Israel

I knew from childhood that I was of Jewish descent, and already by the age of eleven or twelve I was attempting to learn Hebrew, using ancient books my father brought home, and Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew, but then the Six Day War came and a huge surge in my Jewish Consciousness. This coincided with my mother's last pregnancy and hospitalisation, so that I became housekeeper and cook to my younger sisters and father, and also coincided with my first bash at A-levels. I didn't do too well, and repeated them, for a whole year, till I finally left for university in October 1968. At Freshers' Week at Exeter I did eye up the Jewish Society table, but chickened out. When I went to Leicester to study for my MA I took advantage of the language laboratory to study modern Hebrew. It wasn't easy to study the language alone though, but it did give me some familiarity.
In 1973 I was studying for my teaching qualification, and the Yom Kippur War motivated me to apply to go to Israel, and I did contact Kibbutz representatives in London, but plans fell through. It was probably around this time that I also applied to the Anglo-Israel Association for a grant, and did at least gain an interview, with a very patrician group of elders in London. They did recommend though that when I should get to Israel I should visit the Jewish Agency and ask to see Mr Dulzin.
In 1977 I met my Jewish partner whilst working in France. She moved in with me in St Albans in the summer of 1978. In January 1979 we booked a flight to Israel for a week's holiday. The flight was delayed for two days by heavy snow at Heathrow Airport, but we finally made it. I do not remember where we stayed but I recall how we explored Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Jericho and other places. I had finally made it to Israel, with the support of my partner and guide.
In September 1979 we both left our jobs and set off for Israel. We flew to Italy, visiting some of my family, in particular my Jewish grandfather. We then caught a train to head to Ancona, but decided to jump off the train somewhere along the Adriatic coast and have a seaside holiday. Quite by chance we chose Senigallia, left the train, and set off from the station. We chose the Hotel Sabra because of its name, which in Italian means a sabre, but in Hebrew means a prickly pear, and is the nickname given to native Israelis.
After a week we headed on to Ancona, where we boarded a ferry heading for Piraeus near Athens. We were young, so we travelled on deck overnight, going through the Corinth Isthmus. We then spent a week on the islands of Poros and Spetses, relaxing together, meeting young Israelis, swimming, and living as cheaply as we could.
After our island sortie we headed back to Piraeus and boarded the ferry to continue our journey to Israel. We arrived and docked in Haifa as the sun rose facing us, and an elderly Greek Jew was praying at the edge of the deck.
We must have made our way to Tel Aviv, I do not remember, but at an office there we were allocated to a kibbutz in the far North of Israel, close to the Lebanese border. In those days, back in 1979, when Israel was only 31 years old as a country, many young Jews and other young people were welcomed as volunteers on kibbutzim.
We made our way by bus along the coast northwards to Nahariyah, not far before the border with Lebanon. There we caught another bus, and took the road that climbed steeply from the coast, travelling through hilly terrain, following hair-raising routes along the crest of a ridge, till we  reached Kibbutz Adamit. Here we were allocated a room, and began to settle into this new life.
Forty years ago Adamit was an 'Anglo-Saxon' kibbutz, and although its membership was international, many were from the States. there were English people too, like Elaine, and Mark, but there were also members of Brazilian, Canadian, Tunisian, Irish and other backgrounds, and non-Jewish members who had settled there. We two were given a privileged role, working in the avocado plantations down on the coast, so that each morning we left at 4am in the back of a landrover-type vehicle. We would call at the bakery in Shlomi for fresh bread, then a Christian village, before arriving in the avocado plantations down on the coastal plain.
Our tasks were various. Harvesting the avocados was the main activity, filling the sacks round our necks and tipping them into the tractor-drawn trailers. We quickly learned to recognise when the fruits were of sufficient size for picking. I was promoted to work with a michaelson, cherry-pickers that allowed me to reach high into taller trees to reach their fruit. Sometimes I would find an extra large fruit that I would save for myself when I went back to the kibbutz. Sometimes I would find a fruit that was too ripe, and i would use that as a kind of soap to clean my hands, often soiled by the michaelson's mechanism. We were taught by our Tunisian-origin supervisor how to ring bark the trees to stimulate them into fruit production. 
We took it in turns to go back to our hut to prepare breakfast for ourselves and our colleagues. We would dice tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables and mix them with beaten eggs to make a sort of omelette that we ate together. Hebrew was the language spoken, though most present were immigrants, but that helped us gain some familiarity with the language, and also provoked us into wanting to improve our grasp of the language.
We had other tasks, such as repairing the damage caused to water irrigation systems by wild boar. We would go into a plantation, and then the water would be turned on to locate where the alkathene pipes had been chewed through, so that a glorious mud bath would be produced in which the wild boar would wallow. We would carry with us basic equipment with which to repair the damaged pipe. We got completely soaked, but I enjoyed the work.
Weed control was another task, and we would walk behind a tractor spraying weeds to kill them. Health and Safety was non-existent, and we complained about this, but were seen as 'soft'. Eventually my partner went for a blood test that indicated we were indeed being poisoned, which motivated us to leave. There had been some compensation for this task: I had noticed whilst walking up and down large numbers of tesserae, remnants of Roman villas, and I often stopped to grab these and put them in my pockets. I accumulated a whole sackful of these back at the kibbutz which sadly I had to abandon when I left. There were other traces of previous inhabitants, in the form of underground water cisterns. Occasionally we would see a shepherd with his flock of goats.
We enjoyed our time at kibbutz Adamit. We enjoyed getting home at lunchtime, eating, sleeping through the afternoon, then having the evening to relax, chat, read and explore. Sometimes we caught the bus down to Nahariyah for the evening, when there was always the shock of the bus doors opening and the prickly heat hitting our skin. The air was much fresher high up in the hills of northern Galilee.
We had contacts with our Druze and Bedouin neighbours from time to time. We would travel with them on the bus — once a fellow passenger travelled with a young goat on his knees. On another occasion we were invited to a peace-making in the neighbouring Arab community, after a dispute with Druze neighbours. We enjoyed the parcels of goat meat wrapped in very thin bread.
Sometimes we had longer excursions, and would travel together to distant towns like Akko, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but these trips were usually marred by the frustrating attempts to phone Essex: the search for asimonim, telephone tokens, the search for a working telephone box, and the usual failure for these calls to connect both ways.
Our next move was to kibbutz Ein Hashofet, not far from Haifa, where we joined the ulpan, the intensive Hebrew course. The teacher, Uzi, was excellent, and the course members came from all over the world: America, France, Russia and England, and other places I cannot recall, though I remember the people and even some of their names. I worked mostly in the lul, poultry house, unloading many thousands of day-old chicks, and a few weeks later working through the night to collect the large, full-grown birds, three in each hand, and loading them carefully into crates to be slaughtered and processed. Much of the time though I worked in the carpenters' workshop. My colleagues were Arabs from the neighbouring village, but we conversed in Hebrew. Mostly I repaired very many of the communal dining room chairs, whose back legs had been damaged or snapped by people leaning back on them. I would glue and clamp them, and clean them up to return them for use. On one occasion we were asked to make a simple coffin when an elderly member of the kibbutz died.
We did not complete our full six months in the ulpan, though our Hebrew improved tremendously. We left early to join a new scheme, this time in the development town of Ma'alot, still high up in Galilee. We had somehow met Elaine Kop, an American who had settled there, and who organised visitors and volunteers. We were given a flat on the top floor of the merkaz klita, the Absorption Centre. My partner worked in the gan yeladim, the kindergarten, but because of my building background I became the assistant borough engineer for the township of Ma'alot-Tarshiha, working under Mark, a South African. I loved the work, creating maps with crude equipment for the installation of street lighting, creating a basketball court in the Arab township of Tarshiha, leading teams of volunteers painting the apartments of the elderly. My clerical staff in the office spoke Hebrew or French which actually helped me, as that way I could learn all the technical terms in Hebrew for the work I was doing. If there was spare time, I would fill it by designing pavement patterns, using square slabs that had two colours, and were divided either with a straight line or with a quarter-circle. We enjoyed our time in Ma'alot, making friends, becoming much more confident in our Hebrew.
Ma'alot was quite a religious town, with many synagogues, and Friday evenings were magical as the town became quiet and gradually we would hear the singing and chanting from the many small synagogues that reflected the origins of the different communities. Many people at that time were of Moroccan or Tunisian origin, though I also remember a mother calling from her apartment window in Ladino, medieval Spanish. Later Russian immigrants were to arrive and change the character of the town, and naturally we got to know the Americans, South Africans and other English people there.

In the then small shopping centre there was a wonderful shop that sold spices, and nearby was a shop that supplied Jewish religious artefacts. It was here that I bought my tallith, my prayer shawl, that I still have and use forty years later, and which will be wrapped round me when I am buried. The owner of the shop was Eli Shitrit, and he became our friend, welcoming us to his family. We met his wife Rachel, and her parents. I once asked Rachel about her brother, whom I knew had died during the Six Day War, and it was very moving to be told his story, after which she said that it was the first time she had ever talked about him since his death, as it had always felt too painful. I am glad that I listened attentively, and I'm glad that it helped her to talk about him.
Eli also introduced me to his synagogue, where I thereafter prayed regularly, on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, and on the holydays. Although the congregation were almost all of Mizrachi, or oriental, origin, they worshipped following mostly the Ashkenazi, or German, tradition, so services felt reasonably familiar. The synagogue was in the schoolroom where 25 children had been murdered by Palestinian terrorists in 1974, and thus became a permanent memorial to them. The terrorists also killed members of a family in their home, and one of my tasks was to construct a memorial to the Cohen family, using rocks collected on the hillsides above the town. Ma'alot is close to the border with Lebanon, and there were constant reminders of this. Sirens would often go off, and we would go down to the shelters carrying our food. Sometimes military aircraft would go through the sound barrier straight overhead, making a bang that made me drop to the ground below my drawing board.
The congregation was very caring and supportive of me, and taught me so much. Eli invited me to his home to learn traditional Moroccan dirges for Tisha b'Av. We were invited to eat traditional Moroccan hamim, mizrachi cholent, at their home on Sabbath afternoons after the service. We were invited to eat in the sukkah with families in the autumn. At Yom Kippur we experienced the folk tradition of kapparah, when the previous evening a chicken was slaughtered for us which we took home and cooked for our pre-fast meal.
I did return to Kibbutz Adamit to visit old friends. We attended Elaine and Josh's wedding. We welcomed mark and Aviva's new child. And I walked back from Adamit to Ma'alot as a personal challenge, striking alone across the hills and valleys, with just a simple map that wasn't terribly helpful. It was foolhardy, but it was an amazing adventure, and of course I survived it. I set out striking to the south east from the kibbutz, crossing the sole main road somewhere near Goren and Elon, continuing through farmland and forest towards the wadi from the Crusader castle at Montfort that I knew would lead me towards Ma'alot. In the forest I found the ruins of an abandoned village. When I stopped to rest and sip some of my water I was startled by a tortoise that crossed my path.
When I finally reached the wadi I was high up, and there was a steep descent, so that I scrambled and tumbled down its side, my fall prevented by hanging on to shrubs. I reached the bottom bruised and scratched but with no breakages. The wadi provided me with plentiful fresh drinking water too. I marched on, and approached Ma'alot as it went quite dark, walking across moorland guided by the lights in the town.
We left Ma'alot eventually, and travelled to Egypt, which had its own adventures, whether the bullying taxi driver who tried to extort money from us after crossing the Suez Canal by taking us to the police station, the dead rat in the waste paper basket at the Hotel des Roses in Cairo, the pathetic street beggars, arriving at the Cairo Museum before the crowds invaded, the journey when we failed to find my step-grandmother's grandmother in a chaotic enormous medieval-style Cairo suburb with no street names, the nightmare of trying to buy train tickets till we were let in on the secret of going round to the back of the Cairo Station ticket office and paying a bribe, the twelve-hour journey to Luxor with a flooded toilet, the cycle ride to the Valley of the Kings, exploring tombs completely alone, the visit to Tutankhamen's tomb, the beggars picking over the rubbish heaps. I have no recollection of the journey back to Israel, England and St Albans.
We returned to Ma'alot the following summer as madrichim, group leaders for a party of young English (and one Scottish) Jews. That was a special time. It was also when we met Haya Sklar, an American settler whose only son had been killed on the first day of the invasion of Lebanon. We had known him and his sister, seeing him when he came home on leave, and we saw now how his mother had been completely devastated. She never recovered. It was that which led us to abandon our dream of settling in Israel. We had stored several belongings in Ma'alot, which we left behind.
We did not return to Israel until over twenty years later. We drove up to Kibbutz Adamit which had changed completely. None of the kibbutzniks we had known was still there. It felt very sad. We drove to Ma'alot, which had also changed beyond recognition. The town had grown enormously. Its population had changed. Our friends had gone. The wadi had been dammed and flooded to create a leisure facility. Even my fancy pavements had gone, except for a small section I discovered in a quiet corner of the town.

Photographs of our time in Israel