The story waiting for a director to make a film

April 20, 2018   

1. Countless comments have been written about the series "Saleh, This Is the Land of Israel," which deals with the way the state authorities treated immigrants in the 1950s. I read them with interest and, unfortunately, I didn't see anyone write what I felt. Maybe there are those who thought like me, but were afraid to write. The truth is that I'm afraid too, because political correctness in our country is very clear. It's permissible to blatantly slander right-wingers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and anyone who doesn't have a protective umbrella in the media, but in this area - it's not like that. You could very quickly be turned into a dark racist. But I'm taking the risk. Well, I saw large parts of the series in question and I was simply filled with excitement. Hundreds of thousands of Jews are getting to fulfill the dream of generations and are returning to the land of their ancestors after two thousand years. Here, Jews who had already immigrated a few years earlier from other diasporas and built a glorious state with their ten fingers are waiting for them, and in a short time are establishing dozens of development towns, from north to south. They are trying to provide them with a livelihood and a home in the new land. True, no one "dumped" them, the veteran immigrants, out of a truck at the end of a dark road, but the reason for this is simple: when they came to the country, there were almost no roads here. They had to pave them with their own hands. Giora, this is the Land of Israel. Take the archive films that are embedded throughout the series, with the documentation of the masses of immigrants getting off the ships and planes, take the footage of the blooming wilderness and the construction boom, change the melody and narration and tone – and you have an exciting film for the 70th Independence Day. Look around and see. But what can you do when director David Deri prefers to focus on hardship, on evil, and tries to stir up unrest, conflict and do everything so that on the 70th Independence Day they will say Hallel with a curse in Yeruham. 2. Wait, wait, don't misunderstand. It is clear that the new immigrants had many difficulties, and it is clear that they bravely dealt with the obstacles of absorption and livelihood. The Land of Israel was bought in agony. True, the establishment made mistakes in those years. The immigrants could have been absorbed better. But overall, this film gives us a picture of thought, of planning, of a sense of historical responsibility, and especially of a tremendous momentum of action. The only thing that really leaves a sour taste in the mouth is the condescending way in which the officials and heads of the agency spoke about the Jews who came from the Middle East, as emerges from the protocols revealed in the series. Although the real storm here should be around other statements by those very individuals. Not about how to get the new immigrants to settle in distant places that are good for the country, but about how to get the new immigrants to abandon the faith and glorious heritage they brought with them in favor of creating a "new Israeli." I have no doubt that in those dark archive basements are hidden hair-raising protocols and transcripts, with much more disparaging expressions about the religious world of the immigrants. And this injustice needs to be addressed. It's not just going back in the time machine to grumble decades later. This crime of erasing the glorious tradition of the Eastern Orthodox began in the 1950s, but continues in the State of Israel today. An entire generation continues to grow up here who do not learn about "Shema Yisrael" in their education system, who do not know what the weekly torah and prayer and Shabbat are. The sons and grandsons of those precious and innocent immigrants are still being taken and thrown into a dry and weary land without water. And when someone tries to do something about it, to correct this historical injustice in those places a little, they are accused of "religion." That's the real story. It's still waiting for a talented director to research and film and make a moving film. I have excellent interviewees for this film: those immigrants from Morocco from Deri's film. The very same interviewees from Yeruham. Including his sweet, God-fearing parents, who will painfully tell about the re-education of the Ashkenazi elite, which caused many good people to break away from the tradition of their father's and grandfather's house. 3. And hence to another historical matter: On the 2nd of Iyar 5758, the day that Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, the Kibbutz Masuot Yitzhak in Gush Etzion did not go out dancing in the streets. The day before, on the 4th of Iyar, Kfar Etzion fell and 157 of its fighters were killed (so that in fact, their Memorial Day is the date that was later designated as the Day of Remembrance for the Fallen in Israel's Armed Forces). On that historic and happy day, the 5th of Iyar, the final preparations were made in the kibbutz for the surrender agreement with the Jordanians. Israel's 70th Independence Day is also the 70th anniversary of the fall of Gush Etzion. I know the heroic story of Masuot Yitzhak and the settlements of Gush Etzion not from history books, but from my own family stories. My grandfather, Aharon Meir, the late, and his brother Akiva Yavdla, were in Jordanian captivity for nine months. Their sister Yehudit, who also fell in captivity, recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday. At the party The family we held for her heard what happened then in Gush Etzion, exactly seventy years ago this week: "On the day the state was declared, the day after the fall of Kfar Etzion, our parents in Haifa, like all residents of the country, still did not know what had befallen us and the rest of the Gush kibbutzim. Later, my mother told us that on that difficult day she noticed from afar that friends and relatives were walking to the other side of the sidewalk and avoiding bumping into her because they were sure we had been killed. "That day she did not let my father go outside alone, because she was afraid that something would happen to him. They were under enormous stress. On the last day of the fighting, my friend Sarah, who was in contact with the sector commander and knew better than me about what was about to happen, approached me and told me, 'Be strong, your brother will soon come to say hello to you.'" At first, Yehudit didn't understand what she was talking about, but then it became known that the kibbutz where she was stationed had discussed the surrender agreement with the Jordanians and that three young men would go out with a white flag as representatives of the surrendering kibbutz. My grandfather, her brother, was among the three. She said goodbye to him with great pain and fear that this would be the last time she would see him, because there were rumors about the men of Kibbutz Revadim who had gone out with a white flag – and were shot. "He gave me a kind of will," she recalls, "asking me to look after his wife Zipporah and little Israel and take care of our parents. So we said goodbye with a heavy feeling." When my grandfather was already on his way to the village gate, a hasty order was received from the Haganah headquarters not to go out to the gate. It was decided not to endanger any more fighters. And so they spent their last day at Yitzhak's in uncertainty and with various fragments of information and rumors. Speaking of rumors: A few days later, on the way to captivity, the legion soldiers tried to scare them with various reports about settlements that had fallen and more and more comrades who had been killed. At first, they believed every word that came out of their mouths, but then the Jordanians gave the captives a notebook containing a list of fighters who had fallen in battle. One of the companions who knew Arabic looked at the notebook and told the captives: "I'll tell you something now, but don't laugh out loud. The list they gave us now is a list of our cows from the barn. It must have somehow ended up in their hands." From that moment on, they began to doubt the Jordanians' fake news. And back to preparations for the evacuation in Iyar 5758, which, by the way, fell exactly like this year, on a Friday. Yehudit says that she went into my grandparents' house and tried to organize a package of souvenirs from there. What of all the contents of the modest house should she take with her and not leave to the Arab looters? She decided that the most important thing was the family photos of my grandmother, her sister-in-law, the last memento of her parents and siblings who were murdered a few years earlier in the Holocaust. The evacuation was approaching. And so was Shabbat. "Our friend Rachel Harari," says Yehudit, "was lighting Shabbat candles. Friends asked her, 'Why are you lighting candles now? They're going to come to evacuate us soon!' And she answered calmly: 'Shabbat is Shabbat.' "I vaguely remember the rest of the events of that Shabbat night. I don't remember if we made kiddush or if the boys held Shabbat night prayers. Eventually, after a long wait, three trucks arrived to pick us up. Two of them were covered with tarpaulins, and one was open. At first I didn't notice that there was also an open truck, and it wasn't until I got on the closed truck that I noticed it. Since I usually suffer from shortness of breath, I didn't think much and jumped from the top of the truck to get to the open truck. "I sprained my leg from the jump and got on the truck with a limp and in excruciating pain. And so we set off. The trucks started to drive away, and I looked back, with one last look at Gush Etzion. The two flames of the Shabbat candles flickered before my eyes until the truck drove away." • The column is published in the newspaper 'Besheva''