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MY MOTHER DIED ON FEBRUARY 15. IN GOING THROUGH her papers, I found a collection of letters that she (and in part, my father) had written from Jerusalem in 1949 to their parents back in the US. One of these letters describes their Pesah seder at kibbutz Kfar Menahem-the first seder celebrated after the end of the War of Independence.
My parents-Helen Vogel and Albert Yanow-met on February 29, 1948 in New York. My father had left Boston for Palestine in 1946 with his brother Bill (Yehiel) after they were both demobilized from the Navy. Bill resumed his university studies, begun at Harvard, enrolling at the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus. My father, who had his bachelor's and had been ordained at JIR, continued work on his master's thesis and was hired as advisor to overseas students at the Hebrew University. They were both involved in erecting some of the tower and stockade "facts." Bill married a kibbutznikit, a fellow student, and stayed. The University sent my father to the US in early January on a fund-raising mission (although his mother, to her dying day, thought he was raising money to buy guns for the Hagana!). On February 28, he had a phone call from a colleague who was supposed to speak at a Hadassah affair the next day but was ill, and he asked my father to fill in for him. My mother, as an officer of Junior Hadassah, was acting as host, saw my father sign in the guest book giving Jerusalem as his address, and struck up a conversation. They were married in the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue by Rabbi de Sola Pool on March 27 (but that's another story). She was 27; he, 28. After waiting several months, they finally sailed for Israel a year later, in February 1949, and set up housekeeping, very much still the newlyweds, in Jerusalem. They initially shared quarters with three other couples, until April 20, when they moved to an apartment on Rehov Aza that they had been asked to hold down while its owner was on shlichut in South America for six months.
The letters commence March 17, 1949 and continue until July 14. My mother wrote most of them, typing on that very thin, crinkly...