Before its 70th birthday, nation pauses to remember
Remembrance Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel’s Wars and Victims of Terrorism began with a solemn ceremony at the Western Wall on Tuesday evening.
The holy site’s Israeli flag was lowered to half-mast and the ceremony began with the sounding of a siren – as throughout the country – at 8 p.m. to signal the observance of one minute of silence in memory of the 23,645 security personnel and victims of terrorism slain in the pre-state Yishuv and the State of Israel.
The ceremony was attended by Israeli and foreign military and political dignitaries including President Reuven Rivlin, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.
In an emotional address to bereaved families and Israeli society, Rivlin praised the strength of those who had lost their loved ones.
“When I meet them in their houses of mourning, I always feel as if we are exchanging silences, obvious silences. This evening, at the Wailing Wall, I want to say how sorry I am to convey the sadness of an entire nation. That the decree of life of this nation requires losing the best – losing your loved ones,” lamented Rivlin.
“Every time we meet, I always ask that you choose life. And you choose life – for the children, for the parents, the grandparents, for the nation, for us. We wish to ease your broken hearts,” he said.
“We owe a lifetime’s debt to all the houses on whose door knocked bereavement – who granted us the right to blossom here as a free people in our land,” Rivlin acknowledged.
“Citizens of Israel, bereaved families: Tomorrow we will mark 70 years of Israeli independence. And we will remember your loved ones, the heroes,” the president
expert gathered the TNT and maneuvered his way around the barbed wire under the bridge and placed the explosives. When he completed the task he gave me a signal.
“My job was to shout out ‘Beware, the bridge is going to blow up!’ so the British soldiers would leave. But they got so startled, they started shooting their weapons in all directions. None of us were hit, and I shouted it out again, and only at the last second did they run off the bridge and save themselves.”
The Night of Bridges was a success, except for one operation at the Nahal Achziv bridges where 14 Palmah fighters were killed. It was just one of the operations that Rapaport played a key role in during the buildup to statehood and during the War of Independence, in which he served as an officer in the brand-new IDF.
GROWING UP in Nesher, near Haifa, where his Zionist-oriented parents settled after moving from Galicia, now Ukraine, Rapaport followed his older brother into the Hagana in his teens and quickly moved up the ranks. He was one of the lead figures in a revenge raid following what was known as the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre at the end of 1947.
After members of the Jewish underground Irgun threw a bomb into a crowd of Arab workers, killing six of them, Arab workers at the refinery and from the nearby village of Balad al-Sheikh turned on their Jewish colleagues and killed 39.
“The British Army didn’t do a thing to prevent it,” recalls Rapaport. “It was too much for the Hagana, we knew we had to react. On the night between December 31 and January 1, we launched a raid on Balad al-Sheikh and Hawsha, where many of the refinery’s Arab workers lived.
“I was responsible for one of the units, but the main commander was Hanan Zelinger. We knew which houses the workers who carried out the massacre lived in, and we were ordered to set the houses on fire and kill the men.”
In the ensuing battle, dozens of the villages’ residents were killed, and the Hagana suffered two casualties, including Zelinger.
“We finished the mission at around 2 a.m., conducted a summary session, and we all went home, to Nesher and other communities close by. I woke up around 10 a.m. and went outside. People started looking at me like I was a ghost. ‘Chanan! You’re alive!’ I heard over and over.
“People had heard about the raid, and the report got out that Hanan the commander had been killed. But it was Zelinger, not me. Later, during the War of Independence, when we conquered Balad al-Sheikh and it was incorporated into Nesher, it was renamed Tel Hanan, after Hanan Zelinger.”
Rapaport’s brushes with history included participation in a meeting with the de facto leader of the Yishuv, David Ben-Gurion, and Mickey Marcus, the famed United States Army colonel who assisted Israel during the War of Independence and became Israel’s first modern general.
“Marcus told him, ‘Listen, your men are excellent, but they don’t know how to fight in big battalions, just the ragtag units of the Hagana.’
“Ben-Gurion answered, ‘We have neither the time to train nor the manpower.’
“So Marcus sat down and dictated to a young woman who knew English a guide for battalion and company commanders. They used a stencil and distributed it to all of us, and we studied how to be a commander, like learning the Talmud,” said Rapaport.
AFTER THE 1948 war, Rapaport attended the Hebrew University, spent several years in Minnesota on postdoctoral studies in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and returned to contribute to Israel’s rapid development.
“We established a country, bringing hunted people here from around the world. It was born out of necessity,” he said, adding that while he was fighting for its existence, he never had any complex historical thoughts about finding himself at a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish people.
“It was a situation of no choice. After the Shoah, with the hostile Arab countries surrounding us, we didn’t even think about what we were doing, we just did it. I was 19 and doing what I had to do for my people to survive.”
Ironically, when Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, Rapaport, commanding an outpost in the Galilee hills, wasn’t even aware of it.
“We had two drivers who would bring us food a few times a week. Ben-Gurion made his declaration on a Friday, and when the driver came on Shabbat to bring us food, he said, ‘Did you hear? Yesterday, Ben-Gurion declared a state!’ “That’s how we found out.” Thankfully, Rapaport – who lives only a few steps away from the courtyard of the Jewish Agency’s headquarters, where throngs celebrated in 1948 – won’t miss out on the state’s 70th birthday Wednesday night. But the celebrants who crowd Jerusalem’s streets will miss out knowing that one of the heroes of the story is right around the block. •