|
The Hebron Massacre of 1929:
A Recently Revealed Letter of a Survivor
by Meyer Greenberg
The massacre of the Jews of Hebron in 1929 put an end
to the ancient Jewish community at the burial site of the patriarchs. The
riots which erupted throughout the country were an organized Arab attack
against the entire Zionist enterprise with the aim of preventing the
eventual establishment of a Jewish state.
They were the most violent eruption until that time in the conflict
that has been termed “one long war between Arabs and Jews comparable to the
Hundred Years War in medieval Europe.”
Unlike other parts of the country, where Jews
resisted with force, the Hebron community reflected the mind‑set of
the pre‑modern Jew, conditioned by almost 2,000 years of Jewish
powerlessness. The reaction of the
local leadership to the impending attack was to turn to the authorities --
the British appointed governor and the Arab notables -- for protection,
which, when it arrived, was much too late.
The events in Hebron and my grandparents' miraculous
rescue are vividly described in a letter written by my grandfather nine
days later to my mother, Blanche Greenberg.
In 1907, the peak year of Jewish immigration into the
United States, my maternal grandfather, Aharon Reuven Bernzweig, his wife
Breine Zuch Bernzweig, and their six children left Stanislaw, Galicia (then
Austrian Poland), and settled in New York City. Twenty years later, in
1927, after their children were grown and they had accumulated a modest capital,
they were in a position to fulfill the dream of many traditional Jews‑‑to
spend their retirement years in Eretz Hakodesh, the Holy Land.
Late in the spring of 1929, my grandparents travelled
to the United States in order to attend my brother's bar mitzvah.
Upon their return they decided to escape the heat of a Tel Aviv summer by
vacationing in Hebron. Five days later the riots broke out.
Zeide Bernzweig's health was affected by the
Hebron ordeal, and he died of a heart attack in 1936. Baba Breine continued
to live at 16 Bialik Street in Tel Aviv until her death in 1945. That is
where I would visit and spend Shabbat in 1937‑38, when I studied at
Hebrew University.
Aharon and Breine Bernzweig were buried on the Mount
of Olives. In the summer of 1967, after the reunification of Jerusalem, my
wife and I found and restored their desecrated graves.
While members of the family knew that Zeide had
written a letter about Hebron, we were not familiar with the actual text. I
found the original in my parents' papers after their death. The Yiddish is
closely written on ten pages and is difficult to read. I am therefore
greatly indebted to Helen G. Meyrowitz, who deciphered the text and
prepared the initial translation, which I have revised and edited.
While preparing the letter for publication, I found
clarifying and corroborating information in the testimonies of other
eyewitnesses, preserved in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. From
the survivor documents I was able to identify others who were in the group
of 33 who shared the same hiding place, as well as the names of the Arabs
who saved their lives.
|
|
MEGILLAT HEBRON
With the help of God, Monday, Torah portion Shoftim
V'shotrim, 5689 [September 2, 1929], Tel Aviv, may it be built up and
firmly established, speedily in our days, Amen.
My dear children, may you live and be well.
Even
before I begin writing, my hand is already shaking, my head swims, and
every limb is trembling. I am unable to get control of myself, because the
cries are still ringing in my ears. It is one week today since we came back
from the bitter tragedy. Each day I want to write to you, but when I sit
down to write, all my limbs start to quiver and tears pour from my eyes, so
I have to stop. Today for the first time I was able to pull myself
together, with all my strength, with superhuman effort. I got up at dawn
and sat down to write. I hadn't started yet, but even before I could begin,
my pen was already soaked with tears. Although it seems that I am writing
this letter with ink, you should know that it is not ink, but tears.
Now, let me get to the point. I don't really know
where to start and where to finish, because my blood is still churning
inside me. But I will begin my Megillah of Hebron. Children, as you
already know from my earlier letter, Mama, may she live and be well, had
been feeling very weak, ever since we came back from our trip to America.
Moving to a new apartment and all the hard work involved added to it. The
apartment wasn't finished and there was endless aggravation because the
work was not being done to her liking. On top of everything else, she
couldn't bear the terribly hot weather. It was awful; the perspiring was
beyond human endurance. She lay in bed all day because she was too weak to
walk about. I kept begging Mama, may she live and be well, with tears in my
eyes, that we needed a change of climate. It was impossible to convince her
because she didn't want to abandon the house and leave it hefker. Finally
she realized that she had no choice and she agreed. She did not want to go
by herself, only with me. So we left home and went to the country‑‑to
Hebron.
We arrived on Sunday, August 18th. There we went to a
guest house, where we got a very nice room and came to an agreement on the
charges. We paid for one month in advance, since we planned to stay for
several months, until after all the holidays, when it would be cooler.
From the very beginning, things did not go well.
Although the air was very good and the weather cool, and Mama, may she be
well, did not perspire any more, she caught a severe cold and had to stay
in bed. In addition, there were swarms of biting mosquitoes. We had no
choice but to hope that things would get better. Unfortunately, things
don't always turn out the way we would like, and no one knows what the
future holds.
Ever since we arrived in Hebron, we had heard talk of
disturbances in Jerusalem, that Arabs and Jews were fighting. We didn't
have any specific details, but there were rumors in the air, so we were not
in a happy state of mind. But what could we do about it?
On Friday, the 23rd, we heard that things had gotten
worse in Jerusalem. Everyone became very uneasy and walked about without a
head. We had forebodings that something terrible was about to happen‑‑but
what, exactly, we did not know. I was fearful and kept questioning the
local people, who had lived there for generations. They assured me that in
Hebron there could never be a pogrom, because as many times as there had
been trouble elsewhere in Eretz Israel, Hebron had remained quiet. The
local population had always lived very peacefully with the Arabs.
But my heart told me that the situation was serious.
Hebron alone, without the surrounding villages, has a population of 24,000.
Including the villages, there are 60,000 people. Of what significance is
the Jewish community there, a mere 100 families?
What could we do to protect ourselves? We could only comfort ourselves with
the hope that God, blessed be He, would have mercy, and the troubles would
run their course quietly.
Friday afternoon the situation worsened. We heard
that on the street Arabs had already beaten several Jews with clubs. Next
we heard that all the Jewish stores had closed. The atmosphere was
explosive. Everybody was afraid to go out into the street, and we locked
ourselves in our rooms. Things looked really bad. What should we do?
"No one could go out, and no one could come in "[Joshua 6.1];
everybody was fearful. By now the local Jews too were saying that the
situation was serious.
Suddenly, just one hour before candle lighting,
pandemonium broke loose. Window panes were smashed on all sides. In our
building, they broke every window and began throwing large stones inside.
We hid ourselves. They were breaking windows in all the Jewish homes. Now
we were in deathly fear. As we were blessing the Shabbes candles, we heard
that in the Yeshiva one young man had been killed. It was bitter, the
beginning of a slaughter.
In the meantime, mounted policemen arrived, and all
became still outside. We thought that our salvation had come. All through
the night the police patrolled the streets. But it seemed that they were
having problems. You can understand that I walked the floor all the night
terribly worried, with my heart in my mouth. On Shabbes morning, we saw
that the situation was getting worse. Cars kept racing back and forth
through the streets. They were filled with Arabs armed with long iron bars,
long knives, and axes. The Arabs kept screaming that they were going to
Jerusalem to slaughter all the Jews. Soon many Jews gathered in our house.
We held a meeting and talked over the situation, but couldn't think of
anything we could do to protect ourselves, since none of us had any
weapons. Many of the people remained in our house, because by then it was
too dangerous to try to go home.
Now let me tell you about the massacre. Right after
eight o'clock in the morning we heard screams. Arabs had begun breaking
into Jewish homes. The screams pierced the heart of the heavens. We didn't
know what to do. Our house had two floors. We were downstairs and a doctor
lived on the second floor.
We figured that we would be safe in the doctor's apartment, but how could
we get up there? The stairs were on the outside of the building, but it
wasn't safe to go out. So we chopped through the ceiling and that way we
climbed up to the doctor's house. Well, after being there only a little
while, we realized that we were still in danger because by that time the
Arabs had almost reached our house. They were going from door to door,
slaughtering everyone who was inside. The screams and the moans were
terrible. People were crying Help! Help! But what could we do? There were
thirty‑three of us. Soon, soon, all of us would be lost.
Just then, God, blessed be He, in His great mercy,
sent us an Arab who lived in back of our house. He insisted that we come
down from the doctor's apartment and enter his house through the back door.
He took us to his cellar, a
large room without windows to the outside. We all went in, while he,
together with several Arab women, stood outside near the door.
As we lay there on the floor, we heard the screams as Arabs were
slaughtering Jews. It was unbearable. As for us, we felt that the danger
was so great that we had no chance of coming out alive. Each one of us said
his vidui [his confession in anticipation of death]. At any moment
we could be slaughtered, for double‑edged swords were already at out
throats. We had not even the slightest hope of remaining alive. We just
begged that it should already be done and over.
Five times the Arabs stormed our house with axes, and
all the while those wild murderers kept screaming at the Arabs who were
standing guard to hand over the Jews. They, in turn, shouted back that they
had not hidden any Jews and knew nothing. They begged the attackers not to
destroy their homes.
We heard everything. In addition, the little children
in our group kept crying. We were in deadly fear that the murderers outside
would hear them.
As for me, I was already 99 percent in the next
world. All the time that we were in the Arab's house, I lay there on the
floor in terrible pain [from a heart attack].
It just happened that there were two doctors in the house. They sat near me
and they saved my life.
Well, I cannot continue describing the destruction
any longer. It took several hours‑‑to us it seemed like years‑‑until
all became quiet outside. We still lay there, waiting for the Angel of
Death to finish with us as quickly as possible.
But God heard our prayers. Suddenly, the door opened,
and the police walked in. They had been told that we were hidden there.
They demanded that we go along with them, and they would take us to a safe
place. We were afraid to go, because we thought they themselves might
slaughter us. Eventually, they succeeded in convincing us that they had our
good in mind. Since we couldn't walk there, they brought automobiles and
took us, under police guard, to the police station, which was in a safe
location.
When
we reached the police station, there was acted out a real‑life dance
of the devils, for the police had brought together those who were still
alive, the surviving remnant. During the earlier confusion, naturally, no
one could have known what was happening to anyone else, but there in the
police station, everyone first discovered whom he had lost. As people told
each other about their misfortunes and how many casualties they had
suffered, there burst out a terrible cry, everyone shrieking and crying at
the same time. It was unbearable. Blessed God, give us strength! It was
beyond human endurance. Three women went out of their minds right there.
In short, we were in the police station three days
and three nights. We couldn't eat and we couldn't sleep. We lay on the
ground in filth, just listening to the crying and the groaning.
Finally, God, blessed be He, had mercy on us and [on Monday night] the
police again transferred us‑‑to Jerusalem. There we stayed in
the Nathan Straus Health Center for two days and two nights, and on
Wednesday we came back to Tel Aviv.
I am writing you only about our troubles. I
don't have the strength to write about the additional troubles of the whole
Jewish community. That you will surely read in the American newspapers. It
is very tragic, but everything is from God.
Now I will tell you the total number of people who
were slaughtered in Hebron. As of today, there are 63 holy martyrs. While
we were still there, 58 were buried in a common grave, 51 males and 7
females; up to today, there are 5 more martyrs from among the wounded. Of
the wounded, 49 are in serious condition, and 17 slightly wounded. Who
knows how many more fatalities there will be? The Yeshiva suffered 23 killed and 17 wounded. Eight of the
dead and 14 of the wounded from the Yeshiva are American boys. Gevald!
Twenty‑three living Torah scrolls were burned! May the heavens open
and avenge us.
All the houses of study with their Torah scrolls and
holy books were burned; everything in them was destroyed. All the homes
were plundered; not even a straw was left!
We ourselves were left practically naked and
barefoot. Since we had planned to stay there a few months, we had taken
along all our clothes. Mama, may she live and be well, was left with only
the one dress she was wearing and I, too, had only what I was wearing. They
even took my talis and tefilin. Before Shabbes, I gave the
money that I had brought along to the innkeeper for safekeeping. The Arabs
took that money too, quite a large amount.
To make matters worse, the situation in the entire
country is very bad, and no one is paying his debts. I have notes for
several thousand dollars. Last week, notes for $750 came due, but no one
paid. Who knows what will happen in the future? God forbid that we
shouldn't be ruined altogether.
We're trying to keep our heads above water while we keep hearing that here
things are bad and there things are bad. May God, blessed be He, have mercy
and help all the Jews, including us, that we should at least be well and be
able to bear up under these trials. We Jews have had enough troubles!
I have no patience to write about family matters
because my hand is still trembling.
Just one thing, my dear children, may you live and be
well, I ask of you that you put away this letter for the generations. Each
year, at an agreed‑upon day, you should all meet and give thanks and
praise to God, blessed be He, who saved your parents from this great
catastrophe, and each one of you should make a generous contribution to
charity. The miracle took place on Shabbes, Torah portion Ekev, the 18th
day of the month of Av, 5689 [August 24, 1929], in Hebron.
Your father, who wishes you the best, writing to you
through tears.
Aharon
[Aharon
Reuven Bernzweig]
[(Wife)
Breine Zuch Bernzweig]
|
