KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Meanwhile, at Yagur, illegal military training by the Palmach continued with renewed vigor. According to Rubinstein, “Yagur was on a major road between Haifa and the Jordan Valley, and Jordanian soldiers who were there with the British used the road a lot going between Israel and Jordan. The teachers would take us out by the road, and we would hide by the sides of the road with our sticks — they taught us to defend ourselves with sticks — and pretend we had to attack the soldiers. It was scary and a good edu- cation.” Some of the youths were already skilled in war. Ezra Sher- man, for instance, said, “By January 1944, when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, the Russians returned to my area and a brigade commander took me in and ‘adopted’ me, so I learned how to use weapons and went with the brigade from the Ukraine to Berlin and finished the war with them.” The kibbutz divided the children, few of whom other than Aharon could speak Hebrew when they arrived, into two classes according to their math levels; some in the Dror group had not even learned to count to one hundred. Within a few weeks, they were commu- nicating in Hebrew. Leon Rubinstein said, “We studied Hebrew for maybe four hours every day, as well as history and the Bible, from a cultural and historic approach, not a religious one. The kib- butz discouraged us from using other languages, and when you’re young, you can learn languages easily.” They studied basic math and the geography of Israel — the love of the land. Arie Medlinger, who was younger than the rest of the Dror group, was moved to a class with sabra children and became fluent in Hebrew within three months. Aharon, already proficient in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and Ukrainian, became the letter-writer for the rest of the group. When- ever anyone wanted to write to relatives or the kibbutz administra- tion, Aharon served as his scribe. In addition, said Medlinger, “he sang beautifully and was very well-liked. He was sociable.. .and had the most beautiful girl in the kibbutz as his girlfriend.” Cha- na Haklay remembered, “Despite his handicap, he was very active sociable...
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