Tag Archives: Haganah

Jews of the Week: Sara Braverman and Hanna Szenes

First Ladies of the IDF

Sara “Surika” Braverman (1918-2013) was born in Romania. She joined Hashomer Hatzair, the Zionist youth movement, when she was just 9 years old. She made aliyah at 20 and co-founded Kibbutz Shamir in the Galilee. She served with the pre-IDF Haganah, and then joined its elite special forces unit, the Palmach. During World War II, she agreed to join a group of soldiers to form a “Jewish commando” unit that would parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). The mission was to go undercover and assist in underground operations while rescuing Allied pilots and helping Jews escape. Out of 240 that volunteered, 110 were taken for training in Egypt, and 33 were ultimately selected, including Braverman.

Another inductee was Hanna Szenes (1921-1944), originally from Hungary. Her parents noted her bright mind early on, and put her in a prestigious private school. However, Jewish students had to pay triple the tuition, and Szenes nearly dropped out because she couldn’t afford it. (The school later reduced her tuition as she was a gifted student.) Such discrimination led her to become a passionate Zionist. Upon graduation, she made aliyah and studied at the Nahalal Girls’ Agricultural School. Szenes soon joined a kibbutz, as well as the Haganah. In 1943, she joined the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and became a paratrooper. She was then recruited by the SOE and met Sara Braverman. In March of 1944, they were air-dropped in Yugoslavia. Their mission to go into Hungary was called off, but Szenes went anyway with part of the group. They were captured and tortured. Szenes refused to give up any information, and was ultimately executed by firing squad. Her remains were returned to Israel in 1950, and her diary and inspiring poems (in both Hebrew and Hungarian) were posthumously published and became hugely popular. Meanwhile, Braverman had stayed behind and joined Josip Tito’s underground partisans. When her mission ended, she was smuggled out through Italy and returned home. At the start of Israel’s War of Independence, Braverman founded the IDF Women’s Corps at the request of Chief of Staff Yaakov Dori. She recruited 32 other women and the group trained together in Tel Aviv. She went on to promote IDF service among Israeli women for decades to come, and is today known as the “IDF’s First Lady”.

Words of the Week

The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents.
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Jew of the Week: Isser Harel

Father of Israeli Intelligence

Israel “Isser” Halperin (1912-2003) was born in what is today Vitebsk, Belarus to a wealthy Jewish-Russian family. His father was a rabbi who had studied at the famed Volozhin Yeshiva, while his mother’s family ran a large vinegar factory. Following the Russian Revolution, they lost their business and the Communists confiscated all of their property. The family eventually fled to Latvia and were robbed along the way, arriving with absolutely nothing. Young Isser realized Jews would never be safe anywhere, and needed their own national home. He soon joined a Zionist youth group, and at 16 decided to make aliyah. The following year, he faked his age to get a British visa. Arriving in Israel, he joined a kibbutz and there met his soon-to-be wife. The couple later opened their own orange-packing company. In 1942, Isser changed his last name to the Hebrew Harel (“Mountain of God”), and joined the pre-IDF Haganah, which was working together with the British auxiliary forces to fight the Nazis. Harel took an officer’s course in intelligence, then joined the Haganah’s “Shai” intelligence unit. He eventually became the main aid to Shai’s chief, as well as the head of its Tel-Aviv office. With the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, Harel co-founded Shin Bet, Israel’s “FBI”, and built it from the ground up. In 1952, he became the director of Mossad, and over the next 11 years at its helm, turned it into one of the world’s most elite intelligence agencies. In 1955, he arranged meetings between Egypt’s Nasser and Ben-Gurion and nearly achieved a peace deal. Meanwhile, he convinced Morocco’s king to let 80,000 Moroccan Jews immigrate to Israel. It was Harel who obtained copies of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s critical 1956 “Secret Speech” denouncing his predecessor Stalin and marking an important shift in the USSR. He shared the speech with the CIA. Harel also exposed a number of Soviet agents. In 1960, Harel planned and led the successful mission to capture Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He later wrote an account of the mission, The House on Garibaldi Street, which became a bestseller and was adapted to a 1979 film of the same name. In 1963, Harel oversaw Operation Damocles which targeted German rocket scientists working for Egypt. When Mossad mail bombs killed innocent bystanders, Harel resigned from his position. He later joined Ben-Gurion’s new political party and was elected to the Knesset in 1969, serving until 1973. After retiring, he turned to writing and published ten popular books, both fiction and non-fiction. It has been said that “No one terrified Israel’s enemies like Isser Harel”.

Important Thoughts on Palestinian Refugees

Words of the Week

The best way to understand antisemitism is to see it as a virus. Viruses attack the human body, but the body itself has an immensely sophisticated defence, the human immune system. How, then, do viruses survive and flourish? By mutating. Antisemitism mutates, and in so doing defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred. There have been three such mutations in the past two thousand years, and we are living through the fourth.
– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Jew of the Week: Yair Stern

Israel’s Freedom Fighter

Avraham Yair Stern (1907-1942) was born to a Russian-Jewish family in what is today Poland. The family fled during World War I, and Stern ended up living in a small village in Siberia. At 18, he made aliyah on his own to the Holy Land. Stern joined the Haganah defense organization and took up studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1932, he joined the more right-wing Irgun and trained to become an officer. Stern was also a passionate writer and poet. His lyrics were credited with inspiring and strengthening countless Jewish pioneers in Israel. The Hebrew University was so impressed that they sent him to Italy for doctoral studies. Meanwhile, he travelled around Eastern Europe to convince more Jews to make aliyah and join the Zionist movement. Stern quickly recognized the British as oppressors and foreign colonialists, and argued that as the indigenous people of the land Jews had to do whatever it took to reclaim their ancestral home. When the British released the infamous 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration (allowing only 75,000 Jews to enter over five years), Stern concluded that negotiations and diplomacy with the British was no longer possible, and armed resistance was necessary. At the outbreak of World War II, Stern was actually part of a training program with the Polish Army to train 40,000 Jews to liberate Israel from the British! The Nazi invasion of Poland put an end to that program. Stern eventually broke away from the Irgun and formed Lohamei Herut Israel, “Freedom Fighters of Israel”, abbreviated Lehi, in 1940. Some Lehi members sought to recruit local Arabs in their struggle against the British oppressor. But Stern, having lived through the terrible 1929 Hebron massacre and Arab riots (in which over 130 Jews were slaughtered and hundreds more injured and raped), foresaw that the Arabs would never share the land with the Jews in the long-term. Stern went on to organize attacks on British positions and assassinations of British authorities. His group was commonly referred to as “the Stern Gang”. Stern was shot to death by a British policeman in early 1942. Nonetheless, the Stern Gang continued its activities, and even assassinated the antisemitic Lord Moyne, the highest-ranking British official in the Middle East. These events finally convinced the British to abandon the Holy Land for good, allowing the State of Israel to be proclaimed. Immediately after, the new government of Israel disbanded Lehi. In January of 1949, they granted amnesty to past Lehi members, including future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Though he was only 34 years old when he was killed, Yair Stern is credited with playing an instrumental role in the formation of the State of Israel.

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Words of the Week

The current Palestinian political economy, influenced far too greatly by the BDS and anti-normalization campaigns, amounts to a corrupt, unsustainable, terror-supporting regime that is disinterested in the economic well-being of its own people and the development of a new state.
– Khaled Abu Toameh, Arab journalist and filmmaker