softly, to himself, “Assuming of course Alla is well enough to enable me to go.”
I put LA into the itinerary, and told Sam that, everything else being equal, the prime minister would be happy to be guest of honor at the Bonds black-tie gala at the Los Angeles Century Plaza Hotel, on Saturday night, 13 November. The schedule had him flying from there to Dallas the following morning, to address a mass rally of Christian supporters, and then on to Washington for his meeting with the president. Given the tightness of the scheduling and the complex logistics involved we decided to make use of an antiquated Boeing 707 belonging to the Israel Air Force, and to cover the costs by billing the sizeable press contingent accompanying the premier. Departure date was set for Friday morning, 12 November, and the plan was to fly directly to California, landing en route only to refuel, and arrive in Los Angeles well in time for Shabbat, thanks to the ten-hour time difference.
Everything was falling nicely into place when a few days before the departure date, Yechiel Kadishai stuck his head around my door and groused, “We have a problem.”
“How big a problem?”
“Massive! Begin doesn’t want to go. The doctors have performed a tracheotomy on Aliza to relieve her breathing, and he refuses to leave her. We have to cancel everything. I’ll speak to Sam Lewis and to the Dallas people. You handle Rothberg.”
He turned and left, and I felt frantic. How was I to break this news to Sam Rothberg, after he had promoted his whole Bonds razzmatazz around Begin’s presence? I asked Norma, my secretary, to get him for me on the phone, but then changed my mind, and told her not to. It was still the middle of the night in America. I had a reprieve for a few hours, at least.
Came the afternoon and Yechiel was back, beaming.
“Why the smile?” I asked.
“Have you spoken to Rothberg yet?”
“No, I was just about to.”
“Well don’t. We’re going.”
“How come? What’s happened?”
“Alla insists. They’ve stuck tubes down her throat, so she can’t talk. She communicates with notes. When Menachem told her he’d decided not to go she scribbled to him. ‘You’ve got to go. It’s a meeting with the president. It’s important for the country. I’ll be all right.’ He was truly tormented, not knowing what best to do. Finally, he consulted the doctors and they assured him that though Alla was still frail, her condition was reasonably stabilized, and they saw no reason for him to change his plans. So we’re going.”
Being in charge of the programming I flew on ahead, to make sure that every final detail of the prime minister’s schedule was in place. Upon my arrival in Los Angeles, Sam Rothberg asked me to join him at a pre-banquet cocktail party for the biggest Bonds buyers. It would get the ball rolling for the big night. The gathering turned out to be a diamond-studied affair in a Beverly Hills mansion, with about fifty guests. My task was to say something inspirational, and when I had finished, our hostess rose to ask what on earth had induced me, way back in 1947, a mere boy of eighteen, to leave the comforts and safety of my Manchester home for what was already then war-torn Palestine. In response, I described the atmosphere of those tortured post-Holocaust days, and the thrill that had come over me on catching my first sight of Haifa from the deck of a ship called the Aegean Star.
“Aegean Star? Did you say Aegean Star? ” interrupted a fellow in the audience. He spoke with a thick European accent, and he sounded thunderstruck.
“Does that name mean anything to you, Jay?” asked our hostess, who introduced him to the room as Jay Cole.
“Are you kidding?” retorted Jay Cole, brimming with incredulity. “I was on that ship, goddamnit!”
He looked to be in his mid-fifties, short and plump, with a tan that spoke of golf courses, cruises, and beach clubs. His thin hair was tinted blond, and he wore a sky-blue, short-sleeved silk shirt with a heavy gold necklace hung around the points of its collar, like a decoration. But despite the swanky outfit and bleached hair, I could still see scars cutting through his eyebrows. Those, and the death camp tattoo on his arm were the unmistakable signature of another name I recalled from my youth, more than thirty years before.
“Yossel Kolowitz,” I called out with unrestrained excitement.
He waded through the fan of chairs with a smart-ass grin, seized me by the hand, and said, “Damn right I am. And you’re the kid from Manchester.”
“You two have met before?” asked our hostess, bemused.
The quickening interest flowing through the room was palpable as, for the next half hour, Jay Cole told the story of Yossel Kolowitz – his survival in Auschwitz, his failed attempt to jump ship, his internment by the British, his enlistment into Begin’s Irgun, his heroic adventures during the War of Independence and, finally, his life on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek.
Later, over drinks by the pool, Yossel told me the rest of his story. He had ultimately chosen to live with the uncle on a non-religious kibbutz rather than with the uncle in a Jerusalem yeshiva. The kibbutz had been good for him. He had learned the trade of plumbing, married a local girl, and had two sons. An IDF reservist, he was called up to serve during the Six-Day War, and was wounded. He went to America to recuperate. He decided to stay, and chose Los Angeles because of the climate, where he made a decent living as a plumber. In due course, his two sons joined him and, together, they prospered in the plumbing accessories business.
When I asked him how his boys had taken to America, a blush of pleasure rose to his cheeks. “They’ve made me a zaydie, a grandfather,” he beamed. “I’ve got six eineklich ” (grandchildren). “My older boy is married to a girl from Utah, and my younger one to a girl from Wyoming.”
He must have seen my smile falter because he quickly moved his face very close to mine, almost threateningly, and in a mulish whisper that was shot through with his old swagger and bluster, he hissed, “Sure, I would have wanted my boys not to have married shikses [non-Jewish women]. So what am I supposed to do, hotshot – disown them? This is America, right? These things happen all the time in America, right?”
I nodded, wanting to distance myself from his pain, but he drove on relentlessly.
“Don’t think I’m not heartbroken. Of course I’m heartbroken. People here call me Jay Cole. It’s a masquerade. I’m back to my old Auschwitz cabaret tricks. I put on fancy clothes and fancy airs, and at my country club I make people laugh. They think I’m one of them, but underneath I’m crying; I’m forever a survivor. So just keep your opinions to yourself, hotshot, and don’t start telling me what’s right and what’s wrong. Menachem Begin is a survivor. He’ll understand. Goodbye!” And with that, off he went.
The weather in Los Angeles the following Shabbat afternoon, 13 November, the day after Begin’s arrival, was a glorious mix of sun, breeze, and shade. The plaza in front of the hotel where we were staying boasted fountains and foliage; winter flowers bloomed in circular beds and cascaded from pedestals. As I approached the hotel I spied Yechiel Kadishai striding back and forth, eyes darting hither and thither. It looked like he was desperately in search of someone.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Where have you been?”
“With friends over Shabbat. Why? Anything wrong?”
“I’m waiting for Dr. Gotsman. I need him urgently.”
Dr. Mervyn Gotsman habitually accompanied Begin on his travels overseas.
“What’s wrong? I asked.
“Aliza’s dead!”
An icicle of horror and sadness trickled down my spine. Distraught though Yechiel was, he
remained admirably contained as he explained how the prime minister’s son, Benny, had phoned him from Jerusalem with the heartbreaking news. Yechiel’s first act was to try and track down Dr. Gotsman on his beeper, but he didn’t answer. He needed him by his side when conveying the bitter news to Begin, and to his daughter, Leah, who had accompanied him on this trip.
“Presumably we’ll be turning around and flying straight home tonight,” I ventured.
“Yes. I’ve already instructed the crew to ready the plane for departure at nine. Meanwhile, don’t tell a soul.”
By the time Dr. Gotsman turned up, it was twilight. He’d gone to synagogue for the afternoon service and had been in the process of reciting the blessing over the Torah when his beeper went off. He promptly phoned the Israeli duty officer on the hotel’s nineteenth floor, where the prime minister’s suite was located, but she had no idea what it was about. So he hurried back, and, given the news, grabbed his medical bag and went off with Yechiel and Hart and Simona Hasten, old friends of the Begins, to the prime minister’s suite. Filing silently inside they found Begin sitting on a sofa reading a book, splendidly attired in his tuxedo, in readiness for the evening’s banquet.
“What’s happened?” he asked, looking up, his face suddenly waxen.
“Alla has gone,” said Yechiel in a hushed and sorrowful tone.
Anguish overcame him and tears began welling up in his eyes. “Lama azavti otta? ” [Why did I leave her], he wailed, shaking back and forth in grief. Over and over again he cried this lament, refusing all consolation.
Yechiel went in search of the prime minister’s daughter, Leah. When he escorted her back into the room she took one look at her father, and cried, “Ima! It’s Ima! What’s happened to my mother?” Told of her passing, she slumped into the embrace of Simona Hasten, who gently lowered her onto the couch where she leaned against her father, sobbing.
Yechiel described this to me when he left the room, and told me to inform Sam Rothberg of our imminent departure. I found Sam at the end of the corridor, looking drained of all color. He already knew; Hart Hasten had told him. They had bumped into one another as Sam was on his way to the prime minister’s suite for a relaxed chat prior to escorting him to the grand ballroom for the gala affair.
An hour or so later, with an ashen face and haunted eyes, Menachem Begin shambled onto the plane and allowed Yechiel to settle him in the aircraft’s tiny sleeping cabin, from which he hardly emerged throughout the tedious sixteen-hour flight back to Tel Aviv. When we landed briefly in New York for refueling, the traveling journalists rushed to the telephone booths to phone in their pieces. Taking advantage of the stopover to stretch my legs, I caught snippets of what they were dictating into the receivers; all seemed to be saying much the same thing:
“It was a simple, old-fashioned, lifelong love affair…”
“The prime minister relied on her totally…”
“She was the only person he really confided in…”
“She managed all his personal affairs…”
“Only with her was he absolutely candid and open…”
“Begin needed three things above all – devotion, tranquility, and companionship, and she gave him all three…”
Over the Atlantic, I asked Yechiel where Mrs. Begin was to be buried, and he answered that he had broached the matter gingerly with the prime minister, prior to leaving Los Angeles.
“I didn’t want to use the word bury,” he said. “I thought it too awful. So I said funeral. ‘Menachem,’ I said, ‘where do you want Alla’s funeral to be?’ He said, ‘The same place as for me.’ So I said, ‘But I don’t know where that is.’ He said, ‘You have it in my will. I gave it to you a long time ago in a sealed envelope.’ I said I had the envelope, but I’d never opened it because it was my understanding I was to open it only after he’d gone. He seemed to assume he’d go first. He understood the predicament and said, ‘I want the funeral to be on the Mount of Olives, as near as possible to Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein. That’s what’s written in the envelope.’”
Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein had been two heroes of Menachem Begin’s underground days. Condemned to death, they resolved that rather than swing on a rope tied by a British executioner, they would take their own lives, and this they did by embracing each other and blowing themselves up with an improvised hand grenade lodged between them.
Aliza Begin, sixty-two, was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives alongside these martyrs, and Yechiel made sure that the adjacent plot was reserved for Menachem Begin.
During the shiva week, the seven days of ritual mourning following the funeral, when the bereaved sit on low chairs, wear ripped garments and male mourners go unshaven, the prime minister received all comers in what was an extraordinary display of shared grief. People lined up in droves to convey their condolences, people from every walk of life: shopkeepers, professors, politicians, yeshiva students, entrepreneurs, soldiers, rabbis, diplomats, housewives; even men and women who had served jail sentences, and former drug addicts and prostitutes whom Aliza Begin had discreetly helped rehabilitate. Her husband knew absolutely nothing about this until they told him.
At Aliza’s graveside, November 1982
Photograph credit: Yitzhak Harari
As we have seen, Begin revered religious Jews who spent their time immersed in rabbinical texts, and he had a particular admiration for the scholarship of his colleague Dr. Yosef Burg, who was a prewar graduate of the famed Berlin Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary and of the Berlin University. His erudition was amply displayed when he was gave the eulogy for the deceased during the shiva.
“The Kabbalah tells us,” Dr. Burg began, “that there is a Torah that cannot be memorized or written down. It is a Torah not of study or of learning, not of intellect or of scholarship, not of innovation or of disputation. It is a Torah without words. It is a Torah of the nefesh, of the soul, and it is the sweetest Torah of all.
“Nothing we say or write, could ever do justice to, or truly fathom, the nefesh of Aliza Begin – the warmth and love that flowed from her inner being, the demands she made of herself day by day, her sacrifices in the underground for the sake of Eretz Yisrael, her work for the needy and for the sick, for those ailing in body and in spirit; her courage, her vigor, her faith, her fortitude; her love and laughter, her readiness to spare nothing of herself for the sake of her children and her husband. Only when we come together, as we do now at this shiva, and talk of her virtues, can we share a little something of the nobility and stature of the nefesh of Aliza Begin.
“In Judaism, memory is everything. No less than one hundred and sixty-nine times does the Torah command us to remember the past. The significance of memory is that, by it, the past is made part of the present. If you erase the power of memory you shatter the sense of time. Time is past, present and future. And the existence of a future in Judaism is netzach – eternity. To the bereaved the future is also a ma’aseh chesed – a divine act of loving kindness. It is a ma’aseh chesed because even as one remembers the passing of a loved one, the future is a promise that the agony of grief will, in time, mellow.
“In Judaism there are two kinds of memory: zikaron and yizkor. Zikaron is ephemeral; it fades. Yizkor is eternal. If one loses a distant friend, one has pangs of memory and a sense of a place that he or she once filled. The most dismaying thing about such a death is not the gap that it leaves, but how the memory of it becomes a mere echo of the past. That is zikaron.
“However, there is that other quality of memory that never dims. It never dims because the person we recollect is a part of oneself: ‘basar m’basarcha, nefesh m’nafshecha’ [flesh of your flesh, soul of your soul].The deceased remains a living being within one’s soul forever. And that is yizkor.
“And in yizkor we acknowledge that the finality of death is part of life. Or, in the words of Ecclesiastes, ‘To everything there is a season: A time to be born, and a time to die.’ Often, we see the Almighty plucking a beautiful life just when,
to us, he or she appears in full blossom. And then we ask, lama? Why? The prophet Isaiah gives the answer. His answer is that the thoughts of the Almighty are beyond the capacity of mortal minds. And so we are confused and frightened, and ask questions to which there are no answers, except for the one in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty-two, verse four: ‘Hatzur tamim po’alo, ki kol devarav mishpat ’ [The Rock, the Almighty, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice].
“This means that in Judaism there is no such thing as an irrational, meaningless fate. In the words of the eminent rabbinic scholar, Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, Judaism rejects the notion of random events in life. Judaism rejects any belief in a determinate luck or in a blind fate. We do not believe in fate as did the Greeks, who saw everything affected by absurd, unalterable, and ruthless decrees which emanated from some remote unknown. Such a belief crushes a man’s dreams, irrespective of what he does or does not do. This, to the Greeks, was the source of human tragedy. Man becomes a helpless pawn in the hands of inexorable forces which cannot be thwarted, even by the gods.’”
Here, Dr. Burg paused, and looking directly at the prime minister, his son Benny, and his daughters, Hassya and Leah, who were sitting low by their father’s side, he ended, “Even as Judaism tries to comprehend catastrophic events which cruelly destroy man’s dreams, Judaism cannot accept the existence of the ultimately irrational in human life. Events which we label as tragic belong to a higher divine order into which man has not been initiated. The world is governed not by decrees of fate but by reasons beyond our comprehension. We have been granted insights into the physical nature of life through the accumulation of scientific knowledge, but we are excluded from the realm of divine understanding. The relationship between the individual and what becomes of him or her eludes our grasp. Thus it is that even as we mourn the passing of your beloved wife and mother, Aliza, we acknowledge that to God there are no arbitrary happenings. This is why upon hearing of her passing we declared, ‘Baruch Dayan ha’emet! ’ [Blessed be the Judge of the truth]. And this is why we affirmed at her graveside, ‘Hashem natan, Hashem lakach, yehi shem Hashem l’olam va’ed,’ [The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord forever]. And blessed shall be the remembrance of Aliza Begin forever.”
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 71