There is an old Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times.” This is not necessarily a blessing, because interesting can be positive or negative. But no matter, our life experiences can teach lessons, and we can all learn to appreciate what another has experienced and thereby gain wisdom.
Menashe Shabtai is
a well known and popular figure in our Baltimore community. Since I often daven
at Beth Abraham-Herzberg’s, where he is the all-around “go-to guy,” the gabbai, chef, whatever-is-needed person,
I decided to ask him about growing up in Israel. With the approach of the 56th
anniversary of the Six Day War, I was especially interested in his memories of
that seminal event.
Menashe’s parents
left Kurdistan in 1950 and traveled to Baghdad to board an airplane to take
them and thousands of other Jews to Israel. This was called Operation Ezra and
Nehemia. By 1967, the year of the Six
Day War, Menashe was one of eight children; three more were born later. His
father was a butcher.
Menashe was seven
years old in 1967. He had just
transferred to a new school as the family moved from Katamon to Mekor Baruch, a
neighborhood between the tachanah mercazit,
the central bus station, and the shuk, the open-air market. His cousin,
who was an officer in the Israeli army, got him accepted into Maimon, a good
school in Kiryat Moshe.
We may recall, or
have read, that the buildup to the Six Day War was a time of great anxiety. After
Pesach, there were already drills in school: what to do if a war broke out.
There were no shelters in the school, and the 400 children were told to all
stand on the steps inside the building. Menashe’s father, like so many others
his age, was in the Hagana Ezrachit,
the Home Guard. These men went from house to house advising families which room
was the “safest” and arranging for sand bags to be filled. Menashe’s family
lived in a formerly Arab house with a wide area by the window. They thus put
sand bags inside the room covering the windows.
Here, in his own
words, in Menashe’s story:
A Child in War
“In
those days, before the Six Day War, Yerushalayim was a divided city. The area
we call the Old City was occupied by Jordan, and Jews were not able to visit
the Kotel. One early memory I have was of visiting an uncle who had a
small farm and house very near the ‘border.’ On one side were the Israelis.
Then came an area know as ‘no-man’s land’ with barbed wire, and then watch
towers with Jordanian soldiers who could, and sometimes did, actually fire on
Israelis who got too close.
“Since
I was only five years old, I and some playmates did venture close to the
demarcation line, not realizing how dangerous it was. We would talk to the
Jordanian soldiers, and they would talk to us – just greetings back and forth.
“One day, when I
was seven, I was on a bus on the way to school, when I heard a siren. I stood
up because, when the siren sounds on Holocaust Memorial Day or Yom
Hazikaron-Memorial Day, everyone stands in place in silence. But the driver
told me that this time the siren meant that the war had started. We were at the
last stop, the Tachanah Mercazit. I
had to decide in which direction to run. I ran to school.
“No one had
telephones back then. My father had never been to the new school, which I had
entered only a month before. He did not know the location, but after about six
hours, my sister led him to the school, and he took me home. At this point,
there was not yet any shooting in Yerushalayim.
“My two older
brothers still attended the school in Katamon. They were in the sixth and
eighth grades. They went into a bomb shelter there, but we had no way of
knowing that at the time. My mother was beside herself with worry. She
collapsed, and the neighbors came over to calm her down. Until the end of the
war, she did not know their whereabouts, and when they both came home six days
later, she collapsed again.
“Meanwhile, we all
crowded into one room, put mattresses on the floor and listened constantly to
the radio. In the first days, the radio did not tell us what was really
happening. They did not want the Arabs to find out that the Egyptian air force
had been destroyed. What I remember is ‘kravot
lashim, aveidot kveidot,” difficult battles, painful losses.’
“Outside
our home, we could see tanks and soldiers passing Rechov Sarei Yisrael on the
way to Givat Hatachmoshet, Ammunition
Hill. We heard the sounds of bombs and artillery. Remember that we were not that
far from the action. For example, Ammunition Hill is near today’s Ramot
Eshkol. This was a Jordanian army base, it became the site of a very
deadly battle, where many soldiers lost their lives.
“For six days we
stayed in one room. The boys slept on one side of the room and the girls on the
other side. My mother had recently given birth, and our sister was two months
old. The Home Guard had told us not to use the gas stove in case a bullet hit
it and exploded the house. Instead my mother cooked on a small kerosene burner.”
“Har Habayit b’Yadeinu”
“Israel
did not plan to fight Jordan. A war on two fronts was more than enough. But the
Jordanian army had been put under command of an Egyptian general, and he
ordered shooting from the Jordanian side. Israel had to respond. The conquering
of the Old City and the Kotel was not even an original goal of the fighting, so
we were overwhelmed by the victory.
“I cannot describe
how I felt when we heard these words on the radio: ‘Har Habayit b’Yadeinu.’ The site of the Beit Hamikdash was in our hands! Then we heard how our army, with
the help of Hashem, had beaten the armies of Egypt and Syria and had reached
the Jordan River and taken the entire West Bank.
“One
of our neighbors was a builder and owned tractors. He and the other men who had
tractors went and demolished the slum abutting the Kotel. The slums came up to the Wall, with only a very narrow area near the Wall.
Fewer than 100 people could have gotten near the Wall. The bulldozers were thus
needed to demolish the neighborhood that had sprung up. They did this
quickly, before the United Nations could prevent it. At this point, there was
just a flattened area, full of rocks and dust; nothing was paved yet.
“It was shortly
before Shavuot, and we knew that this would be the first time everyone could go
to the Kotel Hamaaravi, the Western
Wall. Our house was full, beyond full. Our relatives came from Teveria, Tzfat,
Kiryat Gat, and several moshavot to
be there for Shavuot. I remember thousands of people walking, as we were, down
to the Old City. The police made most of the people go around to another
entrance, but my cousin, who was a major in the IDF, took me with him through
Shaar Yaffo, through the Arab shuk to
the Kotel. I was a child of seven, and I really can’t describe my feelings at
that moment. After that, I used to go to the Kotel frequently, any time of the
day, whenever I could.”
High School and Beyond
“For high school,
I lived in a dormitory at Yemin Orde, near Nir Etzion. Nir Etzion was
established by the survivors of Gush Etzion and is located near Haifa. After two
years, I transferred to Neve Amiel, also near Haifa, and studied there to
become a chef.
“My career as a
chef began as soon as I graduated from Neve Amiel. I was hired by the King
David Hotel, which enabled me to move back home to Yerushalayim. How did I get
that job? Simple: I went to the Lishkat
Avodah (employment agency) and showed them my teudah from chef school, and they told me to go to the King David,
which was looking for a young man like me. I worked there from September, 1976
until May, 1977. Then I got a draft notice.
“I joined the IDF
and chose to serve in the navy. I was assigned to a rocket-launching ship as a
combination mashgiach and cook. Later,
I was at a base near Sharm el Sheikh. After the peace treaty caused us to give
that area back to Egypt, I finished my service at a navy base in Gush Katif.
“Upon release from
the IDF, I returned to my job at the King David. I was there for 12 years,
including my navy service. I met my wife at the King David. She was a new immigrant
from the Pittsburgh area, and she also had a job at the hotel. I saw her one
day and decided that she was the one I wanted to marry – and she agreed.
“After several
years, we decided, like many Israelis, to go to America for a few years and
save up some money, so we could return and buy a dira (apartment). At first, we went to Pittsburgh for two years,
and I had a number of offers to work in hotels. But I wanted to work in a
Jewish environment and only in a kosher kitchen. I had a cousin in Baltimore,
and we went to visit him. I was hired by Fred Weiss Catering in 1990 and have
lived in Baltimore ever since.”
* * *
At the conclusion
of our conversation, I asked Menashe to tell me what was special about
Baltimore. His words convey a lot of meaning: “Baltimore has tremendous love
and care about others.”
