His life mission

‘We Were Europeans’ is more than just a chronicle of the life of Jerusalem realtor and diplomat Werner Loval.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
We were Europeans 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
We were Europeans 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
In recent years there has been a global preoccupation with genealogy, inspired in part by Alex Haley’s highly acclaimed best-selling novel Roots that was first published in 1976.
Surfing through the Internet one can come across untold numbers of family trees, some of them accompanied by scattered thumbnail biographies that researchers have been able to glean.
Yet for all that, take a random sample of passersby in the street, passengers on a bus or a train or the audience in a theater or a concert hall, and some will not even know the names of their grandparents, let alone their great-grandparents and beyond. Not so for the four children and 12 grandchildren of Werner and Pamela Loval.
Werner Loval is a self-confessed, stereotyped Yekke who likes order and who has put the larger part of his multifaceted life on file, a habit that significantly enabled the writing of We Were Europeans.
The proprietor of one of the country’s largest real estate agencies, he has provided well for his progeny. But beyond spending money on them and indulging in a huge variety of shared family experiences at home and abroad, he has given them a legacy that relatively few offspring receive from their parents and grandparents.
He has given them a family heritage, a sense of roots, and knowledge of their German forebears as far back as 1735.
Better still he has done this in his own lifetime. Yet his engaging, well-illustrated, extremely easy-to-read book (which includes many excerpts from the diary of his sister Erica and input by some of his cousins) is not just some private family history. It is part of the history of German Jewry, of European Jewry, of American and South American Jewry and of the development of the State of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.
Loval, who born in Bamberg, Germany, in 1926 is both a gregarious and adventurous person, who has lived in many countries, has worked in a series of professions and who is involved in a variety of organizations and institutions.
Even as a child, he rubbed shoulders with the rich and the famous. Because there was no Jewish school in Bamberg, his parents sent him to a Catholic school that was close to their home and had a liberal attitude.
On the day after Kristallnacht, when he and his sister went to their respective schools, they were expelled and sent home.
His first job was as an assistant in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Next he worked in a metal works company in Ecuador and then became a stringer for Time magazine.
His subsequent job was in New York, working as assistant to the manager of a textile company. He received a salary of $30 a week, which in 1945 was not bad at all. In 1946, still not a US citizen, he was conscripted into the US Army, where he won a sharpshooter’s medal.
Following his discharge, he went back into textile exports, and might have next gone to a Wall Street brokerage firm but for the fact that the State of Israel was established, and he fancied himself a diplomat. He went to work for the Israeli delegation at the UN, then joined Israel’s Foreign Ministry where he remained for 17 years.
This happened in a roundabout way when Loval joined the American Economic Committee for Palestine, which in 1949 became an unofficial affiliate of the Israeli consulate. In 1951, he became the assistant to the economic counselor at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, which, he writes, was an ideal place in which to meet prominent Israelis. Teddy Kollek, who was then a member of the embassy staff, encouraged him to make aliya, which he did in 1954.
His aliya was “deluxe.” He traveled from New York via England aboard the Queen Mary, at the time one of the most popular luxury liners. He had several family reunions in England, then went to Germany for another family reunion.
His maternal uncle moved in the highest government circles and was also active in the Jewish community of Berlin. Loval made a few other stops in Europe before finally embarking on an Israel-bound ship in Marseilles.
His wanderlust might have continued indefinitely, but for the fact that he met Pamela Sabel with whom he fell head over heels in love. Because her family was settled in Jerusalem, he decided that he too would make Jerusalem his permanent home.
They were married in 1956, and theirs was the first kosher wedding at the King David Hotel. Among the guest were Moshe Dayan, Moshe Sharett, Dov Yosef, Walter Eytan, Teddy Kollek, Chaim Herzog and Zalman Shazar.
In 1958, Loval switched from the Foreign Ministry’s economics department to its public relations department. In this capacity he met many visiting dignitaries, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, to whom he devotes four pages.
Because he has been involved in so many professions and major projects, he has naturally come to know the who’s who in Israel, and drops their names with the ease of someone who has spent a lifetime in such company.
As a diplomat, Loval served in Guatemala and Mexico and was also sent to visit the Dominican Republic.
In August 1966, he left the Foreign Ministry and went into tourism. A couple of years later, based on the knowledge and experience he had gained in establishing Jerusalem’s Nayot neighborhood, he decided to go into real estate and in 1960 created his own company. Soon after he went into partnership with David Blumberg, a South African immigrant, and that was the beginning of the flourishing Anglo-Saxon Real Estate Agency.
Loval has also been active in the launch and development Israel’s Reform Movement.
The beauty of the book is that one doesn’t have to start at the beginning and go through to the end. The chapters are organized in such a way that each is a story on its own and can be read as such, although going backward and forward plays havoc with the chronological order.
It’s a fascinating book about a fascinating family, many of whose members are and were achievers, who whether Zionists or not believed in Herzl’s slogan – if you will it, it is no dream.