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Journalist's Obsession
Was Food And Water
HUGH ORGEL
T
el Aviv — Forty years
ago, during the pangs
of the birth of the
State of Israel, the editorial
staff of the Palestine Post (it
had not yet changed its name
to the Jerusalem Post) sat
around the newsroom discuss-
ing not so much the news of
the day, dramatic and historic
as it was, as much as food.
That was in the days of the
siege of Jerusalem. The last
convoy to reach the
beleaguered city had arrived
the day before Pesach, and
since then, Jerusalem's food
stocks had dwindled to vir-
tually nothing.
And in the newsroom we,
like all others in the besieg-
ed city, were not yet starving,
but we were definitely
hungry. We were also not too
clean. Water had not been
There really wasn't
anything to cook.
Most
Jerusalemites fell
back on the
Khubeiza weed.
pumped to taps for some days
because of damaged pipes and
the severing of the water
pipeline from the coast.
Water was rationed. A jer-
rycan of some five gallons of
the precious liquid was
available from small, donkey-
drawn municipal water-
tankers every second day,
after a lengthy wait in line,
while the shells fell around
the city.
At that time, my wife,
young daughter and I were
living in an old Arab house
not far from the Post building.
It had three-foot-thick stone
walls and a small, enclosed
garden which contained a
cesspool. (That part of
Jerusalem had no central
sewage at that time.) The
cesspool was already
overflowing because of the
absence of the Arabs
employed to empty it, a pro-
cedure accomplished by track-
ing a thick rubber pipe
through the house.
The small garden also had
a few trees and a rainwater
cistern, padlocked by the
authorities to conserve the
precious supply — which we
could not have used anyway,
because of the overflowing
cesspool.
The trees in the garden pro-
ved to be of great importance.
There was no gas or electrici-
ty for cooking, and kerosene
was also unobtainable for the
primitive kerosene stoves and
oil cookers then in use.
Reports had it that if you
could find "Flit" (the anti-
mosquito predecessor of
DDT), its kerosene base
would kindle an oil stove for
cooking or an oil lamp for
light. But the smell made its
use virtually impossible. And
anyway Flit disappeared from
the store shelves within a day
of the start of rumor.
Another rumor also was
disproved by experiment —
that the urine of a young baby
would ignite. It wouldn't.
We proved to be a lucky
family that could fall back on
the trees in the garden for
cooking fuel. Or we would
build a fire in the open air,
hoping that the Trans-
Jordanian Arab Legion shells
and mortars would not fall too
close.
There wasn't really
anything to cook, anyway.
The minuscule ration of rice,
flour and sugar, with occa-
sional bread, an egg and a
square inch or so of meat, was
often unavailable. Most
Jerusalmites fell back on the
Khubeiza weed, which grows
between the cracks in the
pavement and which, when
cooked, helps to pad out an
empty stomach.
And so, back in the Post
newsroom, we sat around
discussing food, often by
candlelight, as we waited for
brave electricity repairmen to
reconnect the temporary
cables. They had again been
damaged by shellfire.
We hoped the power would
be restored in time to melt
the solidified hot lead in the
linotype machines to enable
typesetters to set copy for a
one-sheet newspaper.
There were one or two days
in which it was decided, at
about 4 in the morning, to
wait no longer and turn out a
single-sheet, hand-produced,
stenciled newspaper — main-
ly to provide an issue to carry
the date and edition serial
number as proof that the Post
was not silenced by the Arab
siege.
The talk was mainly about
the adequate, if not luscious,
meals we would enjoy if and
when the siege of Jerusalem
ended.
That was then the limit of
our immediate horizon.
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