It sometimes happens that certain gifts given to archives end up lying in dark corners unattended for years. The reasons vary – there is a shortage of staff, there is more pressing work, the collection requires a language other than the official English and French – but eventually it all gets done.
This is what happened to a gift from the Oberman family, a collection that came to the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives (CJCCC) prior to 1988.
The collection was placed in three boxes, a short description was entered into the database, and since it turned out to be mostly in Hebrew, it was not looked at more closely.
A language expert was finally found, and earlier this year, the Oberman collection got the treatment it deserved. It turned out to contain quite a few surprises.
Since Yehudit and Morris Oberman were known as fervent Zionists who dedicated their life to working on behalf of Israel, it was assumed that the collection contained documentation pertaining to that. But upon closer scrutiny, the collection was found to contain much more.
The first surprise was discovering that Yehudit Oberman née Braslavsky (1901-2000), came from a very unusual family. Her father, mother and five children, emigrated from Ukraine to the Holy Land in 1905, when Yehudit was four years old. The family settled first in Ramla, a then-Arab village halfway between Jaffa and Jerusalem, where the father ran an inn for about two years. They then moved to Jaffa to allow the children to go to proper schools.
Tragically, within four years of their arrival in Jaffa, the father, aged 42, died, leaving his widow in dire straits as the sole provider of the family. How this brave woman managed under the miserable conditions of the early days of Jewish settlement, during the corrupt regime of the Ottoman Empire, belongs to a separate account. Suffice it to say that she did, and her five children grew and thrived. Of her three daughters, however, two ended up leaving what was then Palestine. Yehudit married Morris Oberman and came to Montreal. Her sister Miriam went to Paris. The three remaining siblings stayed on for the rest of their lives.
The second surprise was two-pronged.
First, was the realization that one of Yehudit’s brothers was none other than Yosef Braslavi (1896-1972), the pioneer geographer of the Land of Israel who wrote the first guidebook to the country after walking its length and breath. His six-volume work, Hayadata et Ha’ aretz? (Do you know the country?), is still in print today, as are many other books, articles and pamphlets on the same subject.
(Her other brother, Moshe (1902-1961), was also a writer who wrote extensively on the labour movement in Israel.)
Secondly, there were more than 500 letters written in Hebrew by Yosef Braslavi to his sister, spanning 50 years and covering all the main events of world and Jewish history of the time.
The final surprise lay among the hundreds of folded and twisted pages of those letters. It was a group of photographs mounted as postcards, some dating back to World War I and others to the 1930s. Two seemed especially interesting.
The first depicted a sad looking family sitting under a makeshift cover. The message on the back, in Russian, refers to hard times and the death of the head of the family. Judging by the date of the second postcard, 1919, it could be a Jewish family on its way to exile, having been forced by the Turkish authorities to leave Palestine because they were foreign nationals.
We know more about the second postcard. It was written by Yosef in 1919 from Jerusalem to his beloved Yehudit, and depicted a strangely macabre scene: five men clad in white robes dangle from separate gallows while some soldiers are posing for the picture.
Through the miracle of the Internet, we were put in touch with a Hebrew blog, www. israelitomstones.blogspot.com, run by Oded Israeli, and discovered the meaning of this picture. Israeli had traced a descendent of one of the victims and related the following story.
World War I was a terrible time for the Ottoman Empire – the army was losing battles everywhere and soldiers were deserting in great numbers. At first, an amnesty was declared in the hope of luring the deserters back, but when that failed, military police were employed using informers to catch deserters and put them to death.
Yosef Amozig, a recently arrived immigrant from Morocco, was a successful tailor living in Jerusalem. When war broke out, life in Jerusalem grew very difficult. Gamal Pasha, the Turkish commander in chief at the time, made life miserable for the Jewish population. People lost their livelihood and starved to death, leading to epidemics and general demoralization. Amozig closed his workshop, gave his wife a conditional divorce in case he did not return (for fear of leaving her an agunah) and enlisted in the Turkish army; he was posted to Be’er Sheva as a tailor.
Sometime during his stay there, his commander sent him to Jerusalem to buy material for two suits that he wanted made for himself and gave Amozig a three-day pass. Amozig arrived in Jerusalem, bought the material and reopened his workshop, working day and night to make the suits.
At this point, a tragic set of circumstances set in. Informers noticed him working in his workshop, caught him and put him in prison. He did not have the army permit on him. It was somewhere in his house and could not be found. In addition, his commanding officer for whom he was making the suits was suddenly transferred.
Two weeks later, when his wife finally found the permit and ran with it to the prison, it was too late. The gallows were set up in front of Jaffa Gate and five victims were hanged as an example to all others, Yosef Amozig being one of them.
The five victims were two Jews, two Christian Arabs and one Muslim Arab. A large crowd was present, including many dignitaries. The executioner was a Jewish policeman by the name of Mordechai Sasson, who was a good friend of Amozig’s and cried all the while he was doing his duty.
At nine o’clock in the evening, the bodies were taken down and brought to burial. Amozig was buried on the Mount of Olives, not yet 30 years old.
A photographer, Chalil Rad, took pictures before the bodies were removed and displayed them in his shop window. According to one version, when the English took over administration of Palestine, they confiscated all existing copies and prohibited them from being displayed.
What a haunting tale! And it took one small postcard, lying like the proverbial needle in the haystack, to bring it back to life.
It is also a great example of why archives are so important.
Naomi Caruso is a writer and Hebrew translator who often volunteers for the CJCCC Archives.
