11/5/97

Legends of Nes Ziona

    A man, a hoe, a sack of wheat, a modest dream.
    Reuven Lehrer's daring mission was to convince 10 Jewish men and their families to join him in a remote new outpost he had established at a forlorn site called Wadi Elhanin. That was in 1883. It took three years to achieve his goal and form what he called Haminyan Harishon -- "The First Minyan."
    Twenty years later his one-man settlement was home to 106 souls.
    Today? Twenty-seven thousand.
    The history of Nes Ziona is kept alive by the town's elders so avidly you'd think they had a personal stake in the place.
    They do.
    This is their ancestral home. Never mind that great-grandad's personal Garden of Eden is now paved over, smothered in concrete, debased by soulless progress: underneath it all, the blood soaking the earth is the blood of their blood.
    We think of Nes Ziona -- if we think of it at all -- as a couple of traffic lights between Rehovot and Rishon Lezion. Most Israelis who go there  just keep going; if they stop it's to get gas.
    You wouldn't think a place this nondescript could have a history, a claim to fame, a uniqueness to be proud of, but it does.
    The Israeli flag was created here, at first bearing the words "Nes Ziona" along the lower blue stripe; the JNF and the Histadrut were conceived here, and it is believed Hatikva was first sung here.
    Israel might have been known as the Land of Milk Only, had not Lehrer become the first beekeeper. He was an agricultural spearhead, probably the first in the country to cultivate cotton and tobacco, even rice and silkworms, not always with notable results.
    Nes Ziona has two additional distinctions: it was the only settlement established as a family enterprise, and it buried the first victim of Arab terror.
    The town's third generation, getting on in years, recently decided that the tales of heroism, hardship and heartbreak that were passed on to them, must be preserved for generations not yet born.
    Every few weeks, aging men and women traverse Nes Ziona's unrelenting traffic, strolling past the pizzerias, the video arcades, the electronics shops. They make a left at the garish Nes Ziona Mall, and slip into stately Beit Rishonim -- their sanctuary, the town's first community center, built in 1905.
    There they keep alive their flickering recollections, stories spun by their elders ...
    of Reuven Lehrer installing his 15-year-old son Moshe here in 1881 as a sort of hostage, compelling his wife to bring their other 16 children here to join him ...
    of how he made his fortune: seized for conscription by the Tsar's army at the age of 12, Reuven Patchornik deserted and took refuge with a wealthy Christian family named Lehrer who adopted him, raised him, and then left him their 44,000-dunam realm in Odessa ...
    of how Lehrer exchanged his vast holdings for 2,000 infested dunam in Palestine, watching it shrink to a meagerly 60 dunam by the time he died ...
    of how Lehrer journeyed to Jaffa Port, trying for years to lure idealistic immigrants to settle his malarial land -- and that the first to join his "minyan" was a woman ...
    about the great old mulberry tree in the center of the estate that, for the struggling pioneers, symbolized strength and eternality (it is still there) ...
    of Lehrer's pious, hassidic principles that placed the importance of prayer before anything else ...
    of his wife Faigie, the beloved "Bubbeh" whose 116-year life spanned from Beethoven to Elvis (1823-1938) ...
    of the mysterious appearance one night of a sack of flour at the doorstep of the starving Lehrer family -- the "miracle" that inspired the name "Nes Ziona."
    While they reminisce, the descendants commit their oral history to videotape, for anyone who might someday wonder what their town was like before it was civilized to death.
    Lehrer, 52 when he immigrated from Odessa, didn't come on a Baron Rothschild scholarship. He had no funding, no institutional assistance. "He brought his own fortune, built and developed, using nobody's money but his own," says great-grandson Avraham Patchornik, 71, a bear-like, good-humored chemistry professor. "He came a rich man and ended up with nothing to eat, but never mind," he says, reverently but with an earthy chuckle. "He was maybe the first to lose a fortune in this country. Mostly, it was lost on charity and tzuris."
    Avner Kahanov, who married into Nes Ziona's royal descendancy, bristles at having to relate the history in a brief sitting. "I need two or three days, at least," he grumbles. (Cajoled that his audience comes from a 3,000-year-old city, he is unimpressed.)
    "Did you know the intifada started here?" Kahanov asks challengingly. "Maybe you remember hearing Yitzhak Rabin, two years ago in the Knesset, being told that the intifada began seven, eight years ago. He said, 'Friends, you are mistaken. The intifada began in Nes Ziona, in Wadi Elhanin, when Arabs killed Avraham Yalofsky in 1888.'"
    Kahanov, 80, went to school here in Beit Rishonim, which was renovated 16 years ago as a museum. One tiny room is now a theater, where a riveting audio-visual presentation conveys the early years. In a barn-like, wood-ceilinged space nearby, 100 antique photo-portraits of the founders ring the walls, staring down imposingly at visitors, unforgotten, unforgettable.  
    Settlements. Self-sacrifice. Patriotism. Zionism. Unfashionable sentiments for many of us nowadays. But for some who still get a thrill from a fluttering flag, a nationalist song, a valiant tale of the past, Independence Day is a little extra special.