More than a half-century ago, Ben Hagai Steuerman was a 24-year-old American veteran studying at Tel Aviv University, a first-time visitor to the ancient land of Israel, courtesy of the GI Bill and a wartime quirk of fate.
Steuerman had been a Navy frogman during World War II, blowing up Japanese beach defenses in the Pacific so Marine landing craft could get ashore. The destroyer he had been deployed on had no chaplain, so crew members asked if he would lead weekly services. He said that, as a Jew, he would read only the first half of the Bible. His shipmates agreed to say prayers from the Old Testament.
Steuerman got a kick out of the experience and thought of becoming a rabbi. Someone suggested he test his newfound taste for religion in the land of the Bible. There he first encountered the Haganah, the Jewish underground, in 1946.
“I said: `I’m just here to study,’ ” said Steuerman, 76, who now lives in southern Wisconsin. “I wasn’t a Zionist, just a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.”
The time has come, the Haganah representatives replied, for good Jewish boys to come to the aid of the Jewish homeland they were struggling to establish. So Steuerman agreed to give clandestine lessons in underwater demolition techniques to the first frogmen of what shortly became the Israeli navy.
By so doing, Steuerman was one of the first foreigners to sign up to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. Dubbed the Machal, a Hebrew acronym for “volunteers from abroad,” they numbered about 3,500, most of them Americans and Canadians, but including smaller contingents from places like South Africa. Not all of them were Jewish.
Jason Fenton, a historian at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif., and himself an Machalnik, has written a history of the group. He says some were veterans of World War II, restless and having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. Others had troubled marriages.
But some people, he adds, just couldn’t resist a good cause, especially one pitting David against Goliath. Many of his comrades were impelled to risk life and limb at the sight of little Israel taking on, first, the British Empire, then the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.
Steuerman’s underground activities got him arrested 13 times. Finally, the British authorities decided to send him a message he couldn’t miss. Plainclothes police officers beat him to a pulp on the streets of Tel Aviv. “They told me I had 24 hours to get out of the country,” Steuerman said, “or they’d kill me.”
He headed straight for the waterfront and signed up as a crew member on an American freighter setting sail the next morning. On his last evening in Palestine, a friend said there was a young lady he wanted to introduce him to. Steuerman took one look and asked her to marry him. When she protested, scarcely knowing his name, Steuerman said he wasn’t asking for an immediate answer. She could write, care of the U.S. consulate at his ship’s next port-of-call in Holland.
“When we got there, there was a three-word letter,” Steuerman said. ” `Ani ahakeh l’cha–I’ll wait for you.’ “
By the time he made it back, the British had left and Israel had been invaded by Arab armies. Steuerman and the girl he’d left behind were married in a biblical setting more appropriate for the New Testament his World War II shipmates had gone without. “There wasn’t an empty hotel room in town,” recalled his wife, Miriam. “They cleared out a cow shed for our first night as man and wife.”
Israel’s War of Independence was that kind of conflict, replete with scenes out of a novel. One group of volunteers bought surplus airplanes in America, and needed a gambit to get them past the British arms embargo. Somehow, they got Panamanian officials to grant them the title “Panamanian National Airlines.”
Historian Fenton was a 16-year-old English schoolboy when he went to Israel in 1948. There he saw action with the Democratic 4th Troop, 1st Anti-Tank Regiment. Members chose the designation because they had had enough of saluting and parading during World War II and declared their unit off-limits to rank. Before responding to orders from higher up the chain of command, the Democratic 4th would debate the generals’ strategy.
Previously a mortar unit, it had been promoted to anti-tank combat with a caveat: As the Israelis lacked artillery pieces, Fenton and his mates had to steal their cannons from the enemy.
“I really think we owe Israel much more than she owes us,” Fenton said. “How many people can say, `I helped to make the Jewish homeland a reality’?”
David Gutmann had a similar feeling at a dockside railroad yard in Bulgaria. Today, he is a psychologist at Northwestern University. But in 1947, he was a crew member on a Haganah ship trying to run concentration-camp survivors past the British blockade against Jewish immigration to Palestine. He’d been compelled to volunteer by the realization that the European branch of his family had been extinguished by the Nazis.
On one run, his ship was tied up awaiting its human cargo, when out of the night came a scene reminiscent of the Holocaust: long lines of trains, their passengers riding in cattle cars just like the ones that had carried Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
“There are times when you feel that your own, insignificant life has been pushed up against the great engine of history,” said Gutmann, 72. “There we were, helping the remnant of the Jews to leave Europe, alive.”
Robert Leeds, though not Jewish, went to fight in Israel’s War of Independence because he, too, had a sense of history coupled with a feeling for justice.
“I was too young to fight the Japanese in Manchuria or when Hitler and Mussolini intervened in the Spanish Civil War,” said Leeds, 71. “So I was ready to go when the Haganah recruited me at the Detroit city airport.”
On signing up, Leeds, an experienced parachutist, was told to report to a hotel in Rome, a gathering point for Israel’s volunteer air force.
“Also staying there were a bunch of ex-Luftwaffe pilots who were going to fly for the Egyptians,” Leeds said. “There was also a group of Finns, including her, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”
He pointed to his wife, Peggy. In 1948, she and a group of school friends were on a holiday trip to Italy. They went on a couple of dates, and Robert asked her to join him in Israel.
When he got to Tel Aviv, the Israelis said they were short a bombardier and asked if he might fill in. They said they could train him for the job.
“The first night, a pilot and myself climbed into a two-seater airplane; that was our `bomber,’ ” Leeds said. “They showed me how to muscle a 100-pound bomb out the open door of the craft. That was my instruction.”
After a number of missions, Robert looked up one day to see Peggy coming toward him across the airfield. Close behind were the other Finns.
“My friends wouldn’t let me come to Israel alone,” said Peggy Leeds. “They said Americans were `love-them-and-leave-them types’ and wanted to make sure of Robert’s intentions.”
The Israelis pressed the Finns into service as coast guards, giving them a cabin cruiser outfitted with a homemade machine gun. Peggy went to work folding parachutes, and Robert proved her friends’ fears unfounded by asking her to marry him on the 4th of July.
A seamstress made Peggy’s wedding gown out of two parachutes, and rabbis vied for the honor of marrying these heaven-sent gentiles who had come to stand with Israel in its hour of need. When the rabbi asked Robert if he took Peggy for his wife, he couldn’t think of the Hebrew word for “yes.”
“I stammered todah rabah,” he recalled, “which means `thank you very much.’ “
Afterward, Robert went on to train Israel’s first paratroopers. After the war, the young couple returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Chicago’s northern suburbs. With every subsequent Israeli war, they’ve hung on the news like anxious parents. A few years ago, they made a sentimental voyage to Israel, and visited the headquarters of the paratroops that are the elite formation of the Israeli army.
Unlike some other Machalniks, the Leedses aren’t going back to Israel for the festivities surrounding its 50th anniversary. The Israelis, Robert explains, have better things to do than entertain two aging footnotes to their history.
Besides, Peggy says she got all the thanks she needs in 1948. After a mission, air crews would express their gratitude for her careful packing of the parachutes their lives might depend on.
“If they made it back, the pilots would bring me a rose,” she said. “That was so very sweet.”
