A Tale of Love and Darkness

MY MOTHER ended her life at her sister's apartment in Ben Yehuda Street, Tel Aviv, in the night between Saturday and Sunday, January 6, 1952. There was a hysterical debate going on in the country at the time about whether Israel should demand and accept reparations from Germany on account of property of Jews murdered during the Hitler period. Some people agreed with David Ben-Gurion that the murderers must not be allowed to inherit the looted Jewish property, and that the monetary value should definitely be repaid in full to Israel to help with the absorption of the survivors. Others, headed by the opposition leader Menachem Begin, declared with pain and anger that it was immoral and a desecration of the memory of those who had been killed that the victims' own state should sell easy absolution to the Germans in exchange for tainted lucre.

It rained heavily almost without a break all over Israel through that winter of 1951-52. The River Ayyalon, Wadi Musrara, burst its banks and flooded the Montefiore district of Tel Aviv and threatened to flood other districts as well. Heavy flooding did extensive damage to the transit camps with their tents and their corrugated iron or canvas huts, which were crowded with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled from Arab lands leaving everything behind them and refugees from Hitler from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Some transit camps were cut off by the floods, and there was a risk of starvation and epidemic. The state of Israel was less than four years old, and a little over a million citizens lived in it; almost a third of them were penniless refugees.