The people we
associate with are there are 50 and up.There are also large nursery groups and
teen dance programs for after school hours.
After two years
of attending a wonderful program there, speaking in several languages to
communicate (this is by choice since everybody gets along most comfortably in
Hebrew), I was talking for the first time with a woman I had been seeing on a
"hello" basis a few times a week.
She was sharing
some deep life experiences with me of her young adulthood and arrival in
Israel.As just about the whole adult membership ( my husband and I are an
exception!)has done at one time or another in the coffee room before class.
She mentioned
that she left Morocco with her young husband not knowing she was pregnant, and
lost the baby on the ship.She was deep into sadness while recalling this event
in her life as well as the mistreatment she had experienced in Morocco as a
Jewish person.As we talked further, I asked how she was able to get out of
Morocco given that I had worked as a spy in the early sixties to get the Jews
out of the three North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) under
French rule at the time.
She said the
magic word "HIAS"(which stood and still stands for Hebrew
International Agency--the"S"???)
I repeated her
words as my body become numb. "That was my agency.I worked for them.I was
hired in Paris where I had been living, and , ironically, learning Hebrew on my
own at home getting ready to spend a long term stay in Israel. I figured that
I had never been attached to my Judaism, only attached to my love of all that
is and was French speaking until that point in my life.
Why not
excavate a little, and go back to the source.This was 1962,fourteen years since
the Israeli independence had been established.My live-in boyfriend at
that time met a few Israelis in the Post Office, and talked to them casually,
in French of course.He felt proud, evidently,that his smart American girlfriend
was studying Hebrew at home. They were
looking for a spy to submit secret papers about debarking ships full of Jews
without passports, or at least false ones.They gave him an address of an
apartment where I was to meet them for the plans.
I arrived alone, in the apartment the two of them were occupying,
with my American passport and my temporary French carte d'identite
permitting me passage in and out of France as a foreigner.The interview was
conducted entirely and comfortably in French. I was hired! I
had to stay for 5-7 days in each location so as to appear as an American
tourist.I had to pretend NOT to speak French!This was a woeful
situation.Foreign travel, though completely free, and a beach stay, and
whatever sightseeing I chose for myself.A Bassia dream!
During the
course of conversation with this woman, 55 years later(!), tears welled up in
both of our eyes.My husband was present. "You were
probably part of the team who helped her leave Morocco", he said.
"H.I.A.S.", I said. We all
smiled. Finally, I got to see and meet someone whose name I may have carried on
a list that was all secret coded for secret departure to Israel one night after
my arrival. A true wheel of fortune!I enjoyed my stay, not knowing the
importance of my secret mission!
What a
trip----in both meanings of that phrase.
Ah, sweet
mystery of life!
To
think that I meet and talk with so many at this place (name of it
:COULIER) several times a week, and have done so for coming on two years
next month, and I never tied the two parts of my life together.I
continued to be amazed at the number of older people who had spent the
better part of their lives right here in Eilat, and raised their
families here.So many speak French-not perfectly any more, but with
fluency and Ease in understanding.
There
are those form Turkey as well as the North African countries.They speak
Ladino, a cross breed of Spanish. There is a part of me that feel very
much at home with these people!
Miss Rheingold----
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