The heroes of Yad Mordechai
Against crushing odds, they stood and fought
Seventy-six years ago, the Jewish state was reborn. After centuries of exile, expulsion, slaughter, and relying on others’ goodwill, Jews with more than a little chutzpah had spent decades reviving their ancient language, turning malarial swamps and barren deserts into productive farmland, building universities and hospitals, and laying the groundwork for a country of their own once again in their indigenous land. They took their destiny into their own hands. And no sooner was the nation declared than five Arab armies invaded with the goal of annihilating the Jewish state in its infancy.
In the Negev desert, the scattered and isolated Jewish communities knew they would have to hold the line. During the months of undeclared war that followed the UN vote for partition in November of 1947, they had been harassed and often cut off from the rest of the land’s Jewish community, the Yishuv. And when the Egyptian Army invaded in May of 1948, they were on the front line.
Kfar Darom was one of those communities and had only 30 young people to defend it. With limited arms, they somehow repulsed a major attack backed by artillery. When they ran out of hand grenades, the religious young defenders filled their tefillin bags with explosives and hurled them at the invaders. The news of their brave stand quickly spread and gave heart to other communities facing long odds.
One of the best known stories in Israel’s War of Independence is that of Yad Mordechai. This kibbutz located on the main road between Gaza and Tel Aviv was founded by Polish-born members of Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement. Its name was chosen to honor Mordechai Anielewicz, also a member of Hashomer Hatzair and the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the largest anti-Nazi Jewish rebellion during World War II. Given Yad Mordechai’s strategic location, its people knew they would be a target once the invasion came. Frequently cut off from the Yishuv by Arab attacks, they spent months shoring up their defenses.
On the eve of battle, the children and a few women of Yad Mordechai were evacuated, leaving slightly over 100 men and boys and two squads of the Palmach (the striking force of the Haganah, the Jews’ defense organization) to defend the kibbutz. They had a few dozen rifles, a couple mortars and machine guns, an anti-tank gun, and not nearly enough ammunition to face an Egyptian attacking force of infantry battalions backed by armor, artillery, and aircraft.
The children of Yad Mordechai are evacuated. Photo source: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/hoi_yad_mordechai/
For five days beginning on May 19, 1948, the Egyptians subjected the kibbutz to brutal artillery and air bombardments and numerous infantry assaults. The shelling destroyed the vital water tower and killed most of the livestock. And with no choice but to stand and fight, the defenders fought off attack after attack even as their casualties mounted, their weapons failed, and their ammunition dwindled.
By the end of the fifth day, the defenders were at the end of their strength. The underground shelters they had constructed were full to bursting with the women and the wounded. They were down to 60 able-bodied defenders spread out over 10 defensive posts, their ammunition was nearly depleted, and they had lost their precious Browning machine gun in a direct shell hit. With intense fighting in nearly every corner of the young country, the Palmach couldn’t spare further men or arms for Yad Mordechai’s defense, and the painful decision to evacuate was made early on the morning of the sixth day.
The people of Yad Mordechai objected to being depicted as heroes, but there’s no doubt that’s what they were. They stood against overwhelming odds to defend their home, tying down major resources of the Egyptian Army for five crucial days that the reborn Jewish state could use to prepare the defense of Tel Aviv. The Egyptian Army, which had anticipated a quick march to that city, never made it to Tel Aviv.
In her moving account The Six Days of Yad-Mordechai, Margaret Larkin brings to life the drama, tragedy, and heroism of the kibbutz’s stand, reminding the reader that war is not about statistics, but people. Anyone looking to learn more about Yad Mordechai can do no better than to grab a copy of Larkin’s wonderful book. Here are just a few of the incredible people whose stories she recounts:
Sasha Ivri had arrived in Mandatory Palestine as an “illegal” immigrant in defiance of the British blockade. He and his brother had survived the war living with Jewish partisans in the forest–their parents were murdered in a concentration camp. He had come to Yad Mordechai to train for his new life in Israel. On the first day of battle, a mortar shell hit the defensive post he was manning and Sacha fell, the first casualty. He was 20.
Adek Weinfeld had been a member of the training kibbutz back in Poland. When the Germans invaded, he escaped to the Soviet zone and ended up fighting in Stalingrad with the Red Army. After the war, though eager to leave for Palestine, he directed a home for orphaned Jewish children in Poland (he called them “my children”). He finally arrived in Yad Mordechai in March of 1948 and two months later stood among its defenders. He, too, fell on the first day of battle.
Dov was only 16 and had lied about his age to join the Palmach. Late at night after the first day of battle, a group of Palmachniks crept out to the wadi to take much-needed arms and ammunition from the fallen Egyptians. When the Egyptians began firing on them, they raced back inside the kibbutz and discovered Dov was missing. They whistled Ha-Tikvah, the Zionist anthem, and he finally appeared. He had been busy plucking a revolver off a dead officer as a souvenir. On the fifth day of the battle, he ran to the fray despite a head wound and was hit before he could reach the post. Only two days after he died, the Palmach received orders to demobilize him (his mother had made the petition, which was granted because of his age).
Batia was in charge of one of the shelters. She spent the first day keeping the other women busy caring for the wounded and directing things–in the packed shelter, the women had to take turns sitting and standing, and no mention was to be made of the evacuated children. As night fell and Batia had no word of her husband Shymek, she went out into the trenches herself. No one could or would tell her of Shymek’s fate. It was only after she returned to the shelter and tried to rest that she overheard one boy tell another that “that comrade who sang so nicely and was always laughing” was killed that morning. That was how she learned that she was a widow, that their baby and their six-year-old son were now fatherless.
Wolf Kriger and his wife Vered returned to Yad Mordechai just before the battle, only a few days after she had a stillbirth. He, too, had survived Stalingrad as a soldier of the Red Army and was repatriated to Poland after the war. He and Vered had journeyed through Germany and France for months before being granted certificates to emigrate to Palestine. Vered stayed in the trench with him for part of the morning on the first day of battle and only went to the shelter at the insistence of the commander. Wolf sent her notes by runner throughout the fight. On the second day, a six-pound shell from an Egyptian cannon landed directly on Wolf in Post 1 after they had already fought off a number of Egyptian advances. In the stress of the battle, Russian-born Vered lost her Hebrew and Polish and felt isolated in the shelter among the close-knit women who had long known each other. When she learned her husband had been killed, she became hysterical and couldn’t be consoled.
Arale Meller had been determined to join the British Army’s Jewish Brigade during the war despite his flat feet. He applied as a driver–despite the small matter of not knowing how to drive. He enlisted another soldier to teach him and was accepted. On the fourth day of the battle of Yad Mordechai, as the Defense Committee debated what to do as their situation grew increasingly desperate, Arale, who had been wounded by shrapnel that day, became overwhelmed by nerves and threatened to break out and fight his way through the Egyptian lines on his own if no one was willing to join him. The very next day, an Egyptian tank breached the perimeter of the kibbutz and the defenders desperately poured fire on it. At last, Arale took up two grenades, charged the tank, and threw them at the machine gun slit as he was riddled with bullets. His courageous sacrifice took the tank out of commission.
Chaska and Zalman were childhood sweethearts in Poland. He got the chance to emigrate first in 1938 and then the war kept them apart. She escaped to Lithuania and, through incredible persistence and luck, managed to secure a rare visa for Palestine. When she finally reached Jerusalem, Zalman had already enlisted in the British Army. Upon learning of her arrival, he claimed a toothache and managed a two-hour leave in Jerusalem, where there was a military dental clinic. He finally made it in to see the dentist with 40 minutes left in his leave. The dentist asked which tooth hurt, Zalman randomly picked one, and the dentist promptly pulled it. Zalman made it to see Chaska with 10 minutes remaining in his leave and a bloody hole in his mouth (and if you’ve got a better love story than that, I’d like to hear it). They both survived the battle of Yad Mordechai.
Leika Shapir had been orphaned as a baby in Poland and raised by a strict grandfather and three aunts who disapproved of her longing to make aliyah. She delayed her dream for years out of obligations to her family members. At last she reached Palestine on the day the Second World War broke out. Throughout the battle of Yad Mordechai, she served as one of the runners who dashed through the trenches carrying messages between the defensive posts and headquarters after the loss of the telephone system in the first bombardment.
When it was decided to evacuate the kibbutz, not all the women and grievously wounded men could fit in the few armored trucks the Palmach managed to get through. A column of over a hundred people set off in the night bearing two wounded men on stretchers. At one point the Egyptians on the surrounding hills noticed their movement and opened fire, and the column scattered in chaos. While everyone else reached the safety of the nearby kibbutz that was their destination, one stretcher and its bearers never made it. Naftali Holtzman, the wounded man, was one of the Palmachniks who had come to defend Yad Mordechai. The stretcher bearers were Jacob Yahalom, who had left his own kibbutz for Yad Mordechai out of love for his wife Shifra, and Leika. Naftali, Jacob, and Leika were caught by an Egyptian patrol and their capture was announced on Cairo radio, although the Egyptians later denied any knowledge of them in response to Red Cross and United Nations inquiries. They were certainly killed.
In all, 26 defenders of Yad Mordechai were killed. The survivors spent difficult months trying to build new lives, but in November of 1948 the Israeli Defense Forces liberated Yad Mordechai and the joyful kibbutzniks immediately returned home to rebuild what the battle had destroyed. Their spirit and bravery are emblematic of that generation of citizen-warriors who stood and fought so that the Jewish state might survive.
Memorial to Mordechai Anielewicz. Photo source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Mordechai#/media/File:Yad-Mordechai-Anilevich-memorial-1.jpg
On October 7, 2023, thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel from Gaza and unleashed a bloodbath of torture, mutilation, mass rape, and slaughter. They kidnapped over 200 hostages and murdered more than 1,200 men, women, and children, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. On that terrible day, the security team of Yad Mordechai defended their home, just as their ancestors did 75 years earlier. They managed to repel the invaders, though in the aftermath of the attack, the community was largely depopulated along with much of Israel’s south as the IDF responded to the war Hamas started.
In 1948, the citizens of the infant state of Israel, whether they were native-born sabras, survivors of the Shoah, immigrants fleeing persecution and violence in Arab lands, kibbutzniks, city-dwellers, students, pioneers, or shopkeepers, stood and fought because they had no choice. They had no other home. In the decades since, Israelis have rarely had the opportunity to forget the lessons of 1948, but Israel’s enemies still have failed to learn them. They’d do well to study some history.
This week, as Israel goes from remembering the Shoah, to remembering its fallen soldiers, to celebrating 76 years of independence, it’s clear that whatever the divisions and challenges Israel may face, the spirit and determination of 1948, born of necessity, are still alive.
Note: A slightly different version of this piece appeared last year at .
Very interesting history, important especially for those of us who know little detail of the founding and rise of the state of Israel. Thanks!
Thank you for your part in keeping history alive.