(formerly Solly Genkind, IDF No: 58145)
Durng the night between October 28th and 29th, 1948, the 72nd Battalion of the 7th Armored Brigade – Chativa Sheva – moved out of Safed to capture the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai at Mount Meron.
I was a soldier in “B” Company of that battalion. The majority of the 72nd battalion were Machal volunteers from South Africa, Canada, the U.S., and England. One of those soldiers was Joe Woolf from South Africa, a distant cousin of mine.
It was a dark night as we moved through Nachal Amud and approached the tomb. From where we stood, the massive stones of the tomb towered above us, its windows darkened and lifeless.
I remembered the stories my grandfather used to tell me about the holy man, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, when I was a little boy in Lithuania. “He was one of the greatest of Jewish gaonim, perhaps even greater than the Gaon of Vilna. He wrote the book of Zohar, which is one of the most important books about our religion,” I remembered my grandfather telling me in awe.
Looking up at the tomb, the burial place of the man my grandfather had spoken of, I had an overpowering feeling that destiny had brought me to this place.
Only a few years before that day, I had been sub-human, as the Nazis called us. A Jewish slave laborer in one of the camps in Dachau in Germany, condemned to a slow death by starvation, beatings, and hard labor. And here I was, a soldier in the Israeli Army, about to liberate the holy tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. I had a mystical sensation that I had survived the Holocaust for that purpose, to liberate the tomb for the Jewish People.
My mystical feelings were interrupted by massive machine-gun fire pouring out of the windows of the tomb. Bullets were whistling all around us, biting the rocks behind which we were hiding, setting off sparks in all directions.
Shmuel Daks, a volunteer from England, originally from Vienna and one of the children to come to England in the Kindertransport, didn’t duck fast enough and a bullet pierced his head. He was our first casualty. We were ordered by our officer, Capt. Shutzman, an American volunteer, to return fire.
One of our boys began shooting “Plat” British anti-tank shells at the windows, setting off a rain of sparks as they hit the stone walls. After a few minutes, Sergeant Jack Franses from England ordered us to bypass the tomb. We climbed through the rocks to the right of it, bullets whistling around us.
My section quickly moved towards one of the courtyards when suddenly, from a small building attached to the tomb, the Arabs opened fire on us. I saw a flash of rifle fire coming from a narrow window in the building and felt the bullet whistling by my face. It was so close that I felt its heat. The three comrades who were ahead of me opened fire on the window and I ran to join them. It was a close call. I thought of the 19 close calls during the Holocaust and I was encouraged. At least here I could defend myself with a weapon in my hand.
Dawn broke, and we could see our way around. Ahead of us was a stone wall with an opening in it. Two of us slipped through the opening, while my friend Jack Kesselman, a volunteer from the U.S., stayed ahead of me. Suddenly I saw an Arab on top of the building aiming his rifle at Jack’s back. I managed to shout out a warning: “Jack, look out!”
The Arab turned around and aimed his rifle at me. My rifle was under my arm and I didn’t have time to take aim at him. I simply squeezed off a round in his direction. We must have shot at each other at the same time, because later Jack told me that he only heard one shot. Fortunately for me, I was standing at an angle which made me a poor target, although I did feel the bullet whoosh by me. The way he recoiled I think that I wounded him. For a brief moment we stood looking at each other, but then he jumped down to a lower part of the building and disappeared from view.
Later in the day, we found him about 50 meters from the tomb. He had caught a burst of machine gun fire from Neal Goodman, an American volunteer who had captured one of the rooms of the tomb and had seen the Arab trying to escape through the woods. We fought our way room by room until we cleared the whole tomb of the enemy. The tomb was in our hands. The Arabs defending the tomb were soldiers under the command of Kaujki. Some were Palestinians and some were Syrians, we later found out.
For me personally, the battle of the tomb was one of the most significant emotional experiences of the War of Independence. I almost got shot twice, but survived unhurt. Perhaps Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai had something to do with it. Today, when we visit the tomb at Lag B’Omer, I feel with pride that I and my comrades, the Machal volunteers, secured the tomb for future generations to celebrate Lag B’Omer there.
Author: Solly Ganor