In my last
article, “The Making of a Chocolate Monster” (Purim issue), I briefly described
my friend, 89-year-old Zechariah Nahari, and I was asked if I was willing to
write a series of articles about interesting Chevron characters, beginning with
Zechariah. Tentatively I agreed, and whatever else happens, here is my article
about Zechariah.
* * *
Zechariah Nahari was born and raised in
Northern Yemen, the cultural equivalent of having emerged from the 13th
century. He arrived in Israel in 1949 at age 16, served in the Israeli army in
1951, fought in three wars, married in 1957, fathered five girls and three
boys, and moved to Kiryat Arba in 1971, its first year, where he was an early
member of the Kiryat Arba town council. He worked in construction and then as a
building contractor for over 50 years, participating in building many towns in
Israel, including Kfar Etzion, Alon Shvut, Kibbutz Kalia (near the Dead Sea),
parts of Kiryat Arba, and some of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods. He even taught the
practical, down-to-earth secrets of his trade to engineers from Israel’s MIT,
the Haifa Technion. Initially, these elite students would always raise their
eyebrows since Zechariah was not even a high school graduate, until they saw
the quality and content of his teaching, and how much real knowledge he
possessed about how to keep a building from collapsing.
As an Arabic speaker with many friends and
contacts in Arab Chevron, there was briefly a plan for him to become the joint
mayor of Kiryat Arba and Arabic Chevron, 20 years before the “peace” of Oslo
would have made that impossible. Last but not least, he has been learning Daf Yomi
and davening vatikin in Chevron for
at least 20 years. And all this he accomplished with a formal education that
ended when he was fourteen.
Zechariah claims
to have an internal clock in his head, going back to his non-technological
childhood, that wakes him up at 4:00 a.m., whatever happened before. If he
comes home from a wedding at 2:00 a.m., he will go to bed and wake up at 4:00
without an alarm clock. As a Yemenite Jew, he has an enormous family in Israel,
knows them all and is constantly attending their weddings, so this happens a
lot. Having traveled down to Chevron each morning with Zechariah for years,
when I see him get into our driver’s car I know that the sun will rise. If he
does not show, I have my doubts.
Zechariah was
raised in a village in the mountainous forests of Northern Yemen. When he
looked out the window of his home at night, he could see lions and leopards and
large foxes and wolves – all sorts of creatures – roaming through the village.
One night as a boy, to prove his manhood, he left his home and slept in a cave
outside his village. He plugged up the entrance of the cave with rocks to keep
the nocturnal creatures from attacking him. All night he could hear their
roars. The next morning he returned home. Here is Zechariah’s story from those
days:
One
time the son of the village sheikh was attacked by a lion, so the animal was
shot to death. We were children, 7 or 8 years old. They came to us and told us
to remove the lion’s skin. Now, the lion’s skin would be cured, and then people
would sleep on it and it would them of knee pain. We finished removing the
skin, working slowly but surely to remove it properly. Then a group of Arabs
arrived. They approached us and said, “Please cut off the lion’s meat.” We
asked why, but they just repeated their request, so we agreed. They went and
brought a gigantic copper pot. They brought firewood and water, and they cooked
the meat, while we stood and watched. They finished cooking it and removed the
meat. They cooled the water and used the water to bathe their camels. Now
children are curious, so we asked why they did that, and they answered that it
was so that the camels would be strong.
In Kiryat Arba,
Zechariah, still intimately attached to nature, one time spent an entire night
watching the full moon rise and fall. When we were learning Rosh Hashanah,
Zechariah helped me to understand what the gemara said about the moon’s
movements.
The rudimentary
education Zechariah received was Jewishly thorough. In cheder, he memorized the entire Torah with its trup. Thus,
whenever Zechariah, who is a Levi, receives an aliyah to the Torah in Hebron, he recites the Torah reading
himself, according to the Yemenite and Sefardic custom. He never errs.
(Ashkenazim let the reader handle this even if they know the reading.)
When we learned Meseches Chulin in Daf Yomi, Zechariah
seemed to know the halachot of shechitah, and the anatomy of
kosher animals, like a shochet. I
asked him if he was a shochet, and he denied that. But he added that as
a standard part of his Jewish education as a child, he had been taught to
recognize what lesions in a lung rendered an animal non-kosher, and he was
taught as well to recognize the difference between an animal that had swallowed
metal but remained kosher, and one that had become treif.
His father earned
a living as a tax collector for the Yemenite authorities and as a producer of
rope, carpets, furs and fur coats and other items made from sheep. In the
ancient bartering system that prevailed in Yemen, payment for these services
came from the local Arabs in the form of all the oil, eggs, wheat, spices, and
coffee that Zechariah’s family could use in a year. Zechariah learned all of
his father’s skills and worked alongside him.
In the summer of
1949, when he was 16, his family, consisting of his parents and five children,
himself being the oldest, walked barefoot for a week through the desert and
then were driven to Aden, where they flew to Israel as part of Operation Magic
Carpet. Fifty thousand Jews were flown to Israel on rented British cargo planes
that made 380 flights. Everyone sat on the floor as the planes had no seats.
When they arrived in Israel, Zechariah and his family were settled in a ma’abarah,
or transit camp, in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem. For over two years,
until Zechariah’s induction, the family lived with two other families in a
large single room, separated only by curtains.
Having worked
since age14, Zechariah continued to work in Israel. Like many immigrants, he
began in forestation, preparing the ground for new towns to be built in Israel.
Then he moved to construction work, conquering one skill after another. After a
year, he began taking a series of Jewish agency courses to formalize his
professional knowledge.
In 1951, at age
18, Zechariah was drafted into the Givati Infantry Brigade for two years.
Zechariah did not have an easy time with the army, although he was enormously
proud to be there. It wasn’t that easy for him to take orders. It’s not in his
personality. Also, as the oldest son in his family and a breadwinner, he felt
financial pressure. Leaving his family to enlist was hard for him. As far as he
was concerned, he already had a profession.
During basic
training he was arbitrarily denied a leave for Rosh Hashanah. He took this
hard, and his stubborn streak won out. For months, out of spite, he then
refused to take leaves, arguing that the army had drafted him for two years.
Two years was two years, and he didn’t need any favors. Finally, the lieutenant
colonel who headed the battalion ordered him to go home for a month or face a
month in jail. He went home, then he took a construction job working two
shifts, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. the entire month, making what was for
Zechariah an enormous sum of money. There was a great shortage of Jewish
constructions professionals.
Zechariah
ultimately loved the army. Whether he was serving in a combat position,
teaching skills to officers, or using his artistic and special skills to
prepare a room-sized relief of the Sinai desert out of clay, he felt needed and
part of something great. When his sixth child was born, his first son, the bureaucrats
in his unit wanted him to stop doing reserve duty as the law required. Yet
Zechariah fought fiercely to remain in the unit, and succeeded.
Zechariah is full
of homespun wisdom and natural intelligence. His children all studied in
university and achieved high positions in science and academics, but they know
that he is their equal. One time, a daughter of his, a professor, was going to
America for a year with her husband. Just before flying, she sold her car to
one of her sisters. One week after the flight, the car’s motor died.
Unfortunately, a quarrel developed between the two sisters, and they stopped
talking. The children did not want Zechariah to hear about this, but he heard
all the same, and of course he was greatly troubled.
When the sister in
America came back for her first visit to Israel, Zechariah invited all of his
children to a get-together at which he served them a banquet. In the middle of
the table was a mysterious box with a closed lid. Just before dessert, he
caught their attention and opened the lid. There were thousands of shekalim in the box, in cash. He
addressed his children: “If someone feels that they have been misused and lost
money, by all means please take the money you need from this box. But don’t
stop talking to one another over money! That’s ridiculous!” His effort
succeeded.
As a soldier, he
spent three months in Chevron a year after the Six Day War, and came into close
contact with the 100 families living here with Rabbi Moshe Levinger. This
contact fostered his love for Chevron, and when Kiryat Arba was founded in
1971, he and his family moved there. Zechariah developed close contacts not
only with the Jews he met but with the Arabs of Chevron. During the 1970s many
Jews became friendly with Chevron’s Arabs, and many Kiryat Arba children
learned Arabic. Of course, for Zechariah, Chevron was what it would be for us
to discover a place in Israel where thousands of non-Jews spoke Baltimorean
English. It actually made the army nervous that Zechariah wandered all around
the Arab villages in the area, or that he became a close friend of Sheikh
Jabari, Chevron’s Arabic mayor during the 1970s.
Today, Zechariah
is a widower. He spends much of his day in Chevron studying Torah. Also, he is
known far and wide by both area soldiers and by the daveners and learners as
the person who single-handedly keeps Me’arat HaMachpela supplied with coffee
and cake. Sometimes he does this via donations, but often he pays for it out of
his own pocket. There are some people who are give-give-give and no take.
Zechariah is definitely in that class.
