Page Twenty-Six.

THE. JEWISH, NEWS

Friday, September 7, 1945

From Rome's Ghetto
To Jordan's Valley

Bow The Refugees Strike Root
On J.N.F. Soil In Jewish Palestine

I

By

A. ARZI

T WASN'T EASY," wrote an American soldier from
somewhere in Italy, "to reconcile a discussion of the rug-
ged life in a Palestine settlement with the stately effects of
that luxurious study, with its soft crimson rugs, its richly-
carved mahogany desk, and the large brown-and-tan cushioned
seats that were sprawled about the room. ,
"It was even more difficult to believe that the participants
in this plan to leave soon for Palestine were the two vivacious
sisters with whom I sat talking in these elegant surroundings
of the family study."
That was nearly a year ago. If that American soldier were
to drop in on Palestine today he would see one of those Senori-
tas leading the .rugged life which he found it so difficult to
reconcile with her background. For, together with 35 other
young Italian Jews, she is now ,in Dagania.
It Rained on Hachshara
.
The group has been here since March. Although the aver-
age age is about 20, with the youngest 17 and the oldest 25,
some have been trying to get to Palestine since 1939.- In that
year a few already were undergoing training on a hachshara
farm in Central Italy. Others discovered the Zionist idea for
themselves only in the hard school of the war years. Together
they spent a half-year at work on a hachshara farm which
they called "Lanegeb", near Rome.
Most of them came from an assimilated background. Yet
with Zionism they have won a new-found devotion to orthodox
observance. In Dagania they asked for and obtained their
own kosher kitchen. They have their daily prayer services.
That is a feature common to the majority of Italian halutzim
who arrived in recent years. One group joined up , with the
orthodox Hapoel Hamizrachi settlement at Sde Eliyahu.
They hail originally ftom different kinds of homes in di--
ferent parts of Italy. Some were University students; there
are students of engineering, law and literature among them.
Some came from the kind of home that the American soldier
wrote about. Others come from poor homes in the Roman
ghetto.
Not all went through equally hard times during the war
years, although the lowest common denominator of hardship
was high enough. The poisonous pall of Nazi anti-Semitism
and its Italian Fascist copy hung low over all of them. A few
also will tell you that although they lived in beautiful homes,
that were unscathed by shells, there were periods when they
faced the grim spectre of sarvation.
Some of them fought as Partisans in Florence. They take
their proud place together with other young halutzim from
Europe who fought with Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia or the
Maquis in France.
Some Were Refugees from Poland
Not all are Italian-born. Some were refugees from Poland
or Germany who found their way to Italy in the prewar
years. It is years since most of them last heard from their
families. In a few cases all trace of their . near ones was lost.
In others the tracks led to Lublin.
The ideal of ALIYAH to Eretz Israel brought them to-
gether, in, the, wider sense, in Italy. But the instrument that
welded them together was Hechalutz, aided by soldiers from
the Palestine-Jewish units. It was they who helped organize
their hachshara farm. .
And now here they are in Dagania, in the Jordan Valley,
going through a further period of training to prepare them-
selves for their ultimate settlement on a stretch of Jewish
National Fund land of their own. For the present they live
and work as a self-contained group.

Boy, 14, _Safe in Palestine
After Five-year Odyssey

T

it Letter
From
Palestine

By REGINALD SEIGEL

HE OTHER DAY I met in Jerusalem, where he had come
for medical treatment, a boy • of 14 who had taken five
years to reach Eretz Israel. He had travelled, with only brief
intervals for rest, during most of that period. He had been
shuttle-cocked across Poland and Russia sand Persia, down
through the Persian Gulf and up the Red Sea, and so finally
to this land.
Gideon was a "Teheran" child refugee. All he could speak
when he came here was German and a little Polish. His parents,
originally from Cracow, had settled in Berlin in the late 1920's.
The father was a commercial traveller and did most of his
%business in Danzig.
When the Nazis staged the first big pogrom against the
Jews of Germany in 1938, Gideon's parents moved back to
Poland. It was an uneasy sojourn they had in Warsaw. The
father came again under the Nazi shadow when the annexation
of Czechoslovakia found him in Prague. He hurried hack to
Warsaw; and from then on it seemed to Gideon, he told me, as
though the Nazis were constantly at their heels.
It was at their place of refuge, a camp in Southern Russia,
that the first evacuation of Polish citizens began. Gideon's
parents, who had a boy of 9 and a girl of 3, managed to get him
into a party of evacuees who were going to Persia.
"My father said," Gideon recalled, "that if I ever came to
• Palestine and grew up properly, I might be able to get him and
mother and Sarah the necessary permits to get here. '
The Jewish refugee camp at Teheran was paradise com-
pared with his earlier experiences. There he came into a Jewish
atmosphere.
"But it was nothing compared to Eretz Israel," he said.
"None of us ever imagined that it would be so good here. To me
especially it makes a big difference because I was born in
Berlin, and one of the first things I remember was seeing a
long procession of men and boys in brown shirts, and they were
shouting bad things against the Jews. I was very frightened
at the time because father and mother were frightened. I was
only 3, and they told me afterwards that it was that first day
of April 1933 when the Nazis began torturing Jews."
Gideon remembered how much better he felt when his
father took him away from school a few months before they
left for Poland.
"I always used to wonder," he said, "how it was that all.
the other boys and girls in the class loved Germany so much,
and that man whose picture was on the wall. Then I knew
that to them it was a different Germany from the one which
was ill-treating me."
"Eretz Israel is such a kind place," he declared. "Everyone
here is kind and helpful."
"And what is your ambition in Eretz Israel?" I asked.
"To be a farmer and to have my own share in the building
of the country," he said. "It also means that I will be able to
have my father and mother and Sarah to join me here. They
depend on me to do it."
."Sarah would like , it here very much," he spoke slowly.
"The sunshine and the oranges and the kind people, and the
warm feeling everywhere. She would like it here tremend-
ously."

By

Dorothy

Kahn Bar-Adon

A JERUSALEM SCENE ON V-E DAY

V-E Day In The Valleys

IT

WAS ABOUT FOUR
o'clock in the afternoon when the news came.
The dinner gongs in tens of settlements in the
Jezreel, Beth Shan and Jordan Valleys dinged
ou the long-awaited • announcement—Victory in
Europe. Crowds of workers poured out of the
kitchen, the sewing room, the barn, the fowl ,
runs. Those in nearby fields rattled their wagons
home at breakneck speed.
The children went wild, shouting, "The Nazis
are finished and the Jewish Brigade will come
home tomorrow."
Then, fatigued horses—for they are working
overtime during this harvest season—were hitched
to a wagon and driven to the nearest village to
bring home wine and sweets.
It would be an exaggeration to say that these
settlements went wild with joy. Wounds are too
deep, too fresh, and too frightful. With the ex-
ception of a few fortunate. Americans and English
settlers in En Hashofet and -Kfar Blum, prac-
tically every member of these communal settle-
ments, has close, personal ties with the ghettos
and concentration camps.

Victory—Marred by Weight of Sorrow
As the gong tolled, I saw one Polish woman
burst into tears, crying out, "Victory? haven't
a soul left in the world." It was under the weight
s of these memories that many members of the set-
tlements retired to their rooms during the Vic-
tory celebrations. The nearest anyone came to
"wild joy" was when they heard over the radio
that Americans in New York were "tearing tele-
phone books to shreds"—shrugged their shoulders .
and commented, "What an odd people."
However, there was dancing of the hora and
drinking of toasts in the evening. Settlements
such as Alonim (one of the first settlements of
Youth Aliyah trainees, founded on Jewish Na-
tional Fund land) which has 40 members in the
Jewish Brigade, carried on until dawn. • In older
settlements, such as Merhavia, it was the youth
who took the lead. Here there are youth from
Yugoslavia whose parents may be living and who
are now anticipating reunions. There are also
youth from Poland and Romania who have lost
their entire families.
It also meant a stock-taking. A year ago they
had been war refugees. Today they are on the
road to becoming farmers and they have taken
root in a patch of land which they term, "Shelanu"

(Ours). In the settlement school of Beth Alpha—
in Geva—in its larger neighbour, En Harod—in
the Mizrachi settlements in Beth Shan (Tirat Zvi
and Sde Eliyahu)—in Sarid—in every settlement
of the valleys, there were hundreds of youths from
tens of countries who danced the hora on Victory
Day, aware that despite all that the war had rob-
bed them of—it had given them the precious word,
"shelanu,"—soil, home, future, for themselves and
their people.

Touching Scenes Among Wanderers
There was a touching -scene in Dagania B when
French refugees who have been in Palestine only
a few months, told in broken Hebrew what this
day meant to them. All their sufferings and wan-
derings, they said, had not been in vein, since
they were privileged to greet Victory Day here,
on the bank of Lake Galilee.
In the neighboring settlement of Dagania A
(mother of the communal settlements) the major-
ity of the founder families have sons or daughters
in the Jewish Brigade; in fact, practically none of
the children born in._ Dagania A, of recruiting
age, are at home. Here the scene was enlivened
by a group of vivacious Italian refugees, who, hav-
ing arrived only a few weeks ago, gathered to
rejoice in their native Italian.

Adulterated Joy of the Children
The most spectacular celebration was held in
the settlement school of Mishmar Haemek. The
student body (consisting of children from various
settlements, from towns, and refugees) gathered at
dusk in the grounds, together with the members of
Mishmar Haemek. In the center of the grounds
was a mammoth swastika, widely fenced in. A
match was set to the tar fence. The flames spread
until the swastika went up in smoke.
The children! For them the joy was unadulter-
ated. Hitler had been defeated (by the Jewish
Brigade, assisted by the Russian, Americans and
British.) Their only ouestion was, "Will our
soldiers come marching home tomorrow morning
or only in the evening?" When told that it might
take some time, they wondered why the Americans
couldn't rush them home in "Jeepim" (Jeeps,
Hebrew plural).
Victory celebrations are over and all hands are
busy with the rush of field work. No day passes
without some member of these settlements receiv-
ing a shocking communication from Europe. A
sister or a cousin has returned to the native town
or village; reports on the family's destruction; and
implores help to reach Palestine. Telegrams, scrib-
bled notes, postcards—earth with its tale of horror.
This is the aftermath of Victory.

JNF and the Men
In Khaki and Blue

Jewish Servicemen in Philippines Send $ I 00 to Jewish
National. Fund to Honor President Roosevelt's
Memory in Golden Book

How do the seAce men and
women react to the needs of our
people? Are they concerned that
there should be a speedy end to
Jewish homelessness? Are they
prepared to assist in Palestine's
redemption?
A letter, accompanied by $100,
from Capt. Morris Adler of
Detroit, Chaplain serving with
the U. S. Army in the Philip-
pines, to William Hordes, presi-
dent of the Jewish National Fund
Council of Detroit, offers one
group's answer to these questions.
Chaplain Adler writes:
"Thank you for your very
friendly letter. It reached me in
an appropriate hour—just as I
was about to write to you.
"Enclosed you will find $100
for the Jewish National Fund—
for a page in the J.N.F. Golden
Book in memory of President
Roosevelt.

• Improvised Kinoth

"This sum of money was col-
lected at the suggestion of my
military community during the
reading of Kinoth on Tisha b'Ab.
"Our- young people feel the
§orrow of our people and desire
to participate in Israel's redemp-
tion.
"We had no Kincth and we had

CAPT. MORRIS ADLER

ties in the Philippines, Capt.
Adler informs Mr. Hordes that
he conducts classes in Yiddish,
Hebrew and Zionism, and that
he conducts services in the most
out of the way places in the
Philippines.
His letter was written less than
a week before V-J Day, Rabbi
Adler, who is on leave from
Congregation Shaarey Zedek,
stated:
"I see the men before they
enter battle, as well as those who
return. There are many heart-
rending experiences. We live
here intimately with the tragedies
and the open wounds of an
epoch."
Men in Service Are . Zionists
The message received from
Rabbi Adles; Mr. Hordes points
out, reflects the attitude of scores
of servicemen who have express-
ed strong adherence to Zionist
ideals and who are supporting
the Jewish National Fund.
"Many Detroit servicemen have
sent contributions to the Jewish
National Fund from their posts
in this country and from over-
seas," Mr. Hordes reports. "Many
have planted trees to honor their
parents; others have asked their
parents to support the cause of
a redeemed Palestine. We ex-
pect a great deal from the re-

turnees and we are confident that

to improvise our own Lamenta-
our movement will grow from
tions. They were marked by a
strength to strength until we
deep sense of sorrow and with a , shall see Zion rebuilt in our own
militant resolution to strive for
time."
justice and for equal rights for
Communities throughout t h
the most oppressed people in the
land report experiences similar
world."
to these reported by the J, N. F.
In his description of his activi-
of Detroit.