Fifty Years to Our Aliyah - Part Two

We continue our first year of our Aliyah to Israel, fifty years ago. First installment is here.

First of all, my wife has a post up, here. And now a second here.

Secondly, found more pictures.

Our cabin on the ship was crowded as we even had to store some things we brought in the shower stall. And next door was a woman who was constantly seasick and her regurgitations came through quit audibly. But there was lots of food. One whole dining room was kosher and about 50 of us ate at an added Kosher section in another dining hall. It turned out our waiter had a Jewish mother although he considered himself Greek Orthodox but his genes were an advantage and although deserts were limited choices, we got them all.

This must have been for Shabbat

After the Greeks put on a folk heritage program, members of the youth movements got together and we managed to put on a singing and dancing program (try making leaps when the floor ever so slightly dips and then comes up in mid-leap). 

As I wrote, my wife did the laundry by hand that first year at the Betar Student Hostel, with an open courtyard for the first few months, and this is how she did the drying:

Later, when it was covered, I climbed up on to the roof. Once, I forgot to take my underwear down when a hamsin hit Jerusalem with all that yellow Sahara sand and my private parts were itchy for weeks.

UPDATE:

Here's the view shortly before we arrived, from the east looking west, from where Shonei Halachot is now towards Jews' Street:

Here is the second floor as seen from The Jews Street:

It served as the Lubinsky Position in the 1948 war.

When a phone was installed, we had to run "outside" first (remember, we were in an upstairs apartment and the roof was not yet up) and then downstairs and if it was raining, we either got wet or had to grab a raincoat.  Actually, for the first two months or so, the telephone to use was the one at the Post Office near the Jaffa Gate, across from the Kishleh Police Station as receiving a phone took time in the 'old days'. To get there was a three-minute jog and we had to pre-arrange the times for the call.

Here is the result of another climb up to the roof of the Omariyah School, adjoining the northern wall of the Temple Mount.  Why? The view:

In another of my Temple Mount actions, on the 17th of Tammuz (actually, the 18th as it was a "delayed" fast) I was a bit unceremoniously removed for attempting to pray there:

Yes, that is me getting the old heave-ho and at the gate, I was tossed out, just like in the Westerns when the bad guy goes out the saloon door. In another action, on the Fast of Esther, I had the Majlis Gate door (it is huge; over 4 meters high) almost slammed on my hand (it did make contact with my hand but not as hard as could be, thankfully).

That first year my wife attended Hebrew Ulpan. One way for us walking out of the Old City from Plugat HaKotel Street was through the shuq, out of Damascus Gate and into town:

Another regular route was straight up David Street, out Jaffa Gate and through Mamilla (way before the mall), which I took, among other destinations, to get to the Arabic Ulpan I attended maybe for two months before dropping out. Only later did I find out most of the students in the Beginners Class, who I found so much more advance than I was, were in fact taking that class for the second or even third time. As for Mamilla, in fact, part of the old pre-1967 wall protecting the residents and shoppers from sniping by Jordanians on the walls was still there (picture below for illustration; just that part the arrow points to).

There was a wonderful conditory which had the best chocolate chocolate-filled cookies ever. In fact, we went to visit our friends the Millers who came on Aliyah a half year after us and I bought those cookies for us to share. Yehudit had a one-burner electric plate, I think, but n any case, it took a long time to wrm up some refreshments and not paying attention, I ate them all up.

Going back to our exit through the Damascus Gate, our first trip to Hebron, to the Military Compound to where the first resettlers moved after the Park Hotel, was done by taking an Arab taxi from Damascus Gate down to Hebron where we left off just outside the gate there.

Our next door neighbor, I noted, was Rav Moshe Segel, who blew the Shofar at the Western Wall in 1930 after it became "illegal" to do so. I met Rav Yitzhak Ginsburg who was married to Romemiah, the Rav's daughter. One piece of advice, among many that I received from Rav Segel was about naming children. My wife was pregnant and he told me that he named his children with unique names as Aligal, Yeshav'am, Uzit, Amisar and Tzafrira. He noted than his son closest to us in age was Yadon and when the Rav crosses the street and someone calls out 'Moshe', twenty people turn their heads.

"But when I call out 'Yadon', only my son responds."

I mentioned in the previous blog post that we were treated to a lift home from the Herut offices in town by Haim Corfu. Less than a year earlier, he was elected to the Knesset for the first time and later became a Minister. I guessed that his driver's license was recent as his driving could have, how shall I say, beneftted from some improvement. He, together with Moshe Nehmad, where I purchased electricity needs in town, were involved in the Cairns assassination (on Ralph Cairns). 

Nehmad, Iraqi-born, spent three months in Poland undergoing an Irgun commanders course run by the Polish Army in a camp just south of Andrichov (mentioned here and I blogged on the affair here).

Besides the Western Wall, praying was done usually at the Hitnachalut Moriah building. Founded in May 1968, the group was based on students and teachers at the Bayit Vegan Kiryat HaNoar school.

Also at the only synagogue not desecrated by the Arabs between 1948-1967, Torat Chaim.

Other items: I became a member of the first Residents Committee. I was approached by my 9th grade teacher at YeshivatChofetz Chaim in Forest Hills, Queens, Rabbi Mordechai Goldstein, who was then the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat HaTefutzot on Mount Zion, to intercede with Menachem Begin so they could possess legal weaponery for defense. The late Rav Yeshayahu Hadari, my Mishnayot teacher in 1966 at the Machon, then Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat HaKotel, came to pay a courtesy visit but actually to see if our religious behavior was equal to the Jewish Quarter's, that is, his  standards. He was relaxed to find me in charge and even joked that his name, Hadari, was a direct like to one of Betar's educational principles, Hadar. I found out that the Rav of the Kotel, Yehuda Getz, was a member of Betar in Tunisia and had been in that country's atillery corps which also explained a sum of money he was able to obtain for me at Purim time to provide for implements of self-defense against assaults by Arabs in the Quarter.

We met Menachem Begin in March 1971 by coincidence (I recall it was at the King David Hotel at which we stopped to use the toilet). My wife, Batya, was pregnant and I introduced myself, informed him that I was the director of the Betar Students' Hostel and if our child would be a boy, we would like him to be the sandak (she wasn't). And then, his eyes lit up and said, "Wait, are you the one the call Winkie?". I confrmed my nickname and he continued, "Well, you have regards from Nissan Teman."

Nissan, who passed away in January this year, one of my oldest and closest friends in Betar for 56 years, 

had happened to have chaperoned Begin around just two weeks earlier while he was in New York for a Bonds speaking tour (there was a taxi strike). Nissan was quite conversational and loquacious and during the ride to the airport he told Begin that if he ever ran into his friend Winkie, to please convey regards. Which Begin did.

I'll finish this installment off with my first meeting with Geula Cohen. She had heard (or read in that Haaretz article) that I had worked with Meir Kahane closely for the past two years as I had been head of Betar and then active in organizing demonstrations, what we in Betar called simply "activism". She had been in the US on behalf of the Soviet Jewry campaign in early 1968, at a Madison Square rally, and wanted to hear from me, first-hand and up close, some insight into JDL and Kahane.

I traveled down to her apartment then at Basel Street in Tel Aviv. We discussed matters, or rather I was interrogated for two hours. About thirty minutes in, she noticed I hadn't touched any of the food she had put out. "You think I don't keep kosher," she abruptly put it to me. "I'll have you know Rabbi [Moshe] Levinger and Chanan [Porat] eat here."

I ate.

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