Jews this week will be marking the 80th anniversary of the Hebron massacre that began on August 23, 1929. It is one of the most horrible pogroms in all of history. With a new American administration seeking to portray Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria as obstacles to peace, one wonders what would happen—what would be the reaction—were such an attack to be perpetrated against the Jews of Hebron today.The slaughter that took place in 1929 was part of a series of attacks on Jews. On August 17 in Jerusalem, in what was later seen as a portent, a Jewish boy had been stabbed to death. The killings in Hebron were particularly barbaric, with Arabs wielding hatchets against yeshiva students and women and babies. Before the affrays—to use the word the New York Sun used in its editorial of the time—had passed, scores had been slaughtered.
The story is retold in gruesome detail in a just-published book, Hebron Jews, by a professor of history at Wellesley, Jerold Auerbach. I have known Auerbach for years, as our mothers were cousins, and have admired his work on both labor and Jewish subjects. He uses the skills of a long-tenured professor to remind us not only of the importance of the Hebron story, from Abraham’s original contract on a burial site for Sarah to the return of the Hebron Jews of our generation, but also of its ironies.
Back in 1929 the Jews who called themselves “settlers” were the relatively secular Zionists who lived on the Mediterranean coast and in northern Eretz Israel. The Jews of Hebron had dwelled there intermittently for thousands of years and continuously since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. In the 1920s there was an influx of young scholars from a Lithuanian yeshiva, Knessett Israel. Their arrival coincided with rising tensions throughout Palestine. By August, trouble was sensed by the one British police officer in the town, Raymond Cafferata. He was told by both Arabs and Jews in Hebron that "any trouble" was "out of the question."
Yet that same week a Jewish teacher named Haim Bagayo was warned, "This time we are going to butcher you all." Earlier that day, there had been clashes in Jerusalem, in which three Arabs and three Jews died. The Jews of Hebron, Auerbach writes, "refused to believe that their Arab neighbors, with whom they had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence for four centuries, meant them harm." Cafferata noted that in Hebron "everything appeared normal." But before the day was out, Arabs began to attack Jews with clubs, and Jewish shops were quickly shuttered.
The first to die was a student, Shmuel Rosenhaltz, who was set upon as he studied, alone, in the main yeshiva. The Jews were warned to stay inside their homes. Early the next morning, Arabs, screaming "Allah akbar" and "Itbach al Yahud," or "kill the Jews," began surging through the streets. Two Jewish youths were stoned to death outside the house of the Heichel family. Some 70 Jews sought refuge inside a relatively large house, owned by Eliezer Dan Slonim. Almost the whole family of Slonim—his wife, Hannah, and their son, his father-in-law, who was the chief rabbi of Zichron Yaakov, and his wife—were among 22 persons who were clubbed or stabbed to death and, in some cases, disemboweled. The Slonim’s one-year son survived, having been hidden under dying Jews.
Rabbi Hanoch Hasson was murdered, along with his family. A pharmacist, Ben-Zion Gershon, who’d served both Arabs and Jews, "had his eyes gouged out before he was stabbed to death," Auerbach relates. His wife’s hands were cut off before she and their daughter were killed. Mr. Goldshmidt was tortured, his head held over a kerosene flame, before he, his wife, and one of their daughters were killed. Twenty-three corpses were discovered in the Anglo Palestine Bank, where women were raped on a floor covered with thick pools of congealing blood. Rabbis Meir Kastel and Tzvi Dabkin and five of their students were tortured and castrated before being murdered. The killings went on for two hours, and the final death toll reached 67.
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Source: article ("What Happened in Hebron?) par Seth Lipsky paru dans The Tablet
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