Benno Zell
Viennese Zionist who embraced kibbutz life and witnessed its evolving relationship with Israel
ON 17TH November, 1938, 17 year-old Benno Zell wrote to his sister in Palestine saying he was desperate to escape from Vienna and join her in Eretz Yisrael. “That is my greatest desire,” he wrote. His desire was fulfilled — but not until he had experienced the Second World War as a refugee in England and Northern Ireland and fought as a British soldier on the beaches in Normandy.
Finally reaching Palestine in the twilight of British rule, he helped found Kibbutz Yasur, a small Western Galilee settlement, where he worked, raised a family and lived until his death at the age of 100.
Known for his bonhomie and longevity, Benno’s death evoked messages of sympathy and admiration, not only in his own kibbutz but from the neighbouring Arab villages where he was a familiar figure.
His wife Rita (née Brown), who died three years ago, aged 90, shared his Zionist ideals. She was one of five siblings from Dublin, Ireland who rushed to Israel in the first years of statehood. While Benno enjoyed playing in a mandolin orchestra, Rita became an accomplished artist in a variety of media, including silk-screen painting.
In their life together at Yasur Benno and Rita witnessed the many changes inside the kibbutz and its evolving relationship with mainstream Israel. They formed lasting friendships with overseas volunteers attracted by the kibbutz ideology. They included English novelist Lynne Reid Banks, who taught English to the kibbutz children and married the Anglo-Israeli sculptor Chaim Stephenson.
Benno sometimes regretted not settling in a more prosperous kibbutz but never seriously considered leaving Yasur, even after two of his three sons moved into the wider world after their army service.
Born in Vienna, Benno was the fourth of the five children of Rosa and Berl (Dov) Zell, an Orthodox Polish couple. He grew up in Vienna’s poor Jewish district whose 180,000 Jews formed a sixth of the entire pre-war population.
While Rosa kept a small grocery store, her husband, a watchmaker, spent most of his time in the synagogue. After his father’s death Benno spent the next nine years with his brothers Pinchas and Leo in an orphanage in Baden-bei-Wien run by Orthodox Hungarian Jews. He eventually grew bored with its Talmudic syllabus and became drawn to Zionism and socialism.
On returning to Vienna in 1935 Benno trained as a plumber. With the Nazis in total command of Austria, this became the most terrifying time in the long history of Viennese Jewry. On March 13, 1938 he stood among the vast crowds watching Hitler’s triumphant drive-past to celebrate the Anschluss — Austria’s entry into the Third Reich. He was suddenly pounced on by Nazi supporters and had to run for his life.
On the same day his mother’s shop closed and he and other Jewish students experienced antisemitic abuse at the school for plumbers. He joined the Bachad youth movement and went to a kibbutz training farm at Huttenhoff in Germany. “We ploughed and brought the milk to market and the kids threw stones at us,” he said.
A few months later he returned to Vienna just in time for the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9 and 10, 1938. Benno spent four nights in a police station with about 300 other Jews. He was sent to see SS Lt-Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who was running the mass expulsion of Vienna’s Jews with the community’s own financial and other resources, from an office in the sequestered Rothschild Palace. He was finally given his travel documents and ten English shillings and told to get out of the Reich in two weeks or be sent to a concentration camp.
At the same time his younger brother Leo was bound for England on a Kindertransport, leaving Benno to abandon their mother before starting his own journey to England.
At Liverpool Street station he showed a policeman the address of a rabbi in the East End given to him in Vienna. To Benno’s astonishment the policeman took him there by bus and tube and refused payment for the fare. “Thanks to that policeman”, he said, “I have loved England ever since.”
For the next two years he lived in Northern Ireland at the Bachad movement’s agricultural training farm at Millisle, County Down. Impatient with its strict religious observances, he left for St Asaph in North Wales and worked as a plumber before volunteering to join the army as a welder, repairing tanks on the battlefield.
He received weapons training with the 86th Anti-Tank Regiment of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, and landed at Normandy ten days after D Day. References to his Jewish background were removed from his paybook and identity disc in case he was captured by the Germans. In Normandy he took part in the two-month long battle of Caen which cost more than 4,000 Allied casualties.
Benno narrowly escaped death when an officer standing next to him was killed by a sniper in a church tower. After this his unit destroyed every church it passed while slowly advancing across northern France. He spent the winter of 1944-45 in Belgium where his regiment helped relieve the Americans caught in the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes.
For a year and a half after Germany’s surrender he was based in Hamburg. He was promoted to the rank of sergeant, but his refusal to go to fight the Japanese in Burma could have earned him the death penalty, had the Americans not dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, ensuring Japan’s immediate surrender.
On his return to London he accidentally met his younger brother Leo, now proudly wearing the uniform of a sergeant in the Special Air Service. They compared wartime experiences and discussed their plans for the future. When Benno said that, as a socialist and a Zionist, he planned to live in a kibbutz in Palestine, Leo, who had been adopted by a Christian family and expected to marry a girl in Scotland, changed his plans and decided to go with him.
But by now there were some 90,000 British troops in Palestine caught in the crossfire between Jews and Arabs, and the Royal Navy was intercepting Holocaust survivors bound for the Jewish National Home.
Meanwhile in England Benno obtained forged Palestinian visas for himself and Leo. Arriving in Haifa on a Greek passenger ship from Marseilles, they handed their visas to Zionist officials who presumably recycled them for other immigrants. After the British left the country in mid-May, Leo became a full-time officer in the Israeli army’s Alexandroni Brigade, but was killed by an Arab Legion shell at Rosh Ha-Ayin, aged 25.
Benno was reunited with his sisters Dora and Fany and brother Pinchas, but in 1963 they learned that their mother Rosa had been deported to Litzmannstadt — the Lodz ghetto in Poland in 1941 — but never returned. Benno is survived by his sons Eldad, Nimrod and David Zell, four grand-daughters and two great grandchildren.
Benno Zell: born January 23, 1921. Died September 16, 2021