The first volunteers

Having all fought in World War II, the ‘Mahalniks’ helped the fledgling state survive its first war.

By BARRY DAVIS
A VOLUNTEER pilot in front of his plane 521 (photo credit: Courtesy: Beit Hatfutsot)
A VOLUNTEER pilot in front of his plane 521
(photo credit: Courtesy: Beit Hatfutsot)
When we think of the great pioneers, the people who built this country from scratch, we tend to think of the leading Russian and Polish Jews, the likes of David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Chaim Weizmann.
But how many of us are aware of the central role played by English-speaking Zionists, people who came over here to volunteer, to help the fledgling state survive the War of Independence, and later play a key role in developing some of this country’s initial infrastructures? The volunteers became known as “Mahalniks” (Mahal is an acronym which means “overseas volunteers”). There were around 4,500 all told, 900 of whom came from the United States, with several hundred each from South Africa, Great Britain, Canada, France and South America, and handfuls from places like Scandinavia, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands.
Some of their exploits and stories are finally being given a grand airing, at an exhibition at Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, on the Tel Aviv University Campus in Ramat Aviv.
One man who probably knows more than anyone about Mahalniks is Harry “Smoky” Simon. Now a fit-looking 92, Simon spent almost the whole of World War II as a navigator-bombardier in the South African Air Force, with a stint in the Royal Air Force. Today Simon is chairman of the World Mahal organization and has his finger on all the statistics.
“It is not exactly clear, from the Ministry of Defense records, exactly how many Mahalniks there were, so we put the figure conservatively at about 4,500, who came from 58 countries,” he says.
Not all the Mahal members were Jewish.
Simon was certainly among the more active Mahalniks during the War of Independence, and served in the nascent Israel Air Force, as a navigator-bombardier and chief of Air Operations, from May 1948 to October 1950, attaining the rank of major.
“In total there were 426 [Mahalnik] air crew members – pilots, navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, radio operators, air gunners and cameramen,” Simon recalls. “Ninety-two of these guys were non-Jewish, and there were some excellent guys among them. The top-scoring fighter pilot was a Canadian non-Jew called McIlroy. We had 18 Swedes, and they all threw in their lot.”
While presumably the Jewish Mahalniks were driven by a sense of Zionism to help the new State of Israel get on its feet, one wonders why any non-Jews should have risked their necks.
“I don’t know it for a fact but I believe the Swedes were paid, so you couldn’t really call them volunteers in the full sense of the word,” explains Simon.
Volunteers or no, the nonagenarian says the Scandinavians did their bit for us.
“They kept the air bridge from Czechoslovakia to Tel Nof air base going. That was Israel’s lifeline.”
At the time there was a United Nations embargo on the export of arms to the Middle East, so the aircraft and equipment Israel managed to smuggle out of Czechoslovakia were crucial to the country’s survival.
Simon bemoans the fact that, today, most Israelis know very little, if anything, of the efforts of himself and his fellow overseas volunteers to get this country off the ground, literally.
“People today take the existence of Israel for granted. Our motivation for putting on this exhibition is to educate people about what really happened in those days.”
That also applies to Simon’s successors in the army.
“If you talk to a guy on the General Staff of the IDF he might know the name Mahal but I’m sure he doesn’t know the story at all. I’d like the story of Mahal to be introduced to the educational material of IDF officers’ courses. I think this is a very important chapter in this country’s history, and the officers should know about it.”
Mind you, there has been top-brass recognition of the contribution made by Mahalniks. Then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin hailed their role at a ceremony to mark the unveiling of a monument to Mahal at the Sha’ar Hagai Forest in 1993.
Simon also proudly quotes Ben-Gurion, who said: “the Mahal forces were the Diaspora’s most important contribution to the survival of the State of Israel.”
That role is underscored by the fact that 95 percent of Israel’s pilots during the War of Independence were Mahalniks.
“Rabin said that we brought our experience,” Simon notes. “We’d all fought in World War II. So we knew what we were doing.”
THE BEIT Hatfutsot exhibition includes some interesting and highly evocative memorabilia, too. There is a pilot’s log book and some strange-looking military insignia, including some improvised by now 88-year-old New York-born Zippora Porath. Porath actually made it over here before the War of Independence, arriving in October 1947 as a ZOA scholarship recipient on a one-year program at the Hebrew University. When war broke out she joined the Hagana and served as a medic during the siege of Jerusalem.
Over the years Porath filled a series of important roles, including serving in the Israel Air Force intelligence unit. She was instrumental in setting up nursing services across the north of Israel, and also worked briefly as executive assistant to the Israeli consul-general in New York.
“I arrived [here] at a moment in history,” exclaims Porath. “I had no way of knowing it was such an important point in history.”
A few months into her stay here she suddenly found herself swept up in the rush to get the burgeoning country’s defense system in place.
“You didn’t join the Hagana, you were recruited,” she says. “It was all like something out of a movie. You went to a café, there was a guy with a hat on and a rolled-up newspaper, and then there was the induction with a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other.”
As the winds of war starting blowing here, Porath could have boarded the next ship west and returned to the comfort and safety of New York. That wasn’t really an option for her.
“I wrote to my parents and said you brought [me up] to be a Zionist, I’m where it’s happening.”
Initially, she was in the undercover courier business.
“The British would never search a woman, so we would deliver pistols and arms to various places,” she recalls. “I’d take three grenades hidden in my bra.”
However, after a while Porath decided to devote her war efforts to healing.
“Once I was in the Old City, on a socalled date, and there was a shooting, and I thought that if the grenades go off I’m going to be blown to kingdom come before I can do anything. That’s not the way I want to serve the Jewish nation. So I did a first-aid course.”
Porath soon found herself gaining some valuable practical experience.
“The day I passed my first-aid course there was a bombing on Ben-Yehuda Street [in Jerusalem], so I went along there to see if I could help. I couldn’t get through the cordon of policemen, because I spoke English and they didn’t differentiate between Americans and the British.”
When the would-be Florence Nightingale found her way to reducing suffering blocked she turned to improvising.
Even when she managed to get past the cops she found she had some wheeling and dealing to do to begin administering help to the victims.
“It was a big balagan [muddle], so I took my lipstick and made a huge Magen David, and in five minutes I was in business.”
That act of spontaneity set Porath on the road to even bigger things.
“Without realizing it that’s how I became very resourceful and I became a setter-upper of first-aid stations.”
Before the war, she was a journalism major at college, and she has put her writing skills to good use over the years, occasionally freelancing for The Jerusalem Post, and producing several fascinating books.
One, entitled Letters from Jerusalem 1947-1948, contains several hundred missives Porath sent her family back in New York which she only discovered after her parents’ death four decades later. The foreword was provided by none other than renowned British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who described the letters as “extremely readable, very moving, often dramatic and an essential source for the period.”
Porath is proud of what she and the other Mahalniks achieved.
“Our attitude was, do what you can, when you can, while you can and give it your best,” she says. “That’s how it was for all of us.”
MURRAY GREENFIELD is another Mahalnik with writer’s ink in his veins. American- born Greenfield’s contribution to the state-in-the-making was to serve on some of the ships that were part of Aliya Bet, which brought – or attempted to bring – illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine between 1939 and the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948.
Some of his experiences, and the much wider historical picture of the ha’apala campaign found their way into a book he researched and wrote over a 10-year period called The Jews’ Secret Fleet. Like Porath’s collection of letters this, too, has a foreword by Gilbert. Greenfield also founded the Gefen Publishing House, putting out, among many hundreds of items, the first Dry Bones cartoon book.
Unsurprisingly, 86-year-old Greenfield is a good storyteller and relates his illegal naval experiences in a captivatingly straightforward manner.
“They had to get the Jews out of Europe, and there was no one to get them out,” he states. “They started looking for ships in America.”
Naturally, experienced hands were needed to get the boats from A to B.
“I’d been in the merchant marine [during World War II] and I was a synagoguegoer, and there was some guy there who pointed in my direction,” Greenfield recalls. “The guy who spoke to me said it could be dangerous, and I could go to prison, and there was no pay in it for me.”
That may not sound like good marketing, but it worked.
“I was 20 years old and I went for it,” Greenfield continues. “There were 250 young Americans like me who also joined in. Some were Zionists, some were anti- Fascists and some were probably just in it for the adventure.”
Greenfield says it was on the boats that he first learned about the horrors of the Holocaust.
“The first books about [it] started coming out in 1946-1947, but not many people knew much about it. Back then the Holocaust was very much about numbers.”
Greenfield says he soon received firsthand testimony about the concentration camps.
“I knew Yiddish and every single Jew on the ship had a whole Holocaust story to tell. It was terrible.”
The sessions Greenfield spent with his traumatized passengers created a bond between them.
“When the British caught us, and stopped us from reaching Palestine, they beat us up and fired tear gas at us, and then they sent us all to Cyprus,” he recalls. “The crew members didn’t have to go with them to Cyprus, and it wasn’t like we were heroes, they became a part of us. We couldn’t abandon our passengers.”
Greenfield says he soon learned to appreciate the resilience of his wards.
“When the British caught us they all started singing ‘Hatikva’ – that was also the name of our ship – at night outside Haifa Port. That was very moving. I don’t think Israel would have survived without Aliya Bet.”
At the end of the day, Greenfield says it is about continuing to contribute.
“All the Mahalniks are heroes, they all did wonderful things. But the real story is about the ones who stayed here, or went back and then came back on aliya, and had children and grandchildren. That’s the real legacy.” ■
For more information about the Mahal exhibition: (03) 745-7800 and ww.bh.org.il


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