Remembering the 1929 Hebron massacre

BEN BRESKY

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Perhaps Schissel summed it up best: “I think it’s impossible to understand the reality we face today, without knowing the history of Hebron.”
Tzipi Schissel, curator of the Hebron History museum, leads a tour of the site and discusses her personal connection to the massacre Photo By: BEN BRESKY

Before the mid-1980s, if a crowd gathered at the site of the Avraham Avinu synagogue in Hebron, they would have found crumbling walls and a sheep pen. The synagogue, build in 1540 by returning Sephardi Jewish exiles from the Spanish Inquisition, was abandoned after the infamous 1929 massacre.

But last week Hebron was filled with people snapping photos of the original Torah scrolls, which date back hundreds of years. Now reconstructed, the house of worship has daily services, using the same Torah scrolls used by the community that once lived there.

Dr. Yinon Elmakias, who lectured about the Torah scrolls, was one of the academics who led the seminar marking the 87th anniversary of the 1929 massacre that took 67 lives and resulted in the expulsion of the Jewish community. Young and old walked through the now inhabited Jewish quarter in the city that suffered from the worst of the disturbances that year.

The conference took place on August 10, and began at Midreshet Hevron, a college in Kiryat Arba. Prof. Gershon Bar Kochba, a Hebron resident, spoke about what was called the Jewish ghetto of Hebron, the only place in Israel referred to by that name. With copious notes and photos of the neighborhood – including maps and diagrams of what 1920s Hebron Jewish life was like – Bar Kochba described a traditional, tight-knit, humble community on a lower economic stratum.

The next speaker was Dr. Yuval Arnon-Ohana of Ariel University. In contrast to the previous speaker, he was clean-shaven, bare-headed and spoke almost without any notes. He fascinated the crowd by his lecture on Arab riots, which were instigated by Haj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem.

Arnon-Ohana explained that Husseini’s excuse for the riots was the increase in Jewish immigration. He countered, however, that in the late 1920s, Jewish immigration was at one of its lowest points. He argued that the real reason was a bid for power by Husseini, who sought to consolidate Arab factions by whipping them into a frenzy over a common enemy.

Husseini later became a supporter of Hitler, as evidenced by the famous photo of the two sitting together in Germany.

The cause and details surrounding the riots have filled volumes. Why did neighbors slaughter neighbors? Although tensions existed in the city between Jews and Arabs over generations, daily interaction was a fact of life. For example, the chief rabbi of Hebron, Rabbi Eliyahu Mani (c.1818-1899), mentioned frequently in the lectures, was revered by Jews and Arabs alike as a spiritual leader. The Chabad matriarch Menucha Rochel Slonim (1798–1888) was also respected, and offered advice to both communities despite her seemingly outsider status as an immigrant from Russia.

Sarah Tzipporah Segal (left) (Ben Bresky)

In the riots of 1921, also instigated by Haj Amin Husseini, Hebron was calm. This led to a lax attitude seven years later. But on that fateful Shabbat on August 24, 1929, mobs of Arabs broke into Jewish homes, torturing, raping and murdering 67 people. Their bodies were mutilated and their homes looted. Although many claimed they were only seeking revenge on “The Zionists” or “the strangers,” both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews were murdered. Young and old, long-time residents and new immigrants were targeted. The remaining community was rounded up by the British Mandate authorities and sent off to Jerusalem. The memorial to the victims was later vandalized, and the cemetery plowed over.

One of the most violent and dramatic episodes of the riots involved that of Eliezer Dan Slonim, from the famous Chabad family that helped revitalize the backwater community when they immigrated en-masse in the mid-1800s. Slonim spoke fluent Arabic, and was the only Jewish member of the Hebron city council.

He was manager of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and well-known by both Jews and Arabs. It was for this reason that Jewish community members sought refuge in his home.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on October 9, 1929, in an article titled “Hebron, Five Weeks After the Massacre,” that “it could not help hearing reports of the mob’s demand that Slonim should surrender the ‘foreigners,’ meaning the yeshiva students sheltered in his house, if his and his family’s lives were to be spared, and the martyr’s historic answer, ‘We Jews are one.’” Slonim and his family, including his wife and young children, were killed. One child, one-year-old Shlomo Slonim, survived. He was found with a knife wound in his forehead in his dead mother’s arms.

Shlomo Slonim, who died in 2014, used to attend the memorial in Hebron every year. This year, the few remaining survivors are all in the 90s.

In April of this year, one of the more vocal survivors, Miriam Sasson, died at the age of 92. She was part of the Castel family, whose roots in Hebron go back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Her family was in the group that returned to the city from 1931 to 1935, before the British again deported the Jewish residents amid countrywide rioting in 1936.

It was an Arab neighbor who saved Miriam and her family from the massacre by hiding her in his butcher shop. However another member of the Castel family, 60-year-old Rabbi Shlomo Castel, was burned to death by the mob.

The irony of some Arabs risking their lives to save their neighbors while others brutalized the defenseless has been debated for decades.

One lecturer at the conference had a more personal connection to the story. Tzipi Schissel, curator of the Hebron History museum, led a tour of the site located in the historic Beit Hadassah. The building, originally built in 1893, served as one of the first Hadassah hospital branches and treated residents of all backgrounds.

In 1929 it was the site of violence, and was subsequently ransacked.

The participants of the conference viewed the new 4D movie titled Touching Eternity, about the history of Hebron. As dramatic as the film was Schissel’s description of what her grandmother went through in those dark days. Standing in a hall dedicated in memory of the victims, she told the group about Sarah Tzipporah Segal, whom her family affectionately called “Tzippora’le.”

“She was approximately 14 years old during the pogrom,” Schissel stated. She and her sisters survived with the help of an old man named Abu Shaker Amru, who refused to allow the rioters to enter his house. But the rioters were so cruel that they attacked him and chopped his leg off.” Abu Shaker is mentioned in detail for his heroism, in the book Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, by Hillel Cohen.

Dr. Yinon Elmakias lectures about the Torah scrolls in Hebron’s Avraham Avinu synagogue, some of them dating back almost 500 years (Ben Bresky)

read more: Remembering the 1929 Hebron massacre

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