by Avraham Burg
Two years passed, and Rabin was murdered. Like an efficient boomerang, his discriminatory statement came back and took over the public conversation in the days after his assassination. The headlines, the eulogizers, family members, and others who spoke publicly talked about “a Jew murdering a Jew.” While they were mired deep in the Jewish swamp, to which Rabin in his weakness surrendered many times in his life, my cry was that “a human being had murdered a human being.” My familiarity with Israeli democracy does not permit me to be party to the soppy cliché according to which “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” We are an open, impressive, and tolerant democracy, mainly for Jews. Especially those who, like me, were born to the pedigreed, lordly Ashkenazic Jewish class that can allow itself to defy any restriction. Unfortunately, our genuine democracy is much more limited. Israel is the only half-democracy in the Middle East. Not only because of the occupation and the structural discrimination against Palestinian Israelis, but also because of the large web of restrictions imposed on me as a Jew.
If I were active in politics today, I assume that I would be fighting with all my might for full equality as the defining value of our political camp, I would be seeking partners to establish a joint Jewish-Arab party, and I would make my support for any legislative initiative or political act conditional on canceling and erasing the term “Jewish majority.” Today I frequently ask myself, if I had been living in the 1930s, would I have volunteered for the international brigade in Spain? And if I had been living as a non-Jew under Nazi occupation, would I have had the courage and emotional fortitude to be a Righteous Gentile and save persecuted Jews? I’m not sure. But at least I can make the effort. Sometimes I feel that here, in Israel and the Middle East at large, the borders between good and bad, between right and wrong, will be set for all of Western civilization. Just like then and there. And this time it is my responsibility, with no excuses.
* Paul Mendes-Flohr, Progress and Its Discontents [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013), 15.
CHAPTER NINE
A TALE OF TWO HEBRONS
HEBREW IS THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH I WHISPER SECRETS to myself, dream my dreams, and cry out most bitterly. I know how to laugh in many languages, but I don’t know how to cry in any other language. Hebrew, as a language and culture, is my homeland, my mother tongue. The warmth of its mysteries, its layers of meaning, are as familiar to me as the cracks in the sidewalks of my childhood, and make me at once into a lover and a beloved. The biblical Hebron, the maternal Hebron, and the eloquent Hebron Hebrew of my mother’s home—these all swaddled me from birth. I speak English fluently and I understand contemporary French pretty well, and I can make out German and chitchat in Yiddish and exchange a few words in Arabic; but none of these can compare to the language in which I was loved, and in which I first fell in love.
With Hebrew comes also landscapes and memories, intimacy and openness. I never referred to the landscapes of my homeland and my childhood by anything but their Hebrew names. I know how to speak two Hebrew languages: Jewish Hebrew and Israeli Hebrew. They use the same words, but with different meanings. Ben-Gurion sent us to a “state” school (i.e., a public one) because statehood was his organizing principle. He regarded the state as the systematizing principle uniting all the fragments of the Jewish people who had gathered here. Maybe unbeknownst to Ben-Gurion, we prayed in school for a kingdom of heaven, not for any human government. In the army, we each wore a vest in order to bury deep in its pockets the weapons of destruction that a soldier needed in order to carry out his sacred and profane missions. But only speakers of both Hebrew languages understood that the word the army used for vest, ephod, was one of the garments worn by the high priest in the Temple. So, what are we, soldiers or battle priests? Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Kabbalah, said, “God will not remain mute in the language in which He has been entreated thousands of times to return to our lives.” The return of Hebrew to our lives restored God along with it, but not necessarily in the best way.
At home, Mom would correct our Hebrew punctiliously. She was strict about errors both major and minor, and about pronunciation, consonants and vowels, rare words, and exceptions to the rule. She was in charge of the local language, the language of our identities, whereas Dad was responsible for all the rest of the languages in the world—for universalism. He spoke fluently and eloquently in all the Latinate and Germanic languages. He could chat in Spanish, discourse in French, converse in English, and dream in German. Dutch didn’t grate on him, and he was at ease in Italian.
Occasionally he would stop and ask Mom, “How do you say…?” They both knew that he knew the answer, but it was part of the show they loved to put on, and it served to strengthen the wonderful bond between them. And she knew French and English, and from Yiddish she could slide easily into German. She was a Jewish Palestinian and a seventh-generation native of Hebron, but the more the years passed after Dad’s death, the stronger her German Jewish accent grew. In Hebrew, “homeland” is a feminine word that connotes the one that gives birth. Dad came from over there, from the Fatherland. And Mom came from Hebron, the city of the patriarchs.
Mom could chat in Arabic. She was welcomed in the most illustrious salons in the world, but she was also best friends with her cleaning woman. She would scrub the house beforehand so the cleaner wouldn’t have too difficult a job. Until the day of her death Mom exchanged dishes and recipes, showed up with gifts, and inquired after the welfare of all her friends. She never forgot where she came from, but she also never remained stuck there, in the past—she never just entrenched herself there. Mother came from Hebron, but she never returned to renew her life there or revive the past that had been massacred and destroyed.
Still, while you could take Mom out of Hebron, you couldn’t take Hebron out of Mom, its character, stubborn as a rock. “We are never broken” was the message she passed on to us at every opportunity. Until her final days she lived at home, insisting on doing it all on her own, fully functioning, not passively allowing time to take its toll. At the end of one of her last Passover holidays when she was already in her eighties, she nonetheless climbed the tall ladder, as she’d always done, and hoisted into the boydem—the overhead storage space—all the heavy boxes filled with kosher Passover dishes, putting them away until next year. Suddenly the ladder gave way, and she and the cartons tumbled to the ground. All the dishes broke, the cartons ripped, and the glassware shattered to smithereens. Everything broke—except for her. Her friends suffered from osteoporosis, broke their hips, and endured the other ills of old age. But not her. A few black-and-blue marks here and there, some natural aches from the fall, but that was it. “These bones are from Hebron.” She laughed away her pain.
THE HEBRON OF TODAY IS A CURSED PLACE. MOM’S Hebron was complex demographically, but from her perspective it was blessedly so. Mom’s ancestors arrived in the holy city at the beginning of the nineteenth century and joined the Sephardi community that had lived there at least since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. My mother’s forbears came to the Land of Israel long before the Zionists, as part of a religious and messianic awakening that spread across Jewish Eastern Europe generations ahead of Herzl and the political Zionist revival. Grandfather, according to Mom’s descriptions, was half and half. In the old pictures that always hung in our home, he wore a fur hat known as a shtreimel and a Hasidic robe, and he had a manicured beard and curly sidelocks. He was a man of the Old World when it came to everything external, but he was a supportive and active Zionist in the early religious Zionist groups. His prayer melodies, which I learned from Mom, belong to those olden days. But at the same time, a photo of Herzl was proudly hung on the wall of the home of one of my Hebron uncles.
Mom, in contrast, was almost entirely modern. We didn’t know much about her childhood. Perhaps because she didn’t remember much, perhaps because she simply didn’t want to open some of the boxes that were locked away in the basement of her memory. Sometimes she would tell us about the Arab goa
t owner, who would pass by every morning and sell them fresh goat’s milk, and their Turkish landlady, who nursed Mom’s sister after their mother died at a very young age. We owe our lives to that Turkish woman. She was Mom’s last stop in Hebron, and her first stop on the way to the splendid life that she—Cinderella from Hebron—would go on to lead. Who was this woman who shaped my destiny more than anyone else? The landlady who didn’t just save me—she also determined the course my life would take. It’s a simple tale about a good neighbor, but it became a formative tale of human heroism that knows no bounds, and no borders.
My grandfather (1880–1937) was the chief rabbi and the leading functionary of the Ashkenazi Jewish community in Hebron. He raised Mom and her five brothers and sisters almost single-handedly, since Grandmother had died so young. They rented an apartment from a local landlord, a reputable Hebron Arab. At some point in his life the landlord traveled to Turkey and brought back a wife. She was beautiful, according to the aesthetic standards in Hebron at the time: white and fat. She bore him two children, Shaker and Yasser, and the parents took their names from their oldest son: Abu Shaker and Umm Shaker.
At some point in their childhood, during the 1920s, one of the boys fell sick with a burning fever. At the time, Hebron did not have access to modern medicine. Penicillin, the miracle drug, had not yet been invented. The doctors despaired of saving his life. “He won’t last the night,” they informed the distraught parents. Grandfather, their tenant, the optimistic holy man, sat by the bedside of the sick child all night long, praying. When morning came, the boy’s fever went down, and he returned to himself. The parents, Umm and Abu Shaker, were convinced that it was the rabbi’s prayers that were responsible for their son’s recovery. And they never forgot it. He saved their oldest son’s life, and they went on to save everything for us.
In 1929, when Mom was eight years old, the ground in Hebron shook beneath her. “What do you remember from those days?” I asked her nearly eight decades later. “Practically nothing,” she admitted. “I think most of my memories are stories they told me about those days, and I adopted them as my own, as if they’d come from inside me.” It was a Sabbath day in the summer. On the weekend of August 23, 1929, the family had gathered together in Hebron to celebrate some festive occasion, but the air in the Land of Israel was already saturated with other emotions. The tension between Jews and Arabs was at its peak. They didn’t know it, but that’s when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict essentially broke out.
The British government, which had received the land as a mandate, did not do enough—it did nothing to calm tempers. In Hebron and in a few other mixed cities that year, it all came to a head in terrible savagery. Jews and Arabs, innocent and guilty, were murdered by the hundreds. Over the course of that Sabbath scores of Hebron Jews were cruelly massacred. When the riots began, the Jews of the neighborhood congregated in two houses: in the home of my uncle, Eliezer Dan Slonim, the one with the photo of Herzl on his wall, and in the home of my grandfather, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Moshe Slonim, my mother’s father and her only living parent. Eliezer Dan was young and well respected. He was the head of the local bank branch, he had a licensed gun, and he had made inroads in the British government and in the Palestinian leadership alike. On the afternoon of Friday, August 23, 1929, he was still running around the city, trying to calm tempers. He managed to save several potential victims from a cruel lynching, and he reached a few provisional agreements with the British and with some of the Arab leaders. The Jews had faith in him. “We’ll go to his house, they won’t dare to touch him,” they said; nearly all of them were butchered in his home.
Sixty-five members of the Jewish settlement were murdered in an act of unprecedented evil over the course of two atrocious hours in the city of the patriarchs. More than a fourth of them were killed in my uncle’s home. There were almost no survivors, except for my cousin Shlomo, who was all of two years old and suffered a blow to his head. Amidst the corpses and the wounded, and amidst the rivers of blood that flowed through the streets, the slaughterers mistook him for dead, and he was saved.
In the meantime, on the other side of the neighborhood, the rest of the Jews congregated in Grandfather’s house. “He is a holy man, God will protect us in his home,” they told one another, as Jews in every generation had told themselves. They prayed, they cowered, and they hid. Earlier, Grandfather went out bravely into the streets of the city and tried to negotiate with the representatives of the British government and police to protect his flock. But in vain. He suffered murderous blows from the enraged mobs. They struck him on the head with a thick rope tied with a heavy knot at one end, nearly killing him.
My aunt Malka, then a young girl of fourteen, left the house and snatched him from their hands before he lost consciousness. Thanks to her heroism, he merely lost his vision in one eye, but he survived. While the rioters were raging in the streets and screaming “Itbakh al yahud!” (Slaughter the Jews) and “Falastin lana w’al yahud kilabuna!” (Palestine is ours and the Jews are our dogs), the old Turkish woman sent one of her sons, Shaker, to fetch his father from the vineyards. It was the peak of the harvest season in Hebron, which is famous for its spectacular vineyards and grapes. At the height of the season, the vintners, just as in biblical times, would not come home every day. They slept in stone guardhouses and in vine-thatched huts so as to take full advantage of each workday—from first until last light. “Go get your father,” she ordered him. “They’re killing our Jews.”
The events of those next dramatic moments were told to us again and again by Mom and Aunt Malka—Treyna, as they called her then, in Yiddish. Here is how my aunt put it:
A short while after my wounded father and I returned home and locked ourselves inside, our neighbor Abu Shaker suddenly appeared, riding his white horse. He tied up his horse and sat down on the stairs leading to our house, looked around, and surveyed the scene. Then he knocked on the door and said, “Don’t open! I just wanted you to know that I’m here. I won’t let them touch you! Don’t open the door! Close all the windows and shutters! May God be with you!”
We sat there silently, holed up in the house, and he, Abu Shaker, reported to us on everything that was happening. “Those goons are killing the Jews,” he said in a choked voice. “And there’s no one to come to their aid. The police are with the rioters. The British police are accompanying the murderers to the homes of the Jews and waiting outside while they commit acts of murder, and then accompanying them onwards. God will punish them for this!” he said, and we knew in our hearts that our own end was nigh. We didn’t believe that he, a lone old man, would manage to stop the inflamed, bloodthirsty masses who were drowning Hebron in rivers of Jewish blood.
The Arab said nothing about what had happened in my brother’s house, just one hundred fifty meters away. He kept silent. He did not want to upset us. We heard the terrible screams of the murderers and the death groans of their victims. We didn’t know that at that time my brother, his wife, and his four-year-old son Aaron were still alive. My father stood up and prayed. He cried out to God. We prepared to die. I remember that I asked forgiveness for all my sins. It’s so hard to describe it. You’re penned in your home, and you’re convinced that death is near, yet you can’t describe to yourself what it looks like, how it will come, where you’ll be stabbed.… The whole house was beset by a deathly fear, with only Father’s lips moving soundlessly.
The rioters came. We heard them raging murderously. We heard them thirsty for blood and burning with fury. We also heard Abu Shaker’s voice: “Get out of here! You can’t enter here! Here you can’t kill!” They pushed him aside. He was old, maybe seventy-five, but he was strong. He fought back. He prostrated himself over the entrance, by the door. He screamed at them, “Over my dead body!” One of the rioters waved his knife over Abu Shaker’s legs and yelled, “I’m going to kill you. Traitor!” Abu Shaker was not afraid. “Kill me! Kill me! The rabbi’s family is inside, and they’re my family too. Kill me! I won’t budg
e.” The knife was lowered. Abu Shaker’s leg was ripped open. His blood flowed. He didn’t groan or yell, he just said, “Cut me! I won’t budge!” The rioters consulted with one another in a brief moment of quiet. Then we heard them disperse. We knew we had been saved. I wanted to bring our savior inside, to bandage his wounds, to thank him. He refused. He said, “Maybe others will come, my job is not yet over.”
From the perspective of Zionist, Israeli, and Palestinian history, the Hebron massacre was a formative moment. It marked the end of good relations between neighbors, between peoples, between members of different faiths. That was where the violent path we have all walked down was first laid and paved. It is part of everyone’s historical memory, but for me it has deep personal resonance.
My own mother was there, in that inferno, and her soul was miraculously saved by those incredible people, those righteous gentiles, an Arab from Hebron and his wife, who never lost sight of their humanity. Since then, since that very moment, my family has been divided in two. Half of them will never trust an Arab. There are members of my family from my mother’s side who count themselves among the most right-wing, extremist, and fanatical of the settlers and their supporters. The other half of us will always be seeking out Abu Shaker, that lone righteous man, kind-hearted and courageous, with whom we can start the dialogue anew, restart a better life and seek to set it all right. He, as he put it, is “my family.” And in many senses, he is more my family, more part of the human family, than many of my own blood relatives, who are my ideological enemies.
