Israel sixty
1948 - 2008
Young
Protector
Left: Lapides' kinder-
garten photo, 1934. He's
in top left corner with
striped collar.
Lapides recounts his
role as a teen in the
Right: Jerry Lapides'
military ID photo, 1948
new Jewish state.
Harry Kirsbaum
Special to the Jewish News
N
o sense of youthful joie de
vivre (love of life) showed on
any student's face in Jerry
Lapides' 1934 kindergarten photograph,
least of which on his. Looking particu-
larly dour, Lapides, just off the boat,
found himself the only non-Hebrew-
speaking student amid 18 other Jewish
children in a small Tel Aviv schoolhouse
when the shot was snapped.
Life was tough for everyone as Jews
began the difficult march for a home-
land. As the seeds of death were being
planted in Europe, Lapides was learn-
ing to plant seeds in the future Jewish
state. He talked about his life and his
connection to Israel's history on a most
appropriate day, Yom HaAtzmaut.
"My parents moved to Israel in 1934,
when my father Leo lost his business
in New Jersey during the Depression,"
said Lapides, now 77, and retired in
Southfield. "My maternal grandfather
was a lumber baron in Romania and
supplied lumber to Palestine."
There was enough lumber business
for two families, so Leo joined the
lumber yard his wife's uncle opened in
Jaffa. Two years later, when their lum-
ber yard was burned down during the
Arab rebellion against the British, Leo
took his share of the insurance settle-
ment and bought a bookstore in Haifa,
where the family lived until 1946.
He attended Bet Sefer Ha'Reali in
Haifa; the school also trained its stu-
dents to be soldiers.
Every schoolday started with morn-
ing parade followed by HaGam, an
advanced physical education program
for the Haganah's youth battalion. The
school prohibited all political affilia-
tions, he said. Soldier training began
when Jerry was 14 and included self-
defense, military maneuvers and lots of
Zionism.
In 1946, after another failed busi-
ness, Leo went back to the United
States; and Jerry and his mother
moved to Jerusalem.
He was selected to be a squad leader
in Jerusalem and went to Haganah
camp for the summer. At 16, he led a
squad with about a dozen boys and
girls from ages 12-14, he said.
Lapides lived in the Talpiot area in
southeast Jerusalem and continued
his military training at the Gymnasia
HarIvrit in Jerusalem.
A couple of months before the United
Nations voted on the partition, Jerry
was slipped a message to show up in a
secret place in Jerusalem.
They took Lapides and a few others
into a basement, where a flag with the
Mogen David, a gun and a bible sat on
a table in the middle of the darkened
room; and he swore allegiance to the
I a
He was a guard on a bus on the way
to school, protecting the passengers
with the Sten gun he kept in his school
bag.
Shmuel Agnon, the 1966 Nobel Prize
winner in literature, lived in the neigh-
borhood and would show up every
morning to give everyone who boarded
the bus a coin worth less than a penny,
Lapides said.
"He would say, 'When you get into
town, give this to a beggar because
a messenger of tzedakah is safe
from death, — Lapides said. "The bus
wouldn't leave until everybody had that
coin."
On the day of Israel's independence,
the British evacuated Camp Allenby.
"The huge British intelligence radio
tower was supposed to be released to
t As,
tA lt.tA
At the Israel Consulate in New York City on Yom
Jerry Lapides
HaAtzmaut, circa 1950. Lapides is on the left in white
shirt. Abba Eban is raising the flag.
Haganah, he said. "When you're 17,
that's pretty impressive."
On Nov. 27,1947, when the United
Nations voted on the partition, there
was dancing in the streets, coupled
with rumors that something was going
to happen, he said. "The Arabs started
throwing stones at the buses."
It soon became dangerous to travel
by bus between Jerusalem and Talpiot
— first came the rocks, then came bul-
lets.
us, but they only opened the doors to
the Arab side of the gate when they
left," he said. The Haganah wanted that
tower.
After several Haganah attacks and
some trickery using extremely loud
explosives, the Arabs eventually evacu-
ated.
Lapides sustained a shrapnel injury
to his ankle while searching the camp.
It happened when another fighter tried
to shoot the lock off a metal door like
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he had seen in the movies. Lapides was
evacuated to a convalescent hospital
on the west side of Jerusalem. With
little food and water, healing was dif-
ficult, he said. "They found small cans
of Beluga caviar in an Arab warehouse
in the new city of Jerusalem. So every
morning, he had a little can of caviar
with some stale bread and vitamins.
He was in the hospital until the first
armistice.
How did we win? There was no
choice, he said. "The Arabs were poorly
trained, and didn't expect resistance.
They expected meek Jews."
When recuperated, he went back into
the Haganah, where he was eventu-
ally drafted into the IDF and put into
officer's training.
He was discharged in 1949 and went
to work for the Israeli Consulate in New
York.
He received a master's of education
degree from Rutgers University and
eventually earned a Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan. He taught at
U-M Dearborn and retired as an orga-
nizational development and training
consultant.
He has five children and eight grand-
children and lives with his second wife,
Arlene, in Southfield. He has belonged
to Congregation Beth Shalom for more
than 20 years.
Looking back at 1948, he never
thought they wouldn't make it.
"I was a typical 17-year-old with a
sense that I'll live forever and I'm not
gonna be afraid of anything, and I
wasn't," he said. "In school we learned
how to grow food, how to be surveyors,
how to defend ourselves and how to
attack. If you wanted to talk to us, that
was fine. But we didn't give up. The
land was ours; we belonged there; and
if they were going to attack us, they
were going to suffer." Ei
Harry Kirsbaum is in the marketing depart-
ment of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan
Detroit.