Lew Shaw’s Blog from Haifa

When I lived in Alonei Abba (1972-1976) I worked in the dairy (refet).  Along with us moshavniks were two bedouin hired workers sharing the load, Abdullah and Jassem.  When I visited Hanna, Ron, and Abbie recently, they told me that they had told Abdullah that I was now in Haifa and he invited us to visit.  Abdullah and I were work buddies and I recall long conversations about family and life, and several visits to his traditional bedouin hut/tent for great meals, Arab coffee, and conversation.  So I was very much looking forward to seeing him after all these years.

Abdullah is now retired.  He’s not exactly sure when he was born, but sometime between 1930 and 1935.  He remembers the British, he also remembers the German Templars who originally settled in Waldheim, now Alonei Abba.  Abdullah has nine daughters and one son (finally!).  All but three are marrried and live in houses built on land he owns surrounding his own house.  Three remaining daughters live at home.  Since my last visit, he has built a house, but prefers to stay in the bedouin-style permanent tent adjacent to the house.  His wife, Fatma, runs the household with such efficiency that could have kept GM on an even keel through this financial crisis.

Ron, Abbie, Hanna, and I arrived Saturday at around 1 PM.  A table had already been set up outside and was loaded with the beginnings of our meal.  Abdullah was sitting there waiting for us, while the women bustled around setting out food, grilling meat, and making sure all the details were attended to.  When I looked at him, it seemed like we had last talked yesterday, not 30+ years ago.  He did look a bit older, but not much!  We greeted with a warm handshake and a hug, sat down and began a feast to rival any I’ve ever had.  There were an assortment of salads set out, along with humus, home-made pita, olives, various pickled vegetables, and kubbe (ground meat wrapped in bulgar wheat and deep-fried).  Then came the meats – piles of grilled chicken wings and mutton kebabs.  Fatma just kept piling more food onto each of our plates, totally ignoring any pleas that we had enough already!  I finally realized that there was no way I was going to finish what was piled on my plate and just slowly ate to be polite, leaving what I couldn’t touch. 

After a long, leisurely meal, we moved to Abdullah’s tent and sat around a wood stove on pillows and cushions for rounds of sweet Arab coffee, candies, and pastries.  I learned about how life had changed in the two bedouin villages, the conflicts between the various families, local politics, family politics, and much more.  Abdullah retired many years ago and enjoys his life surrounded by family and villagers.  I got an update on others from the village that I remember – Jassem, Mustafa, Yassir (now village muktar).  The family feuds I had heard about long ago still persist.  But Abdullah says life is much better now (under the Israelis) than it used to be (what else would he say?).  He told of how the regional council had organized a bus trip for senior citizens in the villages to the upper Gallilee and the Golan, including lunch! 

Abbie, with her interest in foods and cooking, asked Fatma about recipes, shopping, and how she manages the house.  Fatma doesn’t speak Hebrew, so Abdullah translated.  She doesn’t trust store-made foods and everything must be made from scratch.  She doesn’t even trust flour, prefering to buy wheat berrries and have them ground especially for her, in loads of 100 kilograms.  Abdullah still takes his tractor to Alonei Abba to take some milk directly from the dairy rather than buying at the store. 

He asked about my life since I left Israel.  Several times he asked me how many hours it takes to fly to America.  This is also a question he asked me many times years ago.  I think he can’t fathom someplace so far away!

Joe is now a feisty eighty years old, retired and living on a minimal pension plus rental income from his property. Saul and Micky are both married, live on the moshav, and have seven kids between them. David works as a driver for the US embassy and lives in Tel Aviv and was visiting the moshav that Shabbat. Galiya was engaged a few years ago but her fiance died in an accident, so she now lives with her father and works as a nurse/EMT for Mogan David Adom. Zeva died several years ago from lung cancer after a life of heavy smoking.

It was great to reconnect with my only relatives in Israel and to see the kids now grown up. Saul, along with working in some sort of sales position and farming, is a reservist in the border patrol and looks like someone I wouldn’t want to cross with. As we all sat around in Mickey’s living room (with the TV on in the background), as usual the conversation turned to Israeli politics. I immediately realized that I was sitting with a group of former South Africans from the apartheid era, transplanting their biases from the blacks back home to the Arabs of this region. Far right wing would be a good description of their views. I was pummelled by the standard right arguments, which include the fact that the Palestinians are just biding their time, playing around with insincere peace negotiatons until the time is right to wipe out all the Jews. Of course their criticisms of the weakness of this and past Israeli leaders is unrelenting, especially against current president, Shimon Peres, whom they blame for Oslo and all subsequent naive peace talks. I kept my mouth shut and waited to move on to another topic.

Saul and his family are off to the local swimming pool. Mickey and his family are off to Nazareth for a day of shopping. Joe offers to make me lunch but I suggest I take him out for lunch. He, David, and I head off to an Arab restaurant down the road from the moshav. The food is certainly to my liking. As usual I enjoy my humos and fool with assorted salads while they tackle their meat dishes. Joe then begins with much animation to describe to me the genealogy project he has been working on for the past few years, with David’s assistance. He has actually visited Lithuania twice and has found some amazing documentation of our family history in his research. He has completed his father’s side and asked me to help him on his mother’s (and my) side. Both sides are almost complete going back to the early 1700’s. Needless to say, I was blown away.

Joe’s mother and my father’s mother (my bubbe) were sisters. The family had lived for a couple hundred years in the Lithuanian village (shtetle) of Shat (or Seta in Lithuanian). There were three sisters – Ida, Bessie (my bubbe), and Olga (Joe’s mother) – and two brothers – Yankele and Yitzhak. Bessie and Ida were sent to the United States in 1908, sponsored by a Silverman family, with marriage arrangements. Joe has found entry documents for both sisters via Ellis Island, then to Boston. Olga and the brothers were much younger and remained in the village. Olga later married and Joe was born there. As the tensions mounted in the early 1930’s (not that it was ever easy for Jews in that area) attempts were made to get the family to America, but immigration was very limited. So Olga, her husband, and Joe, along with one of the brothers, emmigrated to South Africa, as did any other members of that side of my family that survived. One of the brothers, along with their parents and everyone else in the village, were massacred in 1941 and buried in a mass grave. Joe has visited that site, along with the house the family lived in, and much more. He has collaborated with another researcher from the village now in the US. Joe’s dining room table is piled high with photographs, binders of photocopies of birth and death certificates, immigration papers, etc. In addition he has created a genealogy tree on a poster-sized chart for both his father’s and mother’s sides. With David’s help, he has also uploaded the father’s side to a genealogy website and asked me to help with his mother’s side.

My grandmother died when I was 13. Nobody in my family ever was willing to talk about anything to do with their past in Eastern Europe, so I knew very little of this stuff. In addition it is very rare to be able to trace Jewish lineage back to the 1700’s, given the history of expulsions, pogroms, and worse. I was so moved by what Joe had accomplished.

As I drove back to Haifa late in the afternoon I was thinking about the many-faceted intensity of the day – reconnecting with all those relatives past and present.

For about three years (1973-1976) we lived in a small Moshav Shitufi (collective/private agricultural village) in the Galil.  Today I drove from Haifa to Alonei Abba to see if I could find anyone remaining from the period I lived there.  It’s about a 30 minute drive from Haifa, first weaving down from the top of Carmel to sea level, then heading east towards Nazareth.  As I entered the highway leaving Haifa, nothing seemed familiar to me.  However as I climbed the hill to Kiriat Tivon and then down into the valley, it did start looking like I remember it.  Of course, at the turn-off onto the road up to the village, the little shopping mall with the MacDonald’s (all run by Kibbutz Alonim) was new. 

After about five kilometers I turned right into the village.  I parked next to the hundred and fifty year old deserted Templar church in the center of the village.  Alonei Abba was originally settled by Romanian Jewish immigrants in 1948, when they expelled a group of German Christians (templars) who had sympathized with the Nazis during WWII.  Several of the original buildings were either used as houses or left to deteriorate.  The church is one of the latter.  It was a very hot Shabbat morning and the village was very quiet.  I didn’t see anyone around, so I just wandered the few streets recognizing some of the old houses and noticing that several new, quite fancy, houses had been built or were under construction.  I even walked down the road to the refet (dairy) where I spent many very early mornings milking cows.  It was much larger than it was in the 1970’s, but otherwise largely unchanged.  I finally asked a woman if anyone remained from the era that I was there.  She mentioned a few names, most of which I recognized.  However most of these folk weren’t there that day.  Hannah Rosner (now Hannah Levav), an artist and sculptor, had just left for India (not sure whether it was for three months or a year).  Many, of course, had passed away.  The woman told me that Feivel and Joyce  Falk, Americans from Baltimore, were still on the village. However their oldest daughter had recently died in an auto accident and they had become quite reclusive since then.  I would guess they are in their late 70’s by now.  I went and knocked on their door, but no answer. 

I wandered further and finally encountered a guy about my age named Eli who had lived there for about fifty years.  He vaguely remembered me and I vaguely remembered him.  He was, I suspect as usual, was in a very chatty mood.   As we stood in his yard (with a run-down Appalachian look) he expounded in detail on who died, who moved away, who had fights with others, how the community had deteriorated and turned into a commuter community for people working outside.  Apparently in the early 1990’s there was a bit of a revolution in the community and they had transformed from a collective settlement to a more capitalistic model.  Residents were given three choices.  They could  work in the village (mixed agriculture and light industry) and receive a stipend depending on family size.  They could work outside the village, contribute their entire salary to the community and receive a similar stipend.  Or they could work outside, keep their salary, and pay a resident fee to live in the village.  The process of switching to this model caused a major split in the community and most people opted for option #3.  Eli himself originally worked in the village but now works as a construction supervisor for a private company.  He still lives in one of the expropriated templar buidings that he has lived in since he first immigrated.  Eli also expounded on his take on all the problems with Israel (I’ll save those for another conversation) and was basically a pretty cynical man. 

I was left with a lot of thoughts and emotions as I drove back to Haifa.  I was glad that I had revisited an important part of my past.  I was also really disappointed that the very close community and friends I had there were now dispersed and I most likely won’t be able to track them down very easily.

A stop at my new favorite Arab restaurant for lunch did much to lift my mood.