Historical Background and Interviews
III. A New Beginning A New Beginning
adapt to their new lives. Some of them were from radically differ - ent cultural backgrounds, although they were all Jews. “Mordecai, for instance, was an orphan from Egypt with kinky hair — we’d never seen that before — and he spoke French and Arabic while we spoke Yiddish,” said Rubinstein. “The two cultures, Egyptian and Eastern European, didn’t mix. We used to gang up on him in our spare time, and do things like put toilet paper between his toes when he was asleep, or mount a balloon filled with water on the door so that it burst on him when he came in. Looking back, it was veiy cruel.” Some of the Dror children also felt that they were not fully welcomed as part of their adoptive families by the sabra children: “They disapproved of us,” Shmuel Peleg said. Chana Haklay and Behira Zakay said that the only children who welcomed them fully were the Teheran children, so-called because they had been smug- gled out of Europe via Teheran; they had been at Yagur since 1943. She said, “Everyone who was on the fringe of the society, who wasn’t accepted by the b’nei meshek (kibbutz natives) became our friends. We lived almost in two different societies.” By the end of World War II, three Jewish groups were prepared to fight for their freedom from Britain. The largest and most mod - erate was the Haganah, which was socialist in philosophy and acted as the military branch of the Jewish Agency. The two other groups, the Irgun (Etzel) and Lechi, were smaller, more radical, and op- erated underground. At times, the internal animosity between the three resulted in raids on each other’s sites, with kidnappings and interrogations of each other’s members. Lechi had split off from Etzel due to a philosophical disagree - ment. In December 1941, the British had refused to allow a boat carrying 769 Jewish refugees, the Struma, to land in Palestine and like hundreds of other boats carrying illegal Jewish refugees, forced it out to sea. The Struma sank near Istanbul and hundreds of ref- ugees, including 250 women and 70 children on board, drowned. Etzel members who wanted to avenge their deaths founded Lechi very
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