by David Friedman

Yom Ha’Atzamut, Israeli Independence Day, is celebrated this year for the 62^nd time, on April 19-20. My thoughts take me today to the men and women who fought in the War of Independence, who exhibited great courage and sacrifice. It was a time of suffering and hardship indeed, but also a time of God’s restoration of our nation, replete with miracles.  May I share with you three stories, in brief, of remarkable events that were part of the War of Independence? Nothing captures the essence of an historical event as well as the stories of those who were involved in them.

As grade schoolers, my children had to interview a War of Independence veteran. They were fortunate enough to find Mr. Sammy Nisan. Sammy was an Irgun fighter, and a younger acquaintance of later Israeli PM Menachem Begin. At age 19, Sammy made nightly trips under cover of darkness to the Mediterranean shore from Jerusalem. His mission was to search for and save ‘illegal’ Jewish immigrants from being found and imprisoned (or worse) by the British army.  He would comb the shores for refugees, then put the Jewish men, women and children whom he found in his jeep, bringing them to kibbutzes that would hide them, where they would then be absorbed into the kibbutz system. After a night’s work, he would return, sleepless, to his day job in a furniture store. With tears in his eyes, he emotionally related to us how his best boyhood friend was killed in one of these Irgun ‘pick up’ operations that they were carrying out together. A British jeep pursued them after they picked up some ‘illegals’. Sammy’s jeep was shot at, and his best friend hit, and bled to death in Sammy’s arms. Yet Sammy continued his work, providing shelter to soaking wet Holocaust survivors who managed to arrive on Israel’s shores.

After my children interviewed him, Sammy told me: “We didn’t do what we did to receive medals or to get anyone’s praise. We did what we did because we simply had to.”  No one calls 90-year old Sammy Nisan a modern Jewish hero, nor is he considered a tool in God’s hand to bring about the physical restoration of the modern Jewish state. But I can see him as no less than that. It was a moving moment when we all met Sammy, the saver of Jewish refugees and olim [immigrants] from the War of Independence era.

Aryeh Bar David is a professional musician and a moshavnik. We first met him in a taxi in 1980. He came to speak to my class once at King of Kings College about how his family survived the War of Independence in Jerusalem, which during the War was under a starvation blockade for half of a year. As the War was starting, Aryeh’s father was walking home hurriedly to get the family out of their neighborhood apartment into a Jewish area, since they lived in a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood, which had become very dangerous. An Arab gang jumped in front of him, led by the armed neighborhood bully (one Abu George). Wielding his pistol and determined to kill the senior Bar David on the spot, suddenly Abu George and his gang just upped and quickly ran away, looking as if they had seen a lion charging full speed at them. To this day, Aryeh doesn’t know what happened, why it was that the armed gang fled from his unarmed father. The family then made it out of that neighborhood to safety and survived the starvation siege into statehood. Whatever happened, God was protecting this Messianic Jewish family: ‘Though a thousand fall at your right hand, and ten thousand at your left hand, it will not come near you” [Psalm 91]. As history turned out, this family became one of the pillars of the Messianic Jewish community in the fledgling state.

Perhaps no historian attributes the escape of the Bar David family to a miracle, similar to those carried out by God in biblical history. But that is how I consider what happened to them. I have no other category by which to understand what happened.

On the site of the former Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem sits a little known site where the fate of Jerusalem was decided in May 1948. It was then that a handful of frightened high school students, led by a Haganah junior officer, were forced into battle against an invading armored company of the Jordanian Legion. It was a surprise Legion assault that was meant to end the war in one night, because Jewish Jerusalem had sent all of its soldiers to another site outside the city to fight. Making one strategic blunder after another, these professional, British trained Legionnaires killed their commanding officer by friendly fire, made a wrong turn that put them in the direct line of fire of the students’ lone bazooka shooter, and took their time, stopping to party along the way because they knew they’d only be facing a few civilians at best. That gave the students time to plan and execute their successful bazooka-led ambush. And so the virtually undefended city did not fall.

This battle is recorded in the Collins & LaPierre classic, ‘O Jerusalem’. Funny enough, the official British report of the ‘incident’ merely records that the Legion suffered an unexpected defeat and retreated into the Old City. End of story!

Few people even know about what happened on the corner of St. George and Hevron Roads. Even fewer would consider it a military upset of biblical miracle proportions. But I have no other way to understand it. How else does Jerusalem’s Jewish population get saved from certain slaughter by over a dozen armored vehicles, commanded by British officers and driven by British-trained professional soldiers? This Jewish ‘resistance’ had but 1 trained Haganah soldier, who just happened to be in Jerusalem on his honeymoon! Losing Jerusalem on that night would have been the end of the war, and the Legionnaires expected no less to happen. But it didn’t. Why not? It certainly should have. The city was for all purposes undefended on that night.

The efforts and dangers braved by Mr. Nisan at a tender age, and by the Bar David family, as well as the stunning success of Yosef Nevo’s [the Hagana officer] Gadna club [a high school flying club] are the stories of how God brought about His promises concerning the restoration of Israel, promises such as Ezekiel 37.4-12:

Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.' "So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.' " So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army. Then he said to me: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.' Therefore prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. “

We have so many people to whom we can be grateful, people like those mentioned above, whose lives, sweat, blood and tears were how our Israel of today was founded. Their lives are the flesh and blood bones that  G-d put back on their feet, to once again stand and thrive in the promised Land of our Fathers (cf. Ezekiel 37 above). Needless to say, all of us who come to the Jewish state of Israel today do so on the prior footprints of the Nisans, the Bar Davids, the Nevos, the Gadna high schoolers, and last but not least, on the lives of those who fell in that same conflict. I can only understand the events of that time as a fulfillment of the restoration promises of G-d Himself.

Their stories are the stories of how Israel was birthed, of how the Mighty One fulfilled His promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

May I suggest to everyone two fascinating books to read about Israel’s War of Independence: “Six Days at Yad Mordecai” by Margaret Larkin and “O Jerusalem” by Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins. Larkin’s book chronicles yet another miracle: how Tel Aviv was saved from the Egyptian army’s assault [a battle of 4,000 Egyptians who were held off for a week by 118 kibbutzniks, with but a few weapons]. LaPierre and Collins' book contains the personal stories of both Israelis and Arabs who participated in the War.

As an Israeli, these are my thoughts on our 62^nd Yom Ha’Atzamut. May G-d have mercy on our beloved homeland.

Blessed are You Lord our G-d, King of the Universe, Who did miracles for our fathers, in their day, at that time.

David Friedman