While anticipating the formation of the State of Israel, around this time, sixty years ago, three major tasks stood before the leaders and citizens of the Holy land. These were :

Hagannah-Defense: Even before the formation of the State until this very day unfortunately, the need to defend the nation and its people as a right of existence has been the core focus, with a lot of energy, finance, manpower and time dedicated to this task.

Aliyah – Immigration: Nearly a million people made aliyah during the first year of the formation of the State. Olim from all corners of the world came to Israel. With all their different backgrounds and different cultures and different languages, the task to assimilate them and put them together in a ‘melting pot’ to make one strong nation with the same sense of belonging.

Chinuk & Yahadut – Education & Judaism: The Israel of today has many achievements in many aspects of education and is highly recognised in fields of technology and science, archeology, and many more. Along with this development and need to keep abreast in all aspects of modern technology and knowledge, Judaism has also flourished over the years. Thousands of students from kindergarten to Yeshivas and universities are learning, practicing and preaching the laws of Judaism – the biggest ever number in the history of the nation.

While reviewing all these major assignments, that influenced the lives of so many, I, as one of them would humbly like to recount my own story. My story begins a little after the formation of the state of Israel. At a tender age of four months, and with the help of “Aliyah Shlichim” my family made an aliyah. We arrived in Israel on a ship called “Theodore Herzl”. Being a very Zionist family, my parents decided to add “Herzl” to my first name “Chaim” (life)and I was referred to by this name right until I was nine years of age.

Our early days in the young state of Israel were in a tent where we lodged for over six months and experienced the snowy winter of 1950. From there we were moved to live in a “tsrif” – a temporary hut or shack with two or more families sharing the common amenities of shower and toilet outside the hut. We housed this “Ma’abarah” settlement for many years, where I started schooling and grew amongst friends of different nationalities, different cultures, and different mother-tongues – Ashkenazi, Moroccans, Libyans and many more. I still recall the times when we children used to play in the open space outside our ‘tsrifim’ with a crafty soccer ball made from old socks. The mothers would then call out to their children to return home – each one in their mother-tongue, all different, yet all the same in their approach. I could thus pick up a few words in a number of languages.

During the Sinai war of 1956, we housed an underground bomb shelter in the garden along with many others in the locality. We would all crowd around the single radio in the shelter anxiously listening to the ‘Chadashot’. My high school education was subsidized by the Ministry of Education for being classified as a special needs pupil under the category of gifted and talented. During the six-day war of 1967, I was in my final year at school. At this time, all teachers and staff were called to serve in the armed forces, leaving us, the senior students in charge of management of the school.

I joined the Israel Defence Forces after the six-day war. I served for a year and half teaching new “olim” from North Africa, residing in moshavim in South Israel. I married a Sabra whose parents had been victims of Holocaust. During the Yom Kippur war, I served in the Sinai desert as well as the Suez Canal facing the Egyptian Army.

When I was sent to South Africa as a shaliach, I felt I was completing a circle in bringing home some of the olim from there. Since then, I have traveled and visited many countries, experiencing the Jewishness within them, admiring their abilities and their power. This has made my love for home even stronger. After sixty years of great achievements for the state of Israel, it is still struggling and is in turmoil for various issues and because of different reasons, but my love for Israel – the land and its people is unconditional.

Rabbi Haim Dovrat