Israel Memories - by Jerold Auerbach

...With hesitation, I entered. Seated behind a table at one end, surrounded by shelves filled with cartons, was a husky middle-age man dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, wearing a kippa. He pointed to a nearby chair, where I dutifully sat and waited. At his initiative we began a conversation that lasted for thirty years.

Jerold Auerbach..
Algemeiner..
22 April '20..

Warmly greeting my family at Ben Gurion airport in September 1974 was Haggai, a Tel Aviv University history professor who would become my mentor and dear friend during my year as Fulbright professor. He had come to help my family navigate our entry as strangers in a strange land. I had visited Israel for the first time one year earlier with a group of “disaffected Jewish academics,” chosen by the American Jewish Committee in an effort to counter the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment that had begun to spill across college and university campuses. I knew that I was amply qualified. So did the Committee.

The few days that I spent in Jerusalem during that two-week journey convinced me that I must return. The Fulbright professorship became my ticket. Haggai, understandably assuming that we would want to live near the university, went out of his way to guide us through the airport maze to our new home. When I told him that we had already rented an apartment in Jerusalem he was clearly disappointed.

Haggai faithfully attended my weekly seminar (ironically entitled “The American Promised Land”), followed by lunch together. There I became the student, learning about Israel from a superb teacher. A Haganah soldier during the Independence War when he had just turned 18, Haggai chose Kibbutz Revivim, close to the border with Egypt, as his postwar home. A decade later he came to Columbia University for his PhD in American history. With degree in hand he had returned to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University. Our year together, first as colleagues then as friends, taught me about Israel.

I had other teachers that year. One of my students, Rafi Amir, had been the Kol Israel radio newscaster during the Six-Day War. Arriving at the Western Wall with the first wave of IDF soldiers, he broadcast with palpable excitement the return of Jews to their ancient holy site for the first time since Jordan had destroyed the Jewish Quarter during the Independence War. Rafi became my Jerusalem guide and teacher, taking me to hidden corners in the Old City that I never would have found by myself.

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Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896-2016, chosen for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a best book of 2019.