This morning we stood at the grave of Ephraim Chizik and said Kaddish. He fell in the riots of 1929, this week 91 years ago. The 1929 riots are usually remembered mainly for the massacre in Hebron, but it is less remembered that the riots also cut down many other Hebrew communities that were hundreds of years old: Gaza, Ramle, Shechem (Nablus), Jenin and Acre. All of them were destroyed in 1929 and never rose again. One can only imagine what the map of Hebrew settlement would have looked like had these ancient communities not been cut down.
Alongside them, newer colonies were destroyed as well, such as Hartuv, Kfar Uriah, Ein Zeitim, Migdal Eder and Hulda.
At the Hulda farm, which we visited this morning with graduates of the Hatzeva mechina and the Arava Midrasha, a fierce battle took place. Sixteen young men, two women and two children against hundreds of rioters from the surrounding villages. Ephraim Chizik was sent by the Haganah organization to help. The battle began on the 22nd of Av, August 28.
Nine years earlier, Ephraim’s sister, Sarah Chizik, fell in the battle of Tel Hai, minutes before Trumpeldor fell. After his sister’s death, Ephraim wrote to his brother:
“Do not forget that we are now in the 20th century; a century in which only with the blood of our brothers and sisters will we acquire the land. With a true and steadfast heart our sister Sarah sacrificed herself. We shall do the same when the hour demands it.”
When the battle in Hulda began toward evening, Ephraim moved the residents into the stone house at the center of the colony, going back and forth until he had made sure everyone was sheltered inside. The last time he checked that everyone had gotten in, he was struck by a bullet and killed. When the British evacuated Hulda’s residents in the dark of night, his body was left in the field and was buried only several days later. Hulda fell, and rose again as a kibbutz about two years later, west of the farm’s original site.
A few years later, a stone monument was placed on his grave — one of the first monuments erected in the Land — showing Ephraim shielding his sister Sarah.
Another figure deeply shaped by the riots was the third Chief of Staff, Mordechai Maklef. He was born in the Hebrew settlement of Motza, but when he was only nine years old, his father, mother and sisters were murdered before his eyes. He managed to jump from a second-floor window and survived. This is how he described the events in a recently discovered composition he wrote in the eighth grade:
“A cruel hand struck my father, of blessed memory, who was devoted to me and to the homeland… My mother was stabbed many times until she died in great torment. My two sisters and my brother were also killed, and I was left alone, orphaned of father and mother.”
The event shaped his character, and he resolved that Jews must never be slaughtered in their own land without a fight.
And the events changed not only him, but the entire Yishuv.
Hillel Cohen, in his book “Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929”, writes that the overwhelming majority of the Jews were murdered in their homes, unarmed, by Arab attackers. By contrast, most of the Arab dead, who numbered 116, were killed while attacking Jewish communities, by British or Haganah fire.
The words “in their death they bequeathed us life” were never truer than of those killed in 1929.
This understanding of the importance of strength and arms was profoundly significant in shaping the Hebrew force that would go on to establish the state.
