MembersA JERUSALEMITE RECALLS

The announcement, on the second day of the Six Day War of June 1967, sent me back to that dreadful 13th of April 1948. Like others on the Mount, there I was, witnessing the Hadassah convoy massacre, helpless to intervene. Doctors, nurses, patients, Hebrew University scientists, 79 – including my close friend from Jewish Brigade headquarters Avraham (Albert) Soffer. And the British police had assured: ‘the road is clear’!

It wasn’t the first massacre in which I was, so to day, ‘involved’. I was three-and-a-half years old in August 1929, when the Hebron massacre occurred – with a similar number of Jewish victims. I retain a picture in my mind, of standing at a corner of our street in Romema holding the hand of my grandfather, who was in animated discussion with two or three other grown-ups – and of two British Tommies billeted in the house next door, who used to come over to us for a ‘cuppa’.

Romema was then still an elite neighbourhood, with a healthy mix...