Historical Background and Interviews
III. A New Beginning A New Beginning
a dining room and kitchen. There was food rationing all over Israel, although there was no shortage of basic foods.” But they survived, with few conveniences — water and sup- plies had to be carted in from Be’er Sheva, an hour away — and minimal food, not even bread or salt. They immediately began a labor-intensive effort to cultivate soybeans and wheat on a 1,250- acre parcel of land forty miles north of the kibbutz. The land had formerly belonged to Arabs, according to Sherman, and had been allocated to the kibbutz after the war. Four to five people would travel to the farmland together and stay in an old house while they worked the land for a week or two, then return to the kibbutz. Sherman left after one year because he wanted to make his own decisions; he did not like the fact that the group made every deci- sion together. Leon Rubinstein said, “One time, when all they had was a few tents, Aharon wanted to see the kibbutz and Shimshon’s place of burial. I was still in the military and was part of a military motor pool, so I had access to transportation — an open jeep. We drove there, looked at the grave, and spent about an hour at the kibbutz, then drove through the cold desert all night to my encampment — I had to be at work in the morning. Aharon got a ride from my encampment in a military truck, but I worried about the cold and chased after the truck and brought some blankets for him. Then I took a shortcut back to my tent and got stuck in the mud — that is how it was in Israel back then.” The new nation struggled to absorb the huge numbers of arriv- ing refugees. A processing camp, Sha’ar HaAliyah (Gate of Immi- gration), was established on the site of a former British army camp. It was expected that refugees would stay there for three to seven days before starting their new lives in Israel. Immediately, howev- er, the camp was overwhelmed. The stay of the refugees at Sha’ar HaAliyah stretched into weeks and months. Then they were taken to intermediate ma’abarot camps throughout Israel, sometimes for months.
365
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online