L Oh Palestine, My Palestine

1

The Blondheims

Family History

and Personal Biography

A work in progress

by

Hillel Blondheim

April 2008

INTRODUCTION

This family history and personal biography is being written at the insistence of my children and of my grandchildren sufficiently proficient in English to understand it, despite its somewhat high flown style. I started it about 4 years ago and I was90 a few weeks ago. I'll never get to complete it, because it's taking me so long to write. Happily, I'mliving longer and so have more and more to write about;butit takes me longer and longer to do it, and there is less and less time left to do it in. I show samples of it as it so slowly progresses, to the more critical of my offspring. When they stop assuring me that they find it of interest, I will have finished with it, no matter what has not yetbeen included. And of course, it should eventually be turned into Hebrew for the benefit of most of my, BH, numerous sabradescendents.

“Oh Palestine, my Palestine!”[1]

I begin, not at the beginning, but "in medias res."

“Let’s see how quickly you can get into bed!” said my mother. She was

hurrying, getting ready to leave to chair her Hadassah chapter meeting.[2] I finally stated my justified, even if exaggerated complaint: “But I don’t get to see you anymore!” This came when the summer vacation had ended and she had begun teaching again and when her Hadassah chapter had resumed activities. When my childish discontent had been expressed, my mother got the whole message: As an elementary school teacher and educator, she had been giving her best time to her pupils and short-changing her own child!

The result was her decision to take a year’s leave of absence (1927-28) to spend with me, aged 9,abroad, mostly in "Palestine." And thus began a crucial year-long turning point in my development into what I am(and in old age, was!).

"Palestine" was what Israelwas then officially called by its British mandatory rulers and the League of Nations. It was also called that by its Jewish, but not Arab inhabitants (and later, the reverse!). The coinage then included the name of the country in three languages: "Palestine" in English, the equivalent in Arabic, and in Hebrew letters: "Palestina" followed by "E.Y." in parentheses (for Eretz Yisrael).We first toured a bit in Europe. Then wespent a week or so attending the 15th Zionist Congress in Basel, to which mother was a Hadassah delegate.

Zionist Congress (XV), Basel, 1927

The Congress we attended was not one of the more noted ones. But for me it was a wonderful experience, even if most of the proceedings were in "Kongress Deutsch" (a mixture of German and Yiddish). There we met or listened to the speeches of many "street people," personalities whose names were given to streets in the cities and to settlements inIsrael. These included Chaim Weizmann, Menahem Ussishkin, Leo Motzkin, Henrietta Szold, Louis Lipsky, Nahum Sokolow, Berel Locker, and others.

At that or at another Congress, Rabbi Wolf Gold, the American Mizrachi Chairman, ran into Berel Locker, the prominent leftist, at the local kosher restaurant. When Gold asked him what he was doing at a kosher restaurant, Locker defended himself by saying that he was "only having eggs."

We attended the meeting commemorating Herzl and the First Zionist Congress. It was held in the same hall in which it was originally held, in the old City Hall. The current Congress was being held in the new civic center, much larger but much less impressive.

InEgypt

Then came a trans-Mediterranean crossing together with other delegates and returning Jewish Palestinians. This took us to Egypt where we spent a few weeks visiting and touring.

Mother and I got to see much of Cairo, visiting the Mussky Bazaar, the Khan Khalil, the Palace of Mohammed Ali and a selection of famous mosques. We got to the old synagogue in the Cairo suburb of Fostat where we saw the overhead opening to the low-roofed attic which had contained the famous CairoGenizah.

Mother was a very efficient tourist, and had bought a used Baedeker guide book dated 1898, which we have to this day. It includes Egypt, Palestine and Syria(and has a lovely illustration of Jerusalem, showing the walled city with almost no buildings yet built outside the walls). We climbed a bit of the Cheops pyramid and saw the Sphinx with its forelegs still unexcavated, covered by desert sand. We toured northern Egypt by car as far south as Aswan (but long before the Aswan High Dam was built).

Outside the shul after Friday night services, as obvious strangers we were approached by a hospitable Mr.Enrico Nahum and asked if we had proper arrangements for Sabbath meals. So we passed up the restaurant for lovely Shabbat meals at the home of the Nahum family. On entering the home I was bentshed (ritual blessing) by the old grandfather, we enjoyed extensive Sephardi zemirot (table songs) and started a lifelong family friendship, especially between my mother and Fortuna Nahum, Enrico's unmarried sister.

On to Palestine

We crossed the Suez Canal by ferry, and the Sinai desert overnight by trainto Jerusalem. Sitting with us was the Chief Rabbi of Israel, the Rishon LeZion, Rabbi Uziel, and entourage.We all slept sitting up on the wooden second class benches.(First class was only for the very rich, and third class for the very poor.) In the morning we enjoyed the gorgeous smell of orange blossoms as we passed the orchards of Rehovot. The train took us right into the Turkish-built Jerusalem station and from there we took a gharry (horse carriage) to our "pension" (boarding house).

Schooling in Jerusalem

I began to go to school in Jerusalem to make up, partly, for the American schooling I was missing. It was thought that with my exceedingly limited beginning Talmud Torah Hebrew, a private schoolwould be best for me. For about half a year I attended a private progressive school in Jerusalem, established and run by Deborah Kallen, sister of Horace Kallen of the NewSchool for Social Research, NY.The students were carefully chosen, and among my classmates was Yigael Sukenik, son of the already famous Professor Eliezer Sukenik, the senior archeologist, who later was to acquire the first few Dead Sea scrolls for Israel. His son was to become Yigael Yadin, Chief-of-Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, later Member of Knesset and Israel's Minister of Defense.

What I enjoyed most about the school was the training I got in carpentry! I built a small book case which we brought back to the US and which held a full load of books for at least 30 years! This was because when faced with the choice, I chose the very much more difficult and tedious method of chiseling slots in the uprights into which the shelves were then screwed, rather than only screwing them into place between the uprights. The facility I acquired for tools lasted me till recent onset of old age. When Syriland I married, I made for our first kitchen (in the US before aliyah)a table from the wood of a case I found in the basement of my father-in-law’s store. The table has since been moved through a series of apartments in NY and Jerusalem, and is still functioning in my former (now rented-out,next-to-last) home in Balfour St., J’lem.

Among other activities in school we worked in the kitchen preparing our daily lunches, we did gardening, put on a play, etc. The Hebrew I learned there (plus a year or two much later at the Jewish Theological Seminary's Israel Friedlander [night]Classes, back in NY), was the basis for the third-rate Hebrew I relied on to get me through lecturing at the Hebrew University--Hadassah Medical School.I avoided attendingan ulpanto get a more solid basis in spoken Hebrew.How my poor students must have suffered!

Nebi Musa

One day I was wandering home alone in downtown Jerusalem. I joined a crowd watching a wild Arab sword dance, all in honor of Nebi Musa, the prophet Moses. As it was getting wilder someone said to me: "You had better go home. It may be getting dangerous for you." This was just a year before the Arab anti-Jewish riots of 1929 broke out.

Visiting Around

We visited with Henrietta Szold, whom mother knew well from their Baltimore days and from the founding of Hadassah in NY; Jessie Sampter the American Zionist poetess;the Lewin-Epsteins, he, one of the first trained dentists in Palestine, she,one of the first Hadassah nurses;and with the Israel Brodies, also from the States, who were on a two year visit. Their older son, Gerson, became a good friend of mine, a friendship renewed when they returned to NY from Palestine.They lived in a rented just-built house in the very new community of Talbieh.This addition to Jerusalem was started after Rehaviah, and where we now live, some 80 years later. They had a garage in which they kept, not a car which they didn’t have, but apet donkey! Much later BenBrodie made a contribution to Hadassah for a laboratory assistant for me, without which I would not have had a research career in Israel (see below).

Tel Aviv

When we went to spend a few months in Tel Aviv I had only a slightly better command of Hebrew,There I attended the TachkemoniSchool. When we were due to take a test in a subject of which I had understood almost nothing (the Hebrew meaning of the Aramaic prayersin the Siddur). I told the teacher that I wouldn't be able to take the test as I had understood so little of the course in the few weeks I had attended. He asked me if I had gotten anything at all from his class. I just couldn’t say I had learned absolutely nothing. So he told me to write, during the test, whatever I had learned in his class. I was terrorstricken because I would have had to hand in a blank sheet. But the day of the test was the day we left Tel Aviv to return to Jerusalem.

With the onset of spring I was awed by the breath-taking beauty of the white and the pink-blooming “sh’keydiot” (almond trees) along manyof the streets. They were quite different from the non-blossoming maples and elms of Brooklyn! Other memories included attending a session of Bialik’s Oneg Shabbat, which I couldn't follow at all,and playing along Rothschild Boulevard,then lined by tiny newly planted trees. Because of the many building lots which were still empty, one could then actually see all the way to the sea, as in the famous adage.

Back to Jerusalem

I loved every minute of our time in Jerusalem, which I explored intensively on foot. At the time the YMCA building and had just been built, and the neighborhoods of Rehaviah and Talbieh were being built. We lived in Pension Friedman in an Arab mansion in Musrara, At the time it was a relatively high classneighborhood, but is now a slowly recovering slum.

OneShabbat we went to the BezalelMuseum, on the other side of central Jerusalem. We were able to walk in almost a straight line via open lots between buildings through the very center of developing Jerusalem-outside-the-walls. On one corner was a big pile of stones on which two chalutzot (pioneer girls) sat with hammers making gravel out of the stones for paving the street.

Just up the street from where we lived was the old Turkish prison, later the British jail. The convicts, in striped uniforms, were often marched around through the streets under armed guards with fixed bayonets. Years later, in that jail,members of the Jewish underground were imprisoned and later hanged. There they were visited by Reb Aryeh Levine, the Tzaddik HaYerushlmi (The Pious One of Jerusalem), who would become very close with our family.He is said to have slipped them the means to suicide to escape the gallows.The prison is now a museum.

MotherinJeruslem

My mother took full advantage of our stay. She attended courses in the AmericanSchool of Archeology, founded and headed by the famous William Foxwell Albright. One of her fellow students was Nelson Glueck. He went on to become, years later, an outstanding archeologist and director of that school. Eventually he becamea long-time rabbinical head of the American Reform movement.
Mother collected Yiddish songs that were unknown in the US at the time, but only the words, as she couldn’t write music notes. Throughout subsequent years she would sing for company songs she had learned in Palestine. My children learned them from her and went on to sing them for their own children! And every year when we sit in the Succah, we all sing the Yiddish words, as well as the Hebrew and English translations we made, of a song we learned from her: “A Succale a kleine, Mit bretelach gemeinde."

And now back to what could have been the beginning-- our Family History

Blondheim Family History

My father's grandfather, Hartz Blondheim, had settled in Alexandria,Virginiabefore the Civil War. He had immigrated from Alten Busek, some 50 miles north of Frankfort, Germany. My father had traced the family back to the mid 17-hundreds with aid of an old Hagadah inscribed with names and dates of successive Blondheim owners.The Blondheims were active in establishing and leading the local synagogue in Alexandria, as were the Bendheims. The late Charlie Bendheim was a friend of mine in NY, and his widow, Els, is currently a neighbor.She had put me in touch with a relative of hers, Moshe Kattan who translated into Hebrew the conclusions of my father's books on Rashi's Talmudic glosses.

The Blondheim family eventually based itself in the retail clothing business. The economy of the South was greatly damaged by the Civil War and by post-Civil War Reconstruction.Many southern Jews, who were largely in commerce, therefore moved north. The Blondheims also moved, but only as far as Baltimore, in Maryland, the most southern of the Union states. My father was born there and was truly a born-and-bred son of the land of freedom, from an established American family.

Blondheim "Yeckies"

So the Blondheims were American “Yeckie’s,” my father especially. (Yeckie was much later, initially, a derogatory term for German-Jewish immigrants to Israel.) They were characterized by pedantic conservatism and inflexibility, sometimes verging on the irrational. An illustration: when my father asked me, a few years before the start of my college career, to which college I planned to go I said “maybe Columbia” (in NY City, where I lived, but finances eventually dictated tuition-free City College of NY). He replied, “Harvard is the only place for a gentleman!” My son Menahem eventually fulfilled his grandfather’s implied wish, taking his Masters and PhD at Harvard, after his BA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jaine (Jam) Family History

My mother’s family immigrated to America from Austro-Poland when my mother was an infant.They came from Mayden, a tiny town in Galitzia located between Krakow and Lemberg,and near Kobosov and Jeekov. Meiden was mentioned by Agnon in one of his novels. They were part of the great wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the US at the turn of that century. The family were originally peasants, workingthe lands of the local "poritz," who ran the town he practically owned.

My grandmother was Beile Ruche Jam (Yam). She was of limited abilities, had no education, and firmly believed in shaydim(evil spirits). Her first husband died soon after their marriage. They had a son, ‘Chaskel’ (Yechezkel) Feldman, who did not immigrate to America till after WW I.

My grandmother married again, a man younger than herself, Shlomo- Zalman Jam, a field worker with no education, Jewish or otherwise.

They had a daughter,Payeh (Pauline), and then another, Raizel (Rose), my mother. Even before my mother's birth, my grandfather joined the mass migration of Eastern European Jewry to der Goldeneh medina, the "golden" country of America. He immigrated alone to pave the way for the rest of the family. The third sister, born in the US, was Mollie (Malkah; Mildred).

My grandfather became an “operator,” as those who "operated" a sewing machine were called. This hecarried on his back from factory to factory in lower East Side Manhattan, wherever his work was needed in the newly developing “cloak and suit” industry (largely founded by Jewish immigrants). He never was able to earn a decent wage. For a greater than barely subsistence income the family had to wait many years untilRose and then Mildred began to earn salaries as elementary school teachers.

Slum Dwellers

The Yam (Jam) Family lived in abject poverty in New York’s lower East SideJewish ghetto. My mother’s very first memory was of my grandmother responding to a knock on the door at night with a “sh!” She was afraid it might be the len’lor' coming for the rent money, which they did not have. My mother always felt especially grateful to my grandmother because, much later,she would often go out early in the morningtrying to borrow money for her daughter's trolley fare. This was to HunterCollege, which was at that time was essentially an advanced teachers' seminary. The dire alternative would have been for her to start factory work, as her older sister Pauline had.