As one who has, baruch Hashem, lived through all of Israel’s wars, let me tell you about what was probably my first most vivid memory.
I was seven years old and remember being at the celebration of the birth of the State of Israel on a sunny Sunday, May 16, 1948. The date was actually two days after the British rule of Palestine ended on May 14, 1948. Our young yeshiva class was bused to the athletic field of a Detroit public school and we became part of an estimated crowd of 22,000 Jewish Detroiters.
A skywriting aircraft spelled out “Israel” and outlined the Star of David in white against the beautiful blue sky. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blue and white flags with the Star of David in the center fluttered gently.
The shofar was blown stirring the emotions and creating a silence. Tears of emotion, pride, and joy fell upon the cheeks of many in the hushed crowd as Emma Lazaroff Schaver, Detroit’s famous operatic soprano, sang Hatikvah, the Jewish national anthem. I witnessed many older people wiping their eyes and many younger people dancing wildly.
About a half-century later, when I was more interested in the happenings of the day, I went to the main library in downtown Detroit to research the Sunday morning paper and the Monday morning (day after the celebration) paper.
Wallace R. Duell, the talented Detroit News Foreign Service writer, wrote a front-page story of what was a sobering reminder of what was ahead.
After almost 2,000 years of aspiration and striving, the new state was being prematurely born. It was not ready for life. Its contours were not yet complete as they had been hoped for and designed. Its organs were not yet fully functioning. Yet it must spring to arms in the very moment of its birth, for millions of surrounding Arabs were implacable, and would destroy it if they could.
The new Israel was a cartographer’s – and a defending general staff’s – nightmare. It was three almost entirely separate territories, rather than one, each touching only one of the others and only at one small point: a narrow coastal strip; a wedge inland in the north at the Sea of Galilee; and a rough, triangular shard of a piece of desert in the south pointing to Akaba.
Immediately at hand were the more than 30 million Arabs of seven adjacent states.
There were demographic disabilities within, as well as without, the new state. The Jews were less than three-fifths of the population; the Arabs, more than two-fifths. The figures were: Jews, 538,000; Arabs 397,000. This was high co-efficient indeed of antipathy and disaffection.
The following day in another of Detroit’s three dailies, The Free Press, staff writer Sam Petok opened his article on the previous day’s celebration with the follows:
A mournful bray of resolution from Detroit’s Jewry was sounded Sunday afternoon and hurled across the seas to the bloodstained soil of a newborn state.
The shofar, the ram’s horn blown only at sacred holidays, sent its sonorous notes floating into the cloud-flecked skies.
In a hushed moment, 2,000 years of wanderings through the world, of being pilloried, of turning the cheek and of national ignominy flashed through the minds of the throng.
The Jewish state, had been proclaimed.
I’ll never forget that sunny May Sunday in 1948.
