Beginnings,1948
The Beginning of an Era The Beginning of a State The Beginning of a Family
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June 10, 1948. Morning. We are down to only 35 active soldiers against more than two and a half thousand Syrians. Six of our boys are out in the fields, still desperately trying to defend the village. Mordechai is one of them. We hope and pray that we can hold out until midday. Why only until midday? It was said that the Arabs only fought until noon because they believed that Allah only accepts the souls of the dead into heaven each day until that time. And indeed, each day the shelling had stopped around midday and rarely resumed until the next sunrise. If we could make it through the morning, we would be saved by a United Nations truce. At noon, as usual, the Syrian infantrymen begin slowly to retrace their steps, backing off for the day… But! Something unforeseen happens. The Syrian commanders order the soldiers in the rear to fire on those in the front lines, forcing them forward towards our village. This is the final, greatest push of the Syrian battle against Mishmar Hayarden. This is the only piece of Israeli land Syria has a chance to gain before the truce, and the commander won't give up that chance. They are coming from all sides at once. We are doomed. We all huddle in the basement of Eliezer Segal's house. Luckily, there are two rooms; we enter the inner room and are not hit, though many are stumbling into the basement bleeding from bullet and shrapnel wounds. My husband's brother Yakov Moshe was one of the six in the fields, and we don't know what's become of them. Rivka Grobowsky, Mama of the mosheva, is also missing. A Romanian doctor visiting from Ayelet HaShachar, a close friend of the mukhtar's, is trapped with us. We prepare hand grenades to use if the Arabs take the women. Certain of our death, we say our goodbyes. I have no regrets. I turn to Mordechai and tell him only "I'm so sorry my family will never get to meet you." Grenades are falling inside our bunker. One of the hand grenades hits our friend Bubbee Shtall and lodges in his spine; it explodes. We watch him writhe on the dirt floor, wither, and die. We scream “SURRENDER!” in Arabic for two hours. The voice of a Syrian officer comes through loud and clear into the basement. We accept your surrender, he says, in French. Send someone out with the white flag.
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About the Book
In 1946, twenty-year old Gertrude Segelman sailed for Palestine, looking to reconnect with a father who had left when she was six to follow his Zionist dream. What she found was an incredible adventure. In her first year, she dodged British soldiers to build illegal settlements, worked the earth for the first time on a kibbutz, changed her name to Tova, and married Mordechai Eizik, an Irgun idealist living in a tiny village on the Syrian border. When she married Mordechai, and moved to far-flung Mishmar HaYarden to join his Irgun pioneer group, Tova found herself sandwiched between two hostile forces: the Syrians just across the Jordan River, and the powerful socialist Mapai party that controlled most of the Jewish arms and fighting men. It was no surprise that the Syrian army was able to conquer Mishmar Ha Yarden in the 1948 war. The surprising part was that Tova and Mordechai survived. In this poignant memoir, Tova tells a story of the tumultuous birth years of Israel from the perspective of a naïve but gutsy American girl left on the margins of the Jewish state. Tragic, funny and stranger than fiction, it is tribute to the memory both of Mordechai and of Mishmar HaYarden, and to Tova’s amazing strength and big personality.
About the Author
Tova Eizik is a retired nurse, mother of three, grandmother of thirteen, and great-grandmother of eleven, living in Monsey, New York. When she was twenty, she moved to Palestine, got married, fought in the Israeli Independence War, spent eleven months in a Syrian prison, and lived to tell the tale. This book is her story.