Israel's birth recalled in joy and bitterness

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Sunday, April 26, 1998

BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The family of Salime Asfour, a Palestine from Jerusalem who now lives in a College Hill nursing home, fled the fighting that gave birth to Israel. (Photos by Yoni Pozner) | ZOOM |

From the comfort of their living rooms, they summon 50-year-old memories in an instant: dancing the hora as a British gun carrier stands by, fleeing to caves to escape fierce shelling, enduring months of bread-and-water rations.

They live here now, in Amberley Village and College Hill and Burlington, but in 1948 a handful of Tristate residents lived through the violent birth of Israel. As the state celebrates its 50th anniversary this week, some remember it as a dream fulfilled for the Jewish people, others as a Palestinian tragedy. All remember it, even from a distance of half a century and 6,000 miles, as an ordeal.

"In Jerusalem we had no ammunition, we had no food, we got two pieces of bread per person, we had no running water, two buckets of water a day per person, and for a long time that's all we had. And how long can you go on like that?" said Sham Eden of Amberley Village, who grew up in Avondale and moved to Palestine with her Polish-born husband Nachum in 1947. "It's been said we don't believe in miracles but we depend on them. How (we made it), to this day I don't understand."

Like most Jews who moved to the region in the first half of the century, the Edens were Zionists, striving to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Even before the Holocaust, the pogroms against Jews in Europe convinced many in the late 19th century of the need for a Jewish political entity. The goal was Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire and for millenia the historical and spiritual center of Judaism. By the end of World War I, the territory was home to about 550,000 Muslims, 70,000 Christians and 50,000 Jews. As the Ottoman Empire broke apart following the war, the British took control of Palestine. Salime Asfour, who lives in a College Hill nursing home, remembers the joy with which Arab residents greeted the transition.

"Everybody was so happy (about the British mandate) because our government was no government," said Mrs. Asfour, 93, who lived in Jerusalem at the time. "It was a sad, sad time during the Turks, who were in Palestine for almost 500 years but they did nothing for the country, nothing for the people."

Arab enthusiasm turned quickly to suspicion when the British agreed in 1917 to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. A cycle began of increased Jewish immigration, Arab revolt, new restrictions on immigration, and Jewish protests, all exacerbated by Hitler's rise to power in Germany.

"The riots were imminent, not only for Arabs but for Jews. It was very scary," Mrs. Asfour said. "The British had promised the Arabs and at the same time the Jews. Israel was not born yet. The Arabs couldn't do much...The Arabs were angry and the Palestinians were angry."

Sham Eden and her husband, Nachum Eden, of Amberley Village, were among the Zionists who helped to create Israel. | ZOOM |

By 1939 there were 445,000 Jews and 1,044,000 Arabs in the territory, and Arab-Jewish tension subsided as the world turned its attention to World War II. American Jews were split over Zionism, with Cincinnati known as an anti-Zionist town. But as the details of the Holocaust emerged, public sympathy in much of the world solidified behind the Zionists.

They were swayed by stories such as Nachum Eden's, a native of Grodno, Poland who moved to the U.S. in 1938 and lost his mother and five siblings to the genocide. The retired Amberley Village insurance executive, 77, served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Searching for survivors in Munich after the war, he was directed to a man who had a list of people from his hometown.

"He took out his notebook and said, "Here you have all the names of those who survived.' And I started to read and there were 280 names. I recognized my brother-in-law who survived and his nephew. That's all I recognized -- ten pages, 280 people. I said I'd like the next list. He said, "That's it.'

"I got so angry -- I said, how can that be? Twenty-seven thousand Jews and 280 survived? How can you say this? I ran out in anger. I couldn't contain myself. And I got to the Jeep and when I got into the Jeep suddenly it dawned on me: Suppose that he's right. And then I started to internalize that it could have happened to a city. And then a city, it's a country. And then I started understanding what Holocaust meant."

The Edens moved to Palestine in 1947, as did Ezra and Shirley Spicehandler of Amberley Village, so the men could pursue doctorate degrees at Hebrew University. The Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine had resumed and then intensified after the war ended.

The cost of policing Palestine, both financial and psychic, became too much for the British, and in 1947 they turned the matter over to the United Nations. On Nov. 27, the U.N. voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab entities.

"At twelve o'clock at night we were already asleep. We heard people singing. And of course we found out that the vote came in (for partition)," said Mr. Spicehandler, a professor emeritus from Hebrew Union College. The Spicehandlers arose and went to downtown Jerusalem for the impromptu celebration, where mobs were dancing the hora in front of the Jewish Agency building.

"I offered a bottle of cognac to a (British) soldier down there and the soldier said thank you, lifted it up and sad "Up with the Jews!" Prof. Spicehandler remembered. He and his wife then headed to Tel Aviv.

"The city was really wild. And people really thought -- not (Zionist leader and Israel's first prime minister David) Ben Gurion -- but the people thought that it's over, that the British will support the partition plan...and the Arabs will accept the decision as well. Ben Gurion is rumored to have said (that) day, "Now the trouble really begins.' "

The partition plan, accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs, touched off a civil war in Palestine. Volunteers from surrounding Arab states aided the Palestinians, while the Zionists smuggled in weapons from New York and Czechoslovakia.

Mrs. Asfour's family went to Lebanon to escape the fighting, thinking they would be gone for a few weeks. Mohamad Nabi, 61, a retired Burlington businessman, lived in the village of al-Haditha at the time, about 15 miles from the Mediterranean coast.

Mohamad Nabi, 61, a retired Burlington businessman, and his wife, Adibeh, remember the birth of Israel as a time of terror for themselves and their families. | ZOOM |

"We used to run for hiding from the bombs and things. We lived in caves for several days at a time," Mr. Nabi, 61, said. "The next day or so we'd go back and sneak in and get some food, some bread, and at night pray that massacres and things like that didn't happen, and then we'd go back to the caves."

Eventually the family gathered up food, mattresses and blankets and headed for a village several miles to the east.

"We had some relatives there and we stayed with them for about two or three months, to see if we'd go back. We used to go back to our village and get some more food and get some more clothing," he said. "After that we were scared to go back because many of the people who went back got killed."

Troops from Syria, Egypt and Iraq aided the Palestinian efforts, and fear gripped both communities as atrocities continued to mount. On April 9, 1948, Zionist units attacked an Arab village named Deir Yassin and killed about 250 villagers.

Three days later Arabs targeted Jewish vehicles headed for the hospital and university, killing 77 doctors, nurses, students and teachers. Mohamad Nabi's wife Adibeh remembers hearing the rumors of massacres and rapes.

"My father used to hear this and he used to say, if I am here and something happens, I'm going to kill you all and kill myself," said Mrs. Nabi, 61, who was living in Tiberias at the time.

In early 1948 the Edens visited friends who lived near three settlements that had just been attacked. Most of the men at the settlements were killed, and the surviving women and children were housed in a nearby monastery that the Edens could see from their window.

"There must have been 20 or 25 women sitting on the (monastery's) staircase, each one by herself in her grief, some of them with children, some by themselves," Mr. Eden said. "Not crying, not saying anything. It was a deathly silence that must have reached heaven. Something I can see right now, the faces of these people."

In Jerusalem, residents were cut off from the rest of the country. Grocery-store shelves were empty, there was no electricity and constant shelling. Caring for a newborn, Mrs. Eden learned to live on two buckets of water a day by bathing the baby, then washing his clothes and the floor with one bucket. She and her husband washed with the second and then flushed the toilet with it.

Everyone was enlisted in defense efforts. Mrs. Spicehandler remembers doing guard duty on a roof in their neighborhood once. Mr. Spicehandler "said, "Where's the gun? Let me show you how to use it.' And I said, oh no, don't go near the gun. My mother always said guns are dangerous," Mrs. Spicehandler said.

"And I said, what would you do if an Arab came?," her husband said. "And she said, "I'd yell like hell.' "

"And here there were people walking down on the street," she said. "They'd look up at the tower and see someone standing there and they thought they were protected. And it was me."

As more and more Palestinian Arab families fled their homes, refugee camps sprang up east of Jerusalem, many of which still stand today. Charles Mashni, an Anderson Township chemist retired from the Environmental Protection agency, grew up in Ramallah.

He watched as the town's population more than doubled, as dozens of people moved into his uncle's unfinished house. After a time the temporary tents came down and shacks went up. Mr. Nabi's family was among the new residents.

"Some people were camped in our back yard," Mr. Mashni said. "Everybody was in shock, but everybody thought this was going to be a temporary situation. Nobody thought that the refugee problem was going to be a permanent problem. Eventually they thought that things would settle down and everybody would go back home."

On May 14, 1948 in Tel Aviv, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel, prompting the invasion of five Arab armies. The news came over the radio in the barracks where Ezra Spicehandler was.

"A lot of the guys said, oh yeah, in Tel Aviv they declared a country," he said.

"Today when there's a war, you sit in your living room and you see it on TV, you see what's happening," his wife added. "But there was nobody there and we felt completely isolated, like the world had forgotten you. There were these terrible things happening and terrible conditions and even mail stopped. You were so cut off from the world and you thought nobody knows, nobody cares."

Among Palestinians, the events of 1948 are known as al-nakba -- the catastrophe. Mr. Mashni recalls that, during the war and after the June cease-fire, Palestinians weren't angry at the Zionists alone.

"They were more angry at the Arab governments, because they felt they had failed them. There was a lot of resentment at the Arab side, as much as there was at the British or the Israelis," he said. "Everybody was just dumbfounded that the Arabs were getting their tails kicked."

Mr. Mashni, whose grandfather had lived in Cincinnati for a time, moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Kentucky and later moved to Cincinnati. The father of four worked for a pharmaceutical company before moving to the EPA, where he retired in 1994.

He and his wife returned to Israel and the West Bank in 1978 for a trip. They were saddened to find Ramallah, a former resort town, dirty and deteriorating. The ensuing years have strengthened his Palestinian identity.

"I didn't have the nationalism (in 1948) that I have now because I was young and I was involved with other things," he said. "But later on, when I saw how oppressive the Israelis are, I became more determined or more fanatic pro-Palestinian than I was then, because I saw how abusive the Israelis are."

Rabbi Dr. Ezra and Shirley Spicehandler, now of Amberley Village, participated in the Jerusalem celebrations when the Jewish state was created - and they assisted in its defense. | ZOOM |

The Spicehandlers spent the rest of their stay in Tel Aviv, then returned to the U.S. in 1949. As a faculty member and later dean of Hebrew Union's Jerusalem campus, Mr. Spicehandler and his family lived in Israel every summer for 10 years and then for 14 consecutive years. As the country matured, the Spicehandlers noticed a change that he compares to the early years of the U.S. The task of nation-building was hampered by the absorption of immigrants, four more wars and fights over the country's identity.

"During the (American) revolution, everything looked ideal -- people were good, patriotic, self-sacrificing. Once it was over, it got to be normal," he said. "When the ideal is realized, it becomes real. And when it becomes real, all the problems that have been avoided or pushed aside occur."

Mrs. Asfour followed her sons to the U.S. in 1970, after spending years in East Jerusalem. And Mr. Nabi came to the Tristate to attend Wilmington College in 1958, then moved to Kuwait after his marriage to teach school. The family spent summers in the West Bank visiting family, then moved to the U.S. in 1973 and settled in Northern Kentucky. The Nabis ran a restaurant here while raising six children. In 1995, Mr. Nabi returned to al-Haditha, the village where he was born, for the first time in almost 50 years. What he found continues to anguish him.

"It was all just a bunch of wild grass and wild trees," he said. "They tried to just -- if you go there you don't believe there was a village there unless you dig around and see the remnants of the stones. This is what happened with -- it's not (just) our village, it's one of 418 villages that went the same way."

The Edens stayed in Israel until June 1952, and Mr. Eden worked in the new state's economic department. Mrs. Eden's parents and sister moved there around the time she returned, and she travelled to Israel as many as three times a year.

Mr. Eden's last visit to Israel was five or six years ago. He recalls attending religious services around Passover on the trip, where he saw something that gave both a hint of the country's future and a reflection of the idealism that shaped its recent past.

"There were about 12 young people, 15 to 18 years old, of this (religious) movement, the youth movement, and they prepared the service for the old people. And carrying the Torah, how they cared and they sang," he said. "I sat there mesmerized. Whatever their political ideas are, from the point of view of taking care, of devotion, it was something I hadn't seen there" since 1948.

The Tristate Jewish community will celebrate Israel's 50th anniversary with a daylong party Sunday, May 3 at the Jewish Community Center in Roselawn. The local Palestinian community has no observances planned.

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