In the beginning, the Torah tells us, God created heaven and earth. The oceans were made to teem with life and the land blessed with seed-bearing fruit. God said,
“Let there be light,” and there was light.
This is a clean and efficient way to do business. God, notably, did not say, “Let there be a modern Jewish state.” The creation of that, 60 years ago, required immeasurable toil, guile, sacrifice and blood.
Israel was not born through a pronouncement from God or man, but by the efforts of thousands of people.
Many Bay Area men and women put their lives on the line for Israel in 1948.
There are countless stories. Here are six.
David Apfelbaum
David Apfelbaum shifts uncomfortably in his chair — and it really is his chair, as he is sitting at the counter of David’s Deli in San Francisco. He is the eponymous David.
When asked why he would risk his life for the nascent state of Israel, he leans close and speaks in a grave voice barely above a whisper.
“I can tell you one little thing — if you want to hear.
“When I was almost 11 years old, I was in a camp, in Poland, a subdivision of Majdanek. I was hanged.”
He pauses. “By my hands. From a tree. They wanted me to shout out all kinds of things. I knew they would shoot me anyway, and I was a very stubborn child. So I wasn’t going to shout. They took bayonets and put them into my body. I have 18 holes.
“This one,” he says gruffly, jamming a finger right between his eyes, into the now-apparent crater, “you can see.”
Apfelbaum was ripped from the tree and kicked to a bloody pulp. He was hurled into a cramped cellar filled three-quarters of the way to the ceiling with rancid water. For three days and nights he crouched in the bilge, only trotted out twice a day to receive 25 lashes across the back.
“The last time, I could barely hear. My ears, they are full of blood. I had the map of Europe all over my body. A bloody map of Europe. That is my joke,” he says, not smiling.
Finally, with Apfelbaum half-conscious on the ground, a low-ranking SS man asked the camp commandant, “What should we do with this dog?”
“Shoot him” was the immediate reply.
“But he is already dead.”
Apfelbaum was tossed into a chamber amid 50 or 60 rotting corpses. He clawed his way out of the pile of murdered Jews and hid for weeks under barracks, still in the concentration camp.
“And then, you know, typhus.” The 79-year-old sighs and looks down at his wrinkled palms on the counter. “Anyway, I am alive.”
So, in retrospect, it was an easy decision for Apfelbaum to flout international law and smuggle children to pre-state Israel. What’s the worst they could do to a man who’d already seen the worst of it?
“No,” he corrects gently. “I did not see the worst of it. I went through the worst of it.”
After the war, Apfelbaum studied at German universities and taught Hebrew literature in Jewish schools. That was, as he puts it, his “not-secret life.”
Yet after the sun slipped beneath the horizon, he would duck away into the shadows as a secret agent of Bricha (Hebrew for “flight” and “escape”), the clandestine Jewish organization that ferried Jews into pre-state Israel.
A typical group would be 30 or 40 kids from a refugee camp, but sometimes there were 80 or more. Apfelbaum might load them into a train, flatbed trucks or horse carts, or they might even walk all night. But, in the end, he’d pass them on to the next Bricha agent as the children continued their journey to Israel. It would take dozens of men like Apfelbaum to slowly shepherd the kids from Poland down to Italy, where they took to the sea.
“There was one time when we had 85 or 86 youngsters moving from Czechoslovakia to Western Germany. And all of a sudden, I heard some dogs barking. So I must admit, I did something crazy,” he says.
“I started a fire. I figured [the police] would run toward the fire, so I told the children to run the other direction.”
Apfelbaum spoke many languages — German, Russian, Czech, Hungarian and Romanian just for starters — and he had a passport for each nation.
“One of the names was very funny,” he says with a wry smile.
“You know, we didn’t have any butter at that time, so we used the Hebrew word; one of my names was Chemovich, which means ‘the butter man.’”
Another passport was for Kemachovicz, which loosely translates as “flour and butter man” in Slovakian.
“We used to joke and laugh about those names.”
Decades later — and decades ago — Apfelbaum was touring Tel HaShomer hospital near Tel Aviv (“I have been to Israel 56 times,” he notes matter-of-factly). There he was waylaid by some of the hospital’s functionaries who seemed eager to show him a new X-ray machine. So he acquiesced and walked into the darkened room.
When the lights snapped on, Apfelbaum found himself surrounded by young doctors and army officers and Israeli civilians. They were his children — the children he had smuggled into Israel.
“At this party, there were more than 300 of them,” he says, a faraway look in his eyes. “But there are much, much more than that.”
In Apfelbaum’s life, there are no simple answers. So when asked what Israel means to him, he sat for a long time.
“OK, I’ll tell you a little story,” he says.
Apfelbaum takes off his rectangular spectacles, and for just a moment, he rubs the corners of his red eyes.
“The last time I was in Israel was for the funeral of one of my best friends — actually, he called me his brother — David Elazar. We called him Dado.”
Elazar, who would eventually become the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, was chief of the Northern Command during the Six-Day War in 1967. Apfelbaum was in Israel at the time, and Elazar drove him to the Western Wall almost immediately after its capture.
Twenty years earlier, Apfelbaum had somehow escaped the furnace that incinerated thousands of years of European Jewry virtually in its totality. Yet now he walked, stiffly, toward the holiest site in all Judaism. Elazar trailed a few steps behind snapping pictures.
“I didn’t know I was doing this, but later he showed me the film. First, I am walking very slowly, like a man on ice. And then, the closer I come to it, I am walking faster.”
“And at the end — I am running.”
Dr. Bernard Kaufman
Vienna, 1920. Bernard Kaufman was a 6-year-old boy with wavy red hair and watery blue eyes. A portrait of him from the time — outfitted in a navy blue sailor suit, with his hands on his hips — hangs over the mantelpiece of his San Francisco home, all these years later.
Kaufman was out on a walk around town with his father, a doctor, when a barrage of insults clustered around the word “Juden” shattered the morning calm. Father and son were approached by three soldiers on leave from the Austrian army. The trio had had little luck against the Allies; their odds were looking much better against the Kaufmans.
Spit hit the cobblestones, fists were clenched and the attack began. But
this story will not end how you think it will.
“They attacked my father, and I never saw anything like it. My father, he knew how to fight, you know, and he came close to killing three people. He smashed them to bits. This was unbelievable. I still have it — the memory of it is vivid,” Kaufman, now 94, says in a near-whisper.
“The last man, my father hit him so hard I saw the jaw smashed and the bones breaking. And I was a child , so …” At this point, Kaufman loudly emits a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I didn’t know what to do. But I had to protect my father. So, I put my arms around the man and bit him in the tuchus. It must have been terrible, because he screamed and screamed and he couldn’t get me loose.
“Friends of those three soldiers eventually came and carried them out. What became of them, I do not know.”
Kaufman leans back on his couch, drained by the intense memory. His family did not need the subsequent ascent of European anti-Semitism to become ardent Zionists — yet they bore its brunt nevertheless.
You could say young Bernard Kaufman had his principles beaten into him. He was beaten on the way to school. He was beaten at school, and he was beaten on the way home. He was beaten on the streets, on the trams and in the marketplace. On one occasion, a gang of thugs set upon him after he failed to doff his cap as he walked past a Catholic church. On other days, large boys held him down while a smaller boy jammed a fistful of ham into Kaufman’s mouth. These memories, too, are crystal clear.
But not every recollection of youth is violent and foul. Kaufman smiles when he remembers the 1923 World Zionist Congress, which his family attended in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia. “There was a tremendous ado because while the caucus was in session, President Harding died. So the American delegation formed a special committee to memorialize the president.”
Hundreds of Jews packed the hall. Many of them had walked there from parts unknown, as they couldn’t afford a railroad ticket.
In 1928, Kaufman’s father completed his medical studies and moved the family back to San Francisco (where Bernard was born in 1914), missing the pogroms and desperation that were to follow. Kaufman graduated from Stanford University and Tulane medical school before being drafted into the Army as a medical officer.
His Zionist activism was put on hold as he careened throughout Europe tending to the wounds of American soldiers — at least as far as his superiors knew.
“I became active in trying to get people into Palestine, and I arranged for transportation and food — illegally, of course. All illegally.
“We were successful in some cases, of moving a significant number of people. One time, we moved 3,000.”
When asked how many organizers that required, he grinned.
“Three. There were two shlichim — these were people who came from Palestine to help organize the refugees. And these people were so damn tough. There was absolutely nothing that could hold them back or block their efforts. And they contacted me and asked me to be of help.”
If Kaufman’s activities had been exposed, he risked a probable court-martial. When asked how this would have affected his subsequent medical career, the doctor answered economically: “Adversely.”
He returned to San Francisco, where he was an internal medicine specialist for 54 years. His memories of the late 1940s are, once again, “crystal clear.” There were the days he walked into every Jewish business on Geary from the ocean to downtown looking for donations to the Zionist Organization of America and Israel Bonds (he founded the local branch of the latter). There were the near-fistfights with local member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, a national group opposing the formation of a Jewish state. And, of course, there was that night, that unforgettable night.
On May 15, 1948, Israel declared independence.
“There was a mass meeting at the Scottish Rite Auditorium on Van Ness Avenue and there seemed to be masses of people in there,” he recalls with a rapturous look on his face.
“There was a lot of dancing and singing going on. And I danced all night. And I cried all night.”
Kaufman weeps at the memory even now. In fact, he weeps at many memories of the era, even the good ones.
“I don’t know why. Maybe I’m a creampuff,” he says through a teary-eyed smile. “But the memories, they mean so much to me.”
Because when it comes to Israel, the story did end the way Kaufman thought it would — the way he dreamed it would.
“Dreams,” he says of Israel’s founding generation. “They made dreams into realities. And that’s rare. That’s rare.”
Edward Ben-Eliezer
With a sickening series of splintering cracks audible even above the din of the mob, the great wooden doors gave way.
Arab marauders streamed into the home of Massooda Gabbai like invaders breaching a medieval castle. But this was not the Middle Ages; this was Iraq in 1941. It was the “farhood,” the orgy of vengeance and looting directed against the Jewish community of Baghdad after the British invaded Iraq’s capital.
The octogenarian Gabbai grabbed her 11-year-old grandson, Edward Ben-Eliezer, and dragged him to the roof of her palatial home. For two solid days, the looters cleaned out the house, which was full of furniture and carpets stored there as inventory for the family business. The rioters even backed up trucks to the front door.
Bullets whizzed past the grandmother and grandson, fired randomly from the police station across the street, but the mob left the roof alone.
For two solid days, Ben-Eliezer and his grandmother cowered under a lean-to.
“I took my grandmother and I hugged her and didn’t let her go. And the bullets is coming from all over,” he said in his rapid-fire Middle Eastern cadence. “Two days. We didn’t eat.”
As the sun rose on the third day, the pair took advantage of a lull in the carnage to make their escape. They quickly noticed that every door in the Jewish neighborhood had been smashed. But that was far from the worst of it.
“There were parts of bodies and blood all over. There is kids I know from the neighborhood, and they cut [off] their heads or their hands. They slaughtered everybody in the neighborhood. I’m telling you, if we didn’t go on the roof, that would be us in pieces there,” says Ben-Eliezer, 78, his brown eyes staring at the floor of his room in San Francisco’s Jewish Home.
“When looking at all this blood, she put her hand on my face and we started running. I told her, ‘When I grow up, this will never happen to Jewish people again.’ I don’t know why I said that. She put her hand over my eyes and said, ‘Yes, yes, yes’ — three times.”
It was not an idle promise.
Not long after his bar mitzvah, he joined the Baghdad branch of the Haganah, Israel’s pre-state army. He smiles, slightly malevolently — “at 14 years old, you can do a lot of things!”
Ben-Eliezer’s parents never found the crates of ammunition he buried in the family’s basement and tiled over. They never realized that the teenager handed over the copious amounts of money he made tutoring wealthy boys to the Haganah, where it was transformed into “anything, you name it — machine guns, pistols, hand bombs, any kind of ammunition you can explode, we had it.”
In short, they didn’t catch on that their son was killing people, sometimes with his bare hands.
“There were some people who were against us: gangsters. And some Jewish people are afraid of them. Well, you need somebody to go and terrorize them. And we used to do that. But we don’t terrorize with noise [weapons]. You just eliminate them — once and forever,” says Ben-Eliezer. His playful smile is gone. He is, quite literally, deadly serious.
“You go there, you and your friend, and you give [the gangster] something to drink. And then you’ll be on top of him. And then you do your job.”
By the time he was 15 or 16, this was a job Ben-Eliezer excelled at.
In addition to military training and “doing your job,” the Haganah also provided Jewish holiday parties, lessons on Torah and spiritual instruction. Ben-Eliezer savors the memory of the “wonderful young lady” who taught Hebrew songs and Jewish history in a dark, fortified basement.
He never learned her real name.
Make no mistake, though — this was not the Boy Scouts. Every week the Iraqi authorities cracked down on the Zionist underground. Every week “10 more beautiful Jewish children” swung above the city streets. In 1947, word got back to him that the government was on to him. Hoping to avoid a date with the hangman, he went into hiding. Perhaps not surprisingly, his assignments from the Haganah became more and more dangerous.
“What can I tell them, no? ‘No, I’ll go to my hanging.’”
Rather than eliminate local gangsters and bullies, Ben-Eliezer turned to hampering Iraq’s ability to wage war with the future state of Israel.
On a moonless night in 1947, he set off with seven other men and a woman. Soundlessly, the platoon made its way through the rough countryside (never through the middle of the fields, never in a straight line).
Finally, the Jews came to rest in the shadows of an Iraqi military base. Aligned in a crescent in front of them were eight hulking bombers. Eighteen hands began snapping together wires, clips and explosives. The troops fanned out, depositing a package beneath each plane and circling back to a central location; all eight bombs were wired to a detonator like a lethal string of Christmas lights.
One by one, the Haganah fighters sprinted past the detonator and into the darkness. The last soldier, who operated the switch, was the fastest runner; he would have the shortest head-start following the explosions. Finally, he dropped the lever.
With a blinding flash, the eight bombers were engulfed in a fiery chain reaction. Debris thudded to the ground and Arabic shouting and gunfire rippled through the night. In the confusion, one of Ben-Eliezer’s colleagues tripped and broke his neck.
More than 60 years later, Ben-Eliezer shakes his head. He’s still angry.
“Oh, that was stupid,” he spits out. “That was a stupid loss. You know, when someone is hurt and dead, you say that guy is stupid. He didn’t watch himself. You don’t feel sorry for him because if you are a good soldier, you learned to watch yourself. That is what you are taught.”
With that lesson drilled into them, the eight remaining soldiers could grit their teeth and run off into the night. If there was to be grieving, it could come later.
It was now too dangerous for Ben-Eliezer to stay in Iraq. So he attempted to sneak into Iran to get to Israel, walking at night and hiding in caves during the day. This time, however, the Iraqi police caught up with him. His party was shot at, captured and dragged back to Mosul, where they were locked in a synagogue.
Ben-Eliezer pauses. Then, improbably, he smiles.
“You know that sentence, ‘If you have money, it will take you places?’” Well, it solves a lot of problems,” he says with a chuckle.
Money not only takes you to places, it takes you away from them. Haganah agents arrived at the synagogue. Money changed hands — lots of money, evidently. Ben-Eliezer’s group of 22 Jews was provided with a pair of cars. They drove all night, deep into Iran’s interior, ending up at a Jewish refugee camp. Several months later, a massive passenger plane rumbled into the dusty encampment. More than 400 Jews clamored aboard, bound for Israel. Ben-Eliezer was one of them.
Over the next several years the kibbutznik fought to get his 10 siblings and parents into Israel. He also brought his grandmother, to whom he’d promised all those years earlier that Jews would never again be slaughtered defenselessly.
Ben-Eliezer, who immigrated to the Bay Area in the 1950s, sits quietly for quite a while. And then he speaks.
“She was very healthy and beautiful until the last day of her life. She lived to 104.
“And she died — in Israel.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California