Exiled – to Kfar Saba

After Jews were expelled from Tel Aviv-Jaffa almost a century ago, the Sharon city doesn’t forget the bitter times turned sweet.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Children play at Kfar Saba (photo credit: COURTESY KFAR SABA MUSEUM)
Children play at Kfar Saba
(photo credit: COURTESY KFAR SABA MUSEUM)
The deportation of Tel Aviv and Jaffa’s Jews in April 1917 by the Ottoman authorities is just one more sad chapter in the eternal story of the Jew in exile.
At the height of World War I, the Turks decided that the Jews living in Tel Aviv and Jaffa – numbering several thousands – were a potential fifth column likely to cooperate with the British forces against whom they were fighting.
Their answer was to drive them from their homes, with the expulsion taking place at the beginning of April 1917.
The Jews were given a week to organize themselves, and a committee was set up, under the mayor, Meir Dizengoff, to organize the evacuation.
Of these megurashim, or deportees, 1,500 reached Kfar Saba, and to this day the city is very conscious of the tragedy, running several youth activities so that this sad episode will not be forgotten.
The exiles arrived in the village of Kfar Saba and the local population did its best to absorb them. Some were taken into existing homes, some lodged at the Khan (now the city hall, which was used as a hospital) but the majority were forced to live outdoors in what is today Ussishkin Grove. It was a forest of eucalyptus trees at the northern edge of the town that belonged to an agronomist from Petah Tikva, Peretz Pascal.
Here the expellees built themselves huts from the eucalyptus trees with makeshift roofs to keep out the winter rains. They tried to turn one of them into a school and another into a synagogue, fighting the elements to provide themselves with shelter and the ability to conduct as normal a life as possible.
The artist Nahum Gutman chronicled the exodus of Tel Aviv’s Jews in 1917, leaving a sketch in his characteristic style of his own grandmother being transported in a donkey-drawn carriage, carrying, among other things, her Shabbat candlesticks. He wrote about the episode in his book Bein Holot U’kehol Shamayim (“Between Sands and Blue Skies”).
Another family from the deportations that later became well-known was the Krinitzi family, whose son, Avraham, became the mayor of Ramat Gan.
Besides many heartrending pictures of the whole episode, which are in the Kfar Saba Archeological Museum, the curator, Yardena Weisenberg was thrilled to receive a gift from the grandson of one of the expellees – a doctor from Herzliya who came in with a diary describing the events of the time written by his grandfather.
As well as the harsh living conditions they had to contend with, they got caught up in the war raging around them. Kfar Saba was on the front line between Gen. Edmund Allenby’s British army and the Ottoman army. German camps were pitched in the part of town that is now Tel Hai Street and the area was bombed frequently. Until a few months ago, the schoolchildren were taken to the place where the expellees lived in the forest to reenact the whole episode and they were able to find metal balls and other relics of the fighting during the war.
Typhus and other illnesses were prevalent, and many died. A part of the Kfar Saba cemetery has been set aside and bears a sign explaining who the people buried there are and how they died. Because of the circumstances at the time, the graves do not bear the names of the dead.
Nowadays the reenactment of the whole episode in the forest has been stopped as the eucalyptus trees are sick and the municipality felt it would be dangerous for children to be there. But the story of the deportees is alive and well in Kfar Saba. Several of the descendants have websites and document the activities connected with the occurrences.
Plans are in the works to reenact some of the famous battles of World War I. And the victims are memorialized with ceremonies and reciting of the Mourner’s Kaddish.
The city renamed one of its major thoroughfare’s Tel Aviv-Yafo Street about a year ago, as a tribute to the city that the deportees left, and since Tel Aviv’s centennial in 2009, it has its own Kfar Saba Street.