Declaration of State of Israel: Wikimedia Commons via Israel Ministry of Foreign Aff airs/Public Domian: Israel Declaration of Independence: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
nces the Declaration
David Ben-Gurion, the fi rst prime minister of Israel, publicly pronou portrait of Theodor
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h beneat
Aviv Tel
of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, in
m of Art building
Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, in the old Tel Aviv Museu
fi nished, were
yet not
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scroll, the
on Rothshild Street. The exhibit hall and
. Wallish
Otte prepared by
sisters and not go?” — said that she and her
peers knew about the Holocaust and that many
South African Jews of Lithuanian heritage lost
relatives back home.

“The Holocaust wasn’t why I volunteered or
why most other Jews did,” she insisted.

In 1948, she treated many patients who had
survived the Holocaust before their injuries in
the war. They experienced trauma on top of
trauma, she said.

She accounted for her choice to go to Israel
despite pressure from her parents with her spirit
of adventurousness. It’s not every 2,000 years
that one can see the Jewish state rebuilt, she said.

She didn’t want to wait another two millennia.

High-Flying Graphic Designer
Asked whether the Holocaust motivated him,
the late Alex Zilony, who died at 107 on March 3,
replied: “No. What a question!”
Zilony, who was born in Poland and grew up
in Israel, studied in the United Kingdom before
becoming a Haganah pilot. He was one of the
founders of the Israeli Air Force, and speaking
from his home in Tel Aviv, he said that he designed
the IAF emblem, which remains in use today.

“We have wanted a state for over 3,000 years,”
he said. “Maybe the possibility of building a
state was higher after the Holocaust because
we got many new immigrants and war veterans,
but Jews had been migrating since the 1920s
and even before this,” he said.

Zilony’s daughter, Ruth, who was present
during the interview, was surprised at her
father’s response. “This was not the answer I
expected,” she said, highlighting generational
diff erences in Israel today.

Despite the tendency of American, South African
and British volunteer pilots to pride themselves on
the proclamation that they helped solidify a victory
in 1948, Zilony was adamant that Israel would have
prevailed without that help.

Stay Alive!
“They say three Jews, fi ve opinions,” the late
Tom Tugend said in a phone call from his
California home late last year. “This time, it was
half a million of us, one opinion — stay alive!
Pretty much the whole Diaspora or every
Jew who could hold a gun sent someone to
represent their community.”
Despite having fl ed Nazi Germany to the
United States and later returned to Europe as
a U.S. soldier, Tugend insisted that his desire
to help create a Jewish state was a more
signifi cant motivator than the Holocaust.

Jews came from a variety of backgrounds,
noted Tugend, from Jewish IRA (Irish
Republican Army) arms smugglers to Indian
Jews. Some, like Tugend, had served in
the U.S. military, or in the British or French
armies in World War II. Some were offi cers,
while others lacked any military experience,
he said, and a few even came from Kenya.

“The South Africans were among the
most dedicated fi ghters,” he pointed
out. “There was a Jewish Texan cowboy
with a Southern accent. There was a
Jew with a Scottish accent, and I recall
one from Yorkshire whom nobody could
understand. They all wanted to defend
the new nation of Israel.” ■
Israeli Declaration
of Independence
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