Page 26 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - January 19

GILLY’S STORY
GILLY KENAN
I they could, tried not to flinch when the blow
was born on Mt Carmel in 1937. When
WW2 broke out, the British subjects were
evacuated to S. Africa for fear that General
Rommel may invade Palestine. We stayed in
S. Africa for 4 years. In 1944, just before the war
was over, we returned to British Mandate
Palestine where I remember my mother giving
our charming Arab maid her winter coat, just
before she escaped to cold Lebanon in 1947.
When the Declaration of the State was declared,
I was 10 years old. At that time, we were living
on Mt. Carmel, Haifa. One of my most vivid
memories is of running on the Carmel streets,
among the dancing crowds, holding, for the first
time in my life, the hand of one of the boys of
my class! The next day the school was
transformed into a military camp, so we were
sent by buses downtown. Our class of 30 was
squeezed into a parallel class and for the rest of
the year we hardly learnt anything.
The school I went to was the prestigious school,
the Reali School on Mt. Carmel, Haifa. I was
th
then 10 years old, in between the 4th and 5
grade. Every morning, during those days, when I
arrived early at school, I noticed a group of sun
burnt, strong, energetic young boys from the
senior high - school practicing something called
"Kapap" (Krav Panim el Panim – face to face
fighting). It was some kind of military training
before going to the Hagana (the not yet Israeli
army.)
As I was walking down into the yard, I saw a
large man running round in the middle of a circle
of boys, who were holding sticks or clubs at
their arms' length, above their heads. The man
moved from one boy to another, hitting each
boy's club as hard as he could, using all the
might he had. Those boys, who were standing
round in a circle holding their clubs as firmly as
26
came down upon their club. The boys were
pants. All of this activity was most secretive. We
standing shirtless & wore short rolled-up khaki
were told to hurry up and go into our classes
without saying a word, not knowing that those
handsome boys were going to give up their lives
for the sake of creating our Jewish State.
When the fighting broke out that year, we did
not learn (as I had explained previously).
Children from the Northern-border-Kibbutzim
were evacuated to Haifa. My mother told me to
go to where my cousins, who were from Kibbutz
Hanita, were residing due to their evacuation. I
was told to read them a story in Hebrew. I
remember how anxious I was to read nicely to
them. I rehearsed all the way there to sound as
confident and fluent as I could. However, after
two minutes of reading, these seven-year-old
Kibbutz children had heard enough of my
reading and went off on their way leaving me
with the unread story. That unread story was my
little "War Contribution" before the Declaration
of the State of Israel, in that crucial year of 1948.
In 1952, Coronation Year, my father (who was
the son of the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Dr.
Joseph H. Hertz) decided to leave Israel and
return to England.
For three years, I went to a boarding school in
the South of England. When I was 17, I came to
live in London with my family. I was lonely so I
found Habonim, which was the most wonderful
thing for me in London. A year later, in 1956, I
returned to Israel to serve in the Israeli army as a
תדדוב תלייח. On the first day of my joining the
army, the Sinai War broke out on October 31
1956…
And as the saying goes, "she has lived there
happily ever after…"