Pesah, Yom Ha-Atzma'ut, Shavu'ot 1949

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Yanow Dvora

My mother died on February 15. In going through her papers, I found a collection of letters that she (and in part, my father) had written from Jerusalem in 1949 to their parents back in the US. One of these letters describes their Pesah seder at kibbutz Kfar Menahem - the first seder celebrated after the end of the War of Independence.

My parents - Helen Vogel and Albert Yanow - met on February 29, 1948 in New York. My father had left Boston for Palestine in 1946 with his brother Bill (Yehiel) after they were both demobilized from the Navy. Bill resumed his university studies, begun at Harvard, enrolling at the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus. My father, who had his bachelor's and had been ordained at JIR, continued work on his master's thesis and was hired as advisor to overseas students at the Hebrew University. They were both involved in erecting some of the tower and stockade "facts." Bill married a kibbutznikit, a fellow student, and stayed. The University sent my father to the US in early January on a fund-raising mission (although his mother, to her dying day, thought he was raising money to buy guns for the Hagana!). On February 28, he had a phone call from a colleague who was supposed to speak at a Hadassah affair the next day but was ill, and he asked my father to fill in for him. My mother, as an officer of Junior Hadassah, was acting as host, saw my father sign in the guest book giving Jerusalem as his address, and struck up a conversation. They were married in the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue by Rabbi de Sola Pool on March 27 (but that's another story). She was 27; he, 28. After waiting several months, they finally sailed for Israel a year later, in February 1949, and set up housekeeping, very much still the newlyweds, in Jerusalem. They initially shared quarters with three other couples, until April 20, when they moved to an apartment on Rehov Aza that they had been asked to hold down while its owner was on shlichut in South America for six months.

The letters commence March 17, 1949 and continue until July 14. My mother wrote most of them, typing on that very thin, crinkly typing paper on her Royal portable brought from the US on which she had typed her college and graduate school papers (she earned an MS in social work from Columbia in 1945). Most of them are addressed to her parents, Moshe (Morris) and Rose (Rosedeitcher) Vogel, in the Bronx, who had been asked to communicate their contents to my father's parents, Jack and Etta Yanow, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. My mother and I found the letters in my grandmother Rose's drawer after she died, in 1975. At some point in the 1980s, my mother was asked by the sisterhood at my father's congregation in Gary, Indiana, where they were then living, to speak about her years in Israel. She took the letters, stapled them to regular bond paper, and marked sections for her presentation. In her outline for that speech, she notes: "May 16, 1949 - 5000 people came into Haifa yesterday - the largest number that ever came in at once."

The first section here is from the letter dated Friday, April 15, 1949. It was written by my mother and addressed to her parents.

Friday, April 15, 1949

Dear Folks:

We have just returned from Kfar Menachem where we spent Wed and Thurs, and such an experience alone is worth more than I shall be able to convey to you here. In the first place, this is the kibbutz that A1 spoke about in his talks, from which groups went out in 1946 to settle the Negev. The kibbutz was founded some 13 yrs ago by a group of American and Canadian Zionists, but at any given moment now one can hear spoken Hebrew, English, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Bulgarian, and who knows what else. 600 people were expected for the Seder, and there were about 550. The plan had been to have it out of doors, on the lawn, but the weather prevented that. You can imagine what it would have been like to have a Seder outside, with the moon and the stars as they can shine at this time of the year, but the weather has been very difficult', people don't remember weather like this for the past 30 yrs. So at the last minute tables had to be taken down and others setup in the dining room. It was quite crowded: even without the 100 or 150 guests that were there, the normal population has to eat in shifts. But they put up narrow tables, which were knocked together, and with a table on the porch and one extending into the kitchen (where we heard the people conducting their own Seder because they couldn't hear us) everyone got in. We had "protectzia" and were well taken care of.

Aside from the regular Chaverim of the kibbutz, of whom there are about 160, there was a group of Noar [young people] from Cyprus, who had cone to Israel on one of the last boats to leave there, and another group of Olim from Bulgaria. When the Haggadah was read, with a different person reading each paragraph, you could feel that this was the history of an exodus being read by those who had made the journey, and you knew when we stood up in memory of those who had died to make this liberation possible and real, that there were not many people in the hall who had not lost somebody in the struggle. For a moment, this was a culmination of history. One could stop at this point and recall all that had happened not only in the last 2000 years, but what was more real to us because it had happened during our lifetime, - that which had taken place in the last 15 or 16 years. And then, because this was a kibbutz, so close to the earth and to nature, and to life and to growth, - and because we had seen all around us what could be accomplished in a positive way, and because this was the thing that gives substance to the idea of a Jewish state, - these were Jewish people who could finally live as human beings again and could build the kind of country and society that they wanted, - this gave reality to the banner tacked up on the wall in Hebrew - "And today you have become a people"; this gave substance to the B'racha that was said at the end of the Seder, "Al ha-Gefen v'al P'ri ha-Gefen" - this gave substance to the toll that has been paid and to the straggle still to come to build a Jewish state.