It was two o’clock in the morning when a group of women and children climbed on the truck to begin the renewal the Jewish presence in the City of the Patriarchs. Yehudit Katsover recounts. 43 Years to the historic night
With the approach of the day when we commemorate the liberation of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Golan, we conducted discussions with a number of key figures in the settlement enterprise, we aroused memories from the first days and were amazed at how much the vision of sovereignty occupied the pioneers of Judea and Samaria in those days, days of the first steps of the settlement enterprise.
Yehudit Katsover
Yehudit Katsover, one of the heads of The Sovereignty Movement, came to the settlement enterprise almost against her will, but very quickly connected to the ideology, the vision and the practical deeds. In a conversation with Sovereignty, she recalls the secret operation when, one spring night in the month of Nisan 1979, a group of women and children sneaked into Beit Hadassah, in the heart of Hevron and began what afterward became the renewed Jewish community in the city.
The government at that time refused to allow an entire neighborhood in Kiryat Arba to become populated. The efforts of the community leaders to cancel the freeze did not bear fruit and this impasse caused the leadership to think about a new and innovative way to break through the impasse.
“One morning in Nisan, Rav Levinger, obm, told me about a planned operation to enter Beit Hadassah. I asked what it was all about. He said that it would be at night; that I should prepare myself with some clothing, that I should wait for instructions and it was not clear how long the stay there would continue”.
Katsover answered Rav Levinger that she would give him an answer as soon as possible whether she would join or not, and went to consult with two people – with her mother and with her husband. “I consulted with my mother, a survivor of Auschwitz. I asked her opinion about going into the old city of Hevron, and to my delight, she said that it would be fantastic, an appropriate answer for the approaching Holocaust Remembrance Day. My mother was a calm, rational woman and not an automatic supporter of jumping and skipping on the hilltops, and therefore, her measured response and her defining the step as an answer to the Holocaust were most significant in my eyes”.
Katsover’s husband Zvi heard about the idea and announced that he also would be in the picture, and since the plan was to bring in women and children, he would volunteer to remain at home with the small children.
“I took with me two of the children who were older and at two in the morning we met at the usual gathering place, the open space near the supermarket in Kiryat Arba, where a truck was waiting with Staff Sergeants Zambish and Dompa. We, the women and children alighted on the truck. We had already experienced battles, entries and exits, but we depended on the leadership of Rav Levinger as a man of vision and practicality”.
Katsover continues, describing the events of that fateful night: “We arrive at the Hevron Casbah, the truck stops, we place a ladder from top of the truck into the yard of Beit Hadassah. We knew that above, there were soldiers on guard duty and we had to be very quiet. It was really a miracle that not even a peep was heard from a baby or small child. We entered the building without being detected, we began to clean the building, which had been quite neglected. It was a building that had served as a clinic, which the women of Hadassah had established to benefit both the Jewish and Arab residents, which fact did not help in the riots of 1929, when the Arab rioters murdered and abused and slaughtered a pharmacist and two members of his family, who lived next to the clinic. We groped in the dark. Until this time, we were only familiar with the top floor of the building. Everything was full of dust. For many years, neither Jew nor Arab had entered the place. I said to myself that it looked like man landing on the moon, every step raised a cloud of dust…”.
The women and children settle down in the building amazingly quietly; for the children, we found corners where they could sleep until the approaching morning and with the first light of day, the Jewish presence in the building was discovered by the astonished soldiers. “They asked how we got in; we told them. They were very friendly. A few hours passed and then the division commander, Fuad Ben Eliezer, obm, arrived. He listed the names of everyone who was in the building and announced that whoever was in the building could stay, but no one else could enter”.
The night that we entered the building was chosen to be the night between Wednesday and Thursday, “with the intention and hope to remain at the place at least until Shabbat and with the faith that if we passed a Shabbat there, we would have established a holding at the place. The idea to bring in women, specifically, came from the fact that the prime minister was Begin and his Beitar sense of honor would mean that one doesn’t touch women and children, and indeed, it worked”.
Very quickly, the women get organized for the approaching Shabbat. The rumor about our entry to Beit Hadassah took wing and arrived in Kiryat Arba, where families were organizing equipment, cleaning tools, food and water to be transferred to the women and children in the building through the windows, while the soldiers at the place were making sure not to allow anyone to come inside besides those who were already there.
In parallel with the work of preparing for Shabbat, the women opened a sort of school for the children to keep them occupied during the day. Another day passed and Shabbat began. There was a sense of gloom that crept in because of the distance and the separation from the family members that remained in Kiryat Arba, but this feeling dissipated very quickly when “on Sabbath eve, after evening prayers at the Cave, all of the people, residents from Kiryat Arba and students of the yeshiva, came on the way from the Cave of the Patriarchs to Beit Hadassah with glorious singing of ‘Assign Guards for your city’ and ‘A Woman of Valor’. It was extraordinarily touching and strengthened all of us. The soldiers at the entrance to the building kept the rules strictly and did not allow even one of the men to come inside to do Kiddush for the women in the building”.
The sounds of singing and dancing were heard again after the morning prayers, “it was a most meaningful booster shot for us”, says Katsover.
Shabbat passed and with the new week the people living in the building began to create for themselves a daily routine, while outside of the building, gatherings began to take place as part of the events of the month of Iyar, the month of independence and Jerusalem Liberation Day. In the gatherings that attracted supporters from throughout the entire country, assertive speeches were made, in which the government was demanded to approve the return to the City of the Patriarchs and the Jewish assets in the city.
“The siege on the building continued for a few months. During this period there were children that managed to exit and return between the security bars but on the whole, the guard was meticulous about the rule that whoever left could not return”.
Nevertheless, there were some cracks in the rigid application of the rule. With special permission, one of the husbands was permitted to enter on the Sabbaths in order to do Kiddush, teenagers who had to leave for matriculation exams received special permission to leave and then return to the building and when one of the women was about to give birth, she also received permission to leave and return, but not before the women of the building began to prepare for the birth in the building itself. “We asked that a ‘birthing package [havilat leida]’ be sent to us, but apparently someone did not hear well and sent us a ‘package of ice cream [havilat glida]’…”, Katsover recalls Katsover and she tells as well of the enormous rats that ran around in the building undisturbed, between and on top of the besieged residents. Signs of illnesses also began to appear in the place, which still had conditions that were far from minimally hygienic.
The populating of the building, and actually, the opening of Hevron to the Jewish residents became possible after the murder of six young men that were shot by a gang of Arab terrorists when they came to the building on one of the Sabbaths together with the rest of the worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs to bolster the besieged women and their children.
The vision of sovereignty, Katsover admits, was not then, in the first days of the settlement enterprise, the settlers’ top priority, although it was spoken of from time to time.
“Rav Levinger is the one who brought me to the vision, to the ideal and the idea that I fell in love with. He is the one that brought me out of the trauma of coming to the city where there were no sidewalks, no telephone and no medical services and there was mud all over the place. We came to Hevron from Dimona because Tzvi had promised that if a city was established here, he would come to live in it. When he made this promise to his brother, Beni, I did not take it seriously, but later I understood that he was actually very serious. I did not understand why we had to leave our important work in the area of education in Dimona and move to Hevron, but he said that many others would come to Dimona; the struggle at that time was for Hevron. There were arguments, but fortunately, I gave in…”, she says and describes the crisis that Rav Levinger brought her out of with his idealistic spirit.
“Rav Levinger spoke of sovereignty, but he said that sovereignty would come through building. This approach was absolutely correct at that time. Rav Levinger explained that it is impossible to carry out Israel advocacy over something theoretical. When you build you can also explain that a community is being built here and the Land of Israel is being built. Today we are in a situation in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem where there are already 750,000 Jews over the Green Line, and this is indeed the time to clarify things and to “close matters for good”, for ourselves as well as for the world. When we stutter there is no reason they will no attack us”.
“This is the reason that together with Nadia Matar, we set out to advocate for the idea of sovereignty. We have succeeded in having the Israeli public become aware of it, but it has still not arrived to the practical-political aspect. For this reason we need practical and spiritual support from everyone in Israel”.