G-d counts the Jewish people because he loves them. Each person is important to Him.
Each census has a more specific reason, too. The census at the start of the portion — and book — of Numbers is for military purposes, writes Nachmanides.
The Jews were on the threshold of entering the Land of Israel.
It would need to be conquered.
It would need to be known how many fighters in each tribe were available. After the conquest, the land would be divided by tribe, and the population of each tribe was one criterion for the division.
The census was not just tribe-wide. Within each tribe were extended families and still smaller groups; each was counted separately.
Numbers 1:18 reads:
“They [the entire Jewish people] … established their genealogy according to their families, according to their fathers’ household … ”
Yossi Ron knows the numbers of his father’s household — perhaps he even knows the numbers of his extended family — but of all the losses in the Holocaust and Israel’s wars, there may be something unique about his genealogy.
As the verse says: and they established their genealogy.
Yossi Ron was in Denver last week speaking before supporters of the Jewish National Fund. The facts of his story need no embellishment; their power speaks for itself.
In an eerie twist to an already astounding personal history, he spoke in Denver on May 13 — 66 years to the day when his parents were murdered in the Arab massacre of Kfar Etzion, in 1948.
They were massacred one day before Israel declared independence.
They were massacred after they had raised the white flag and put down their weapons, but against any legal norm, the Arabs killed them anyway.
Of the 127 victims, 126 were men.
There was only one female victim — Yossi Ron’s mother.
This is the background:
“Only one good thing came out of my parents’ Holocaust experience,” he says. “They met each other.”
Their enslavement in Nazi labor camps was in the 1940s.
In the 1930s, kibbutzim in Etzion were founded; Kfar Etzion, in 1943.
Both of Ron’s parents survived the Holocaust.
They were liberated on Jan. 17, 1945 by the Russians.
His mother went back to her birthplace, Lodz, Poland.
Three weeks later, on Feb. 2, they were married in Lodz.
Yossi’s mother was 17.
His parents were married, yes; but hardly together.
Somehow, his mother secured a certificate to emigrate to Palestine.
His father did not.
She left Europe for Palestine. He had to remain in Europe.
They were reunited some 18 months later on Kfar Etzion, half of which by now consisted of Holocaust survivors.
In the Arab violence that greeted the UN vote favoring the establishment of a Jewish state in November, 1947, the farmers on Kfar Etzion were outgunned and outnumbered.
The violence against the small Jewish settlement — some 160 people — got so bad that at the beginning of 1948 all the women and children were evacuated to Jerusalem.
The Jewish settlements in Etzion were not evacuated immediately because they formed the protective southern flank of Jerusalem.
Yossi Ron was sent to Jerusalem.
His mother refused to go.
Her parents had died in Auschwitz.
She had already been separated from her husband for 18 months after their marriage.
She wasn’t going to be separated again.
Thus, all the defenders of Etzion were males, with one exception.
One of the four survivors of the massacre remembers that when the leaders of Etzion saw that there was no choice but to surrender, Ron’s mother cried out in puzzlement and objection: “Why did you surrender?”
On May 13, 1948, she, along with 127 other defenders, were shot dead.
Yossi Ron was orphaned.
His parents are the only married couple in the long history of Israel’s wars who died as soldiers.
Yossi was under two.
The massacre of Kfar Etzion is not to be confused with the fate of “The Convoy of The Thirty-Five.”
This military defeat, also in 1948 and also tied to Etzion, became the subject of an eerie, mystical inquiry involving the lottery of the Vilna Gaon and the tzaddik of Jerusalem, Rabbi Aryeh Levin.
Thirty-five reinforcements were sent to the Etzion area when it became clear how perilous its position was. All thirty-five were killed by Arab forces.
They were buried hastily due to the dangers at the time, and not every grave could be marked.
This caused untold anguish to the survivors of the dead.
Rabbi Levin was urged to use the “goral ha-Gra,” the lottery attributed to the Vilna Gaon (1720-1797), to identify the soldiers buried in the unidentified graves.
After much prayer, and sitting in a candlelit room at night, Rabbi Levin flipped the pages of a prescribed edition of the Hebrew Bible seven times — flipping at random — then did more flipping, seven times, until he reduced the search to one verse for each of the unidentified graves. This verse would contain a clear message — if the person doing this was a spiritual adept.
Indeed, each verse that Rabbi Levin hit contained a clear reference to each of the names of the soldiers in an unidentified grave.
The graves of these slaughtered reinforcements are not to be confused with the burial place of the massacred defenders of Kfar Etzion.
After massacring the defenders of Kfar Etzion, the Arabs left their bodies unburied, open to the animals and the elements.
Only after long negotiations with the Jordanians did Israel get the right, two years later, to retrieve the bodies.
Except that then, there were no bodies.
Only bones.
The fields of the former Kfar Etzion needed to be combed for bones.
It took a week.
Yossi’s mother’s bones were still in the bunker.
There was no choice but to bury the bones of the 127 defenders in a mass grave.
It is on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem.
“My personal story, to my great sorrow and pride, is the story of Israel,” says Ron.
On May 13, 1948, 47 of the 71 children who had been at Kfar Etzion were orphaned. “We have a close relationship,” says Ron.
This is hardly the only close relationship he enjoys.
Who raised him?
A 36-year-old infertile widow, Haviva Vander, one of the women evacuated from Kfar Etzion, adopted little Yossi. She raised him on a kibbutz, then in Tel Aviv. He rose to the rank of colonel in the Israel Air Force, in which he served for 21 years. This, after he finished an electrical engineering degree at the Technion.
Just in case you have this image of a tough, militant, macho Israeli soldier, Yossi Ron is a quiet, humble, articulate, kind man whose personal story was already sufficiently dramatic when a shock hit him out of the blue in 1979.
As the verse says: and they established their genealogy.
One fine day there was a knock on his door.
A woman with blond hair and blue eyes — like his mother — stood there.
She said, “I am your aunt.”
He had thought she died in the Holocaust!
The next chapter of his personal history unfolded:
His aunt was with his mother in the Nazi slave labor camps.
She, too, survived.
But ended up in Poland.
Communist Poland.
Jews could not get out.
Until 1968.
She went to Forest Hills in Queens, New York.
Her husband found a job in Iran for an American construction company and moved there temporarily. In 1979, the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah and he escaped via El Al, landing in Tel Aviv.
“Through common friends they found me,” says Ron. “There were no phones where I lived.”
“I never knew I had a living aunt.”
The war was over in 1945. The contact came in 1979.
A 34-year gap.
Why?
Not only that, but only one year ago — 2013, a 68-year gap — Yossi Ron learned that his adoptive mother had known that her adopted son had an aunt, and she knew as early as 1961. Ron found a letter dated in 1961 saying that his aunt was trying to get him touch with him.
What gives?
First Ron thought that his adoptive mother hid this information out of fear that his aunt would try to take him away.
“But it wasn’t so. They were probably afraid of the communists — afraid to do too much searching in Israel.”
Ron’s aunt never returned to Israel again, but he visited her in Queens quite often.
Stop.
As if all this compelling genealogy were not enough, Ron’s daughter — named after his mother — was killed in a car accident.
At the same age as his mother at the time of her death.
Twenty years old.
In an understatement, equal parts faith, strength and good sense, Ron says simply, “I said when this happened, we shall continue. I believe we have succeeded in being a happy family.”
When Kfar Etzion was destroyed and its residents massacred by Arabs in 1948, this farm was one of three other kibbutzim that made up the Etzion bloc. They were all destroyed, burned to ash by the Jordanian Legion.
However, residents of the other three kibbutzim were not murdered but taken to Transjordan for 11 months, then released.
The visitor center in Gush Etzion — the Etzion bloc — is now trying to modernize the technology that tells this story.
The new museum will be divided into three sections.
• Personal stories about the founders and defenders of Gush Etzion — including Yossi Ron’s parents;
• A reconstructed wartime communications trench and the actual bunker where the defenders hid, in which a movie about the return of the children to Gush Etzion in 1967 will be played;
• An exhibition on Gush Etzion in the 21st century.
Shani Simkowitz, the director of the Gush Etzion Foundation, which is revitalizing the museum, thought that Yossi Ron’s personal story — his genealogy — would make a compelling presentation abroad.
His speech to the JNF last week was his first one outside Israel.
To put it mildly, I would say that she was right.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
