From South Yarra to Sinai
From South Yarra to Sinai
Author: Aaron Eidelson 1953 - , Melbourne, 2014
Editing: Graziela Eidelson, Meyer Eidelson
DEDICATION
For my parents Rita and Joe to whom I owe everything. To my beautiful children who are the reason I decided to write this book. To my sister Margaret who, had she lived, would have written many books much more profound than this. In memory to our families who were murdered in the Holocaust. May they be of eternal blessed memory.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the second volume in the history of our family. The first volume–‘Books Tanks and Radios. Stories from a Family of Survivors’-was written by my brother Meyer and records the struggles of the Eidelson family before their arrival in Australia. My volume picks up the story of the second generation growing up in Australia. Hopefully future generations of Eidelsons will thrive to record their stories in future volumes. My brother Meyer generously gave his advice and read and edited the final draft. This book could not have been written without the love and encouragement of my wife Graziela who supported me throughout the writing process and editing of the first draft and adding her valuable opinion and advice.
GLOSSARY
Aliyah – Immigrate to Israel, literally ‘to go up’.
Aron HaKodesh - Holy Ark in the synagogue which holds the Torah Scrolls
Bar Mitzvah - Celebration when a Jewish boy turns thirteen
Cholent - Traditional Jewish casserole
Chutzpah – Audacity
Fress - To eat, to stuff oneself
Garin - Select group of young persons
Haftara- Selections from the books of the Prophets
Haggada – Traditional book read at Passover
Hashomer Hatzair – Jewish (Socialist) Youth Movement
Havdala - Ceremony of candle lighting to end Sabbath
Kibbutz - Communal settlement
Kiddush – Benediction and meal on Sabbath
Kol Nidre - Evening before Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement)
Kosher - food prepared to Jewish dietary laws
Kosher le Pesach – Approved Kosher food for Passover
Lechaim - To Life! - Traditional Jewish toast
Mamserim - Bastards
Ma nishtanah – traditional song on Passover
Matza - Cracker or flatbread eaten on Passover
Nudnik – Incorrigible nagger
Peshakreff - Dog’s blood (popular Polish curse)
Rabbi – Congregation leader, teacher,
Rosh Hashana – Jewish New Year
Schlepp – To carry or drag from one place to another
Schule – Synagogue
Seder – Ritual order of service and meal on Passover
Shabbat – Sabbath (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown)
Shaharit - Morning prayers
Shema - Most important of the daily prayers
Shlemiel – Person in he wrong place at the wrong time
Shlemozzle - A mess, a stuff-up
Shtetl –Jewish East European traditional village and way of life
Succoth – Feast of Tabernacles
Tallis – Prayer shawl worn by men
Tisha B’Av – traditional day of lamentation in August
Torah - Five books of Moses
Ulpan – Israeli Hebrew language school
Yizkor - Memorial service
Yom Kippur – Judgement Day, Day of Atonement
CONTENTS
Chapter Two: A Fractured Skull
Chapter Three: Jewish Welfare in South Yarra
Chapter Five: Bar Mitzvah Lessons in South Yarra
Chapter Six: The Streets of South Yarra
Chapter Seven: The Number Eight Tram
Chapter Eight: The Continental Light Rye Bread
Chapter Nine: The Newspaper Boy
Chapter Ten: Self Defense in South Yarra
Chapter Eleven: The End of the Marriage
Chapter Twelve: Hakoah Versus Hellas
Chapter Thirteen: All Creatures Great and Small
Chapter Fifteen: South Yarra’s Synagogue
Chapter Sixteen: A Stick of Dynamite
Chapter Eighteen: Jewish Cooking in Punt Road
Chapter Nineteen: The Commission
Chapter Twenty: The Dream Home110
Chapter Twenty One: The Student Rebel1
Chapter Twenty Two: The Barmitzvah Boy
Chapter Twenty Three: The Trumpet
Chapter Twenty Four: Margaret Sarah Eidelson
Chapter Twenty Five: Learning to Jump
Chapter Twenty Six: The Tigers
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Chapter One: Suez Canal 1973
You can usually tell when an artillery shell is about to land on top of you. Most shells in flight scream louder and louder as they get closer. Katyusha rockets however are harder to predict. They are fired in massive clusters, up to forty-eight at a time, and they explode at intervals that you can hear approaching like giant footsteps in a long corridor. There were six soldiers in my foxhole when a Katyusha rocket with our name on it struck. It was our fault. We had no business being in that hole.
Starting in the early hours of 16 October 1973 my paratroop company had walked darkness across the Suez Canal, from the Sinai Desert into Northern Africa. We were part of the Army’s ‘Operation Valiant’ intended to encircle the Egyptian 3rd Army and force its surrender.
The exquisite beauty of Suez, a modern wonder of the world, was in remarkable contrast to the insanity of the circumstance that had brought us there. As I stepped onto the soil of Egypt I felt reassured by the groves of tall gum trees sprouting from the sand. It was almost a typical Australian bush scene. The sun shone through the branches and we knelt down in the warm sand and the eerie quiet. I heard cats crying. There was a brood of four kittens playing in the sand under a gum tree. They were tabby cats like Benji, our family cat in South Yarra. I thought about adopting a kitten for a pet but where would I keep it in the middle of a war?
Israeli tanks and trucks were now rumbling across the water in a convoy. It was astounding how fast the army could move. Despite heavy losses, the combat engineers had worked all through the night to assemble a ‘unifloat’ bridge, eight hundred metres long, light enough to float yet strong enough to support heavy vehicles. We had watched the work from the earth ramparts on the western bank that the Israelis had reclaimed in bloody battle from the Egyptians.
The night before our arrival the 890 Paratroop Regiment had been sent to clear a space and create a diversion to the north of the Israeli crossing. The paratroopers, most of them in their teens, had been ambushed by an Egyptian anti-tank division in an area nicknamed ‘The Chinese Farm’. By morning 120 soldiers were dead or missing.
This was a horrific reality check for the Israelis. During the Six Day War, Israelis forces had maneuvered virtually at will, destroying opposing armies in their path. Now we faced a military force that had been custom-built to destroy us. Since 1967 the Soviets had created a new army in Egypt from scratch and trained it for two years behind a screen of UN peacekeepers which then rolled out of the way as neatly as a sliding bathroom door.
They hurled this army at Israel on the tenth day of the Islamic peace-fest of Ramadan. After Israel had reeled before the advance and then moved to counter-attack, we found that the previous rules of the game had changed. An umbrella of SAM missiles now protected Egyptian forces. The Soviet-supplied anti-aircraft systems performed with deadly efficiency and took a catastrophic toll, hitting over half of all attacking Israeli aircraft. No longer was it possible for a fighter-bomber squadron to route an Arab armoured division. The shock of these losses as well as the worsening situation on the Syrian front resulted in air support for the Southern Command being suspended. Yitzchak Rabin, Prime Minister and Chief of Staff during the previous Six Day War, admitted simply: ‘We were taken completely by surprise’.
The Egyptians had prepared to accept up to 30,000 casualties to attain the canal crossing. Their actual loss was only 208 soldiers. They crossed the Suez Canal in one of the most impressive water barrier crossings recorded in military history. The troops who crossed were equipped with wire-guided Soviet anti-tank missiles and hand-held RPG 7 rocket grenades ideally suited to desert warfare. We now understood that we were not going to defeat the enemy without a brutal fight and perhaps we might need a miracle. Founding Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion once remarked: ‘A Jew who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist’.
There were dead bodies strewn on the ground and corpses floating in the canal as my company took cover behind the earth ramparts overlooking the water. Shells burst intermittently over us throughout the night, sometimes fifty yards away and sometimes closer. My friend Rafi Leon tore open some Nescafe sachets and mixed them in his green plastic water bottle. He added sugar, shook the bottle vigorously and offered me a swig of what he called ‘iced coffee’.
He could see that my nerves were getting the better of me. Rafi however was perfectly relaxed. He was a red-haired, religious soldier who wore an embroidered yamulka under his helmet and spent his spare time playing guitar. How did he reconcile his faith with the carnage around us?
‘Don’t worry everything will be fine’, he reassured me. ’We’ll be careful and we’ll watch each other’s backs’.
After the crossing, we had received orders to destroy an Egyptian missile battery just north of the bridge. But the shelling started again and continued to harass us for the next few hours. This time it was on the eastern bank and much heavier than the previous night. My whole platoon was crammed into a bomb shelter for protection from the storm of shrapnel. At two in the afternoon there was a break in the pounding. We crawled out and waited for orders but the barrage started again.
I later read that the Russians had shown Egyptian President Anwar Sadat satellite photographs indicating where we had crossed the canal. Sadat had ordered his forces to destroy the Israeli initiative there and then.
Unfortunately six of us had recklessly chosen to take cover in an open foxhole. We were pleased to breathe the fresh air and were entertained by dogfights in the African sky between Israeli phantom jets and Egyptian MiG fighters. But then the Katyusha hit. A piece of shrapnel tore into my left leg below the knee.
I opened my eyes and wished I had kept them closed. Of the six soldiers in the hole, only three were now alive. My friend Rami on my right lay silently flat on the ground with his eyes open. I saw that his red paratroop boot was shredded at the left ankle. Amir, the company medic, attended him first. As he touched his shoe a massive slice of white bone appeared. Rami’s left foot had been severed. I was the least harmed of the soldiers left alive. It was just another injury.
I whispered to myself: ‘If mum knew where I was she’d kill me’.
Chapter Two: A Fractured Skull
My first memory in life is falling from my high chair in the kitchen of our flat in South Yarra. The year was 1955 and I was two years old. I fractured my skull leaving a bump and scar which remain to this day. The fall was in the morning and by evening I was back from the Alfred Hospital. When Joe, my dad, came home from work, my mother Rita told him the news. Dad felt the back of my head and said, ‘Be a good soldier!’
The next visit to the hospital came at the age of four when the heavy ironwork front door of 731 Punt Road slammed on my right index finger. The tip of the finger, just below the nail, was hanging half off. I ran upstairs and presented it to Joe. He rushed me across the street and onto the Punt Road bus. He didn’t have his wallet so he lifted my hand and showed the gruesome sight to the driver. The driver turned without saying a word and drove on. At the Alfred the doctor placed a mask on my face and in three seconds I was asleep. The finger was stitched back on and I proudly wore a rubber glove to Fawkner Park Kindergarten for the next few weeks.
My parents Rita and Joe argued over who was to blame for my fall from the highchair that caused the fractured skull. This was just one of an exhausting series of arguments in their marriage.
My two brothers, my sister and I invested all our wishes beseeching God to stop the fighting at home. We prayed that peace and quiet would descend upon the small flat on the intersection of Toorak Road and Punt Road, South Yarra. Whether it was over birthday candles or the wishbone of a chicken, every wish became an appeal for God to impose domestic peace on our family. Did Rita and Joe ever consider the fear and pain that their violent quarrels visited on the lives of their small children? Perhaps they did, but emotional discipline was a luxury that our family never enjoyed.
My sister Margaret was the eldest child and she suffered the most. I and my two brothers Michael and Nicky also felt the terror but for a small sensitive girl it was much harder. Margaret was intelligent and understood the hopelessness of our parents’ predicament. She had to be the first to pretend to the outside world that life at home was normal. Margaret died in 1982 of pancreatic cancer. She was thirty-two years old. Did a difficult childhood and all its anxiety contribute to her early death? We shall never know for sure.
Communication can mean many things. It is more than mere words; it means conveying to others that you care about them. It is hard to communicate when there are secrets, when children believe that loyalty to their parents and family’s problems is more important than acknowledging their own feelings.
In the fifties, families didn’t talk. And Jewish families talked even less than Australian families. They didn’t talk because no human language has the words to describe what Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe endured. When we complained too much, Rita would silence us by reminding us how the Nazis had murdered her whole family. What therefore did we have to complain about? There was no response to this charge.
Even a single question might show contempt for a subject of infinite grief that needed to remain tightly locked behind black drapes and barred doors. Sometimes when I nagged too much, Rita threatened to put me in Frances Barkman House where I had spent a few days in respite whilst Nicky, the youngest, was being born in March 1956. Apparently I wasn’t happy there because when Rita came to collect me she found me clinging to the bars of the front fence and crying to go home. Following that experience I never again mentioned Frances Barkman House. Although I had no idea who Frances Barkman, I doubted she knew her name would be used as a bogey for misbehaving children!
Since the fractured skull and chopped finger incidents, I have made numerous visits to the Alfred in my life. Indeed our three generations of family have used the Alfred so often that we think of it as ‘our hospital’. Three times the Alfred has repaired fractures to my ankles and in 1993 the Emily McPherson Ward nursed me back to health from a bout of depression that had made my life miserable for several months.
I had plenty of time in bed to reflect where I would be if almost a century earlier a Fenian activist had not shot Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh. In 1869 Denis O’Farrel shot Prince Alfred Ernest Albert, the second son of Queen Victoria in the back in Clontarf, Sydney, So great was the public outrage over the attempted assassination that the citizens of Sydney and Melbourne commenced fundraising to build hospitals as a memorial to the cure of Prince Alfred. Almost two months later, O’ Farrell the anti-monarchist met his maker at the end of a rope in Parramatta Gaol, setting a record for the shortest time between arrest and execution.
In 1870 Prahran Council donated a parcel of low-lying land, opposite Fawkner Park, South Yarra for the provision of a hospital and architect Christopher Webb won the competition to design the Alfred Hospital with a revolutionary drawing. Webb incorporated ‘Nightingale’ design principles by including light-filled wards connected by covered pavilions.
When I felt like rebelling against the strict order of hospital routine, I reminded myself of Ms Turncliffe, the Hospital’s first matron, who had set the bar for discipline and devotion to duty in the nursing profession. She learned her rigor from ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ - Florence Nightingale – who was sent to the antipodes to train nurses.
