Deming-Do Recollected

IDF honoree Ann Newman recalls her role

in assisting the birth of Israel.

HARRY KIRS BAUM
Staff Writer

I

n the mid-1940s, Ann Rosen
was a good-looking blonde
who hung out in the American
Pub on Allenby Street in Tel
Aviv, drinking and talking with the
British patrons, especially the mili-
tary officers.
How would they have known that
Rosen and her equally good-looking
blond-haired, blue-eyed "boyfriend"
weren't their friends at all, but mem-
bers of the Jewish underground.
"Neither of us looked Jewish," said
Ann Rosen Newman. "They talked
very openly with us, but we tracked
their every move."
Newman — who was honored
Wednesday by the Michigan Friends
of the Israeli Defense Forces at its

annual dinner at the Ritz-Carlton
Dearborn — reflected in an hour-long
interview in her Novi office about her
passage from Poland to Palestine to
Detroit. Still blond and trim at 75,
the grandmother of 17 seemed
reserved at first, but as the story
unfolded, her words became less delib-
erate and more emotional. Her story
may have been common in its time
and place, but it is remarkable in ours.
Her father, Eliezer Rosen, was
raised in a shtetl in southern central
Poland. He was a follower of Vladimir
Jabotinsky, who established the
Zionist Revisionist movement in
1925, and asked Eastern European
Jews to move to Palestine and liqui-
date the Diaspora before the Diaspora
liquidated them.
Eliezer took the words to heart and
moved to Palestine in 1931. Five years

later, 8-year-old Hannah Rosen board-
ed a ship in steerage with her mother,
Risha, and two older brothers for the
six-week voyage to join Eliezer and the
400,000 out-numbered Jews living in
the future State of Israel.
Hannah joined Betar, the Zionist
Revisionist youth group, when she
arrived.
When her oldest brother, Pesach,
was detained by the British in 1942,
she joined the Irgun led by Menachem
Begin, then became a member of the
more active Lochamei Herut Israel,
(Lehi) when her other brother Yitzach
was jailed for smuggling arms in 1944.
She has problems with people refer-
ring to Lehi as the "Stern Gang,"
named after its founder. Avraham
Stern and criticized as a terrorist
group.
"We called it The Freedom

Fighters for Israel'," she said. "It wasn't
being left or right, right or wrong. We
were all consumed with the thought to
have a homeland."
Her parents feared for her safety,
but supported the cause.
Hiding weapons and ammunition, ()
gathering information and chumming
with unsuspecting British Criminal
Investigation Division officers were
parts of her job.
Newman told of clandestine meet-
ings in an Arab cemetery outside Tel
Aviv after curfew, then sneaking
through the streets to hang anti -
British posters.
"We believed in a need for a Jewish
homeland," she repeated, "We felt that
the British didn't want that goal to be
achieved."
That was the philosophical differ-
ence between the Lehi and the Irgun,

0-<

11/13
1998

16 Detroit Jewish News

