KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Trying to build housing and infrastructure for the refugees, Is- rael established new settlements at a rate of one every three days, or one hundred a year, at high financial and social costs; during the Tzena between 1950 and 1952, the economy was severely chal- lenged by recession and an austerity period with strict rationing was instituted. At Yagur, members said, they ate “half an egg” at a time. “People used to say the chickens had a razor blade in their bottoms,” Arie Medlinger said. Poultry was only available on Passover, and dairy products, fruits, and vegetables were in mea- ger supply. Rubinstein said, “After I left the army, I moved to Haifa and made plans to immigrate to the United States. I shared a tiny room, about five feet by seven feet, with another young man. There was no running water, no facilities, no telephone. He worked at night and I worked during the day, so he slept in the bed during the day and I slept in it at night. There was very little work in Israel then. The company I worked for would give me an IOU slip because they didn’t have money to pay their workers. When I left Israel, I was owed six months’ pay.” Ideological questions wracked the country and in 1951, the HaKibbutz HaMeuchad movement suffered a split, known as HaPilug, between pro-Soviet and pro-Western foreign policy sup- porters, with Yagur favoring the West. “Only devoted Mapainiks left the kibbutz,” Medlinger commented, “and I think they regret it until today.” Like the Altalena affair, HaPilug is considered a painful moment in Israeli history, although the factions reunited later. Refugees continued to arrive, not only from Europe but from Moslem countries in the Middle East. “Between 1948 and 1957, as a consequence of government pressure, economic strangulation, and physical pogroms, some 467,000 Jews would be compelled to flee their ancestral homes in Moslem lands. The largest number of them would find asylum in Israel.... Within a period of five years, the Holocaust nearly doubled the Sephardi and Oriental component
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