Review of New Book: The 1929 Massacre in Hebron

'Ghosts of a Holy War': How the Israel-Hamas War is rooted in the 1929 Hebron massacre

Grand Mufti shows SS youngster how to use a rifle

Yardena Schwartz, author of Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, is an award-winning American-born journalist who spent 10 years living and working in Israel. In 2019, she was handed the sort of literary treasure that most journalists can only dream of.

Ten years earlier, Suzie Lazarus (née Shainberg) and her husband, Paul, were still living in the old Shainberg family home in Memphis, Tennessee, but were about to move. Clearing the attic, they found a box filled with documents.

Suzie found, together with cables, telegrams, photographs, and a diary, more than 60 letters, each up to 10 pages long, written from what was then Palestine and dated in the late 1920s, all sent from her uncle David to his family.

The letters fascinated Suzie’s daughter, Jill. Over the next decade, Jill organized and digitized all of them, and finally archived them at her synagogue. Then, feeling that the archive deserved to be more widely known, she located Yardena Schwartz and entrusted her with the letters and diary.

What Schwartz discovered was truly enthralling.

Grand Mufti with Hitler

An amazing discovery connecting the 1929 massacre to today

Aged 22, David Shainberg, intensely religious and possessed of a deep feeling for Judaism, decided that his purpose in life was to travel to the Holy Land and study Torah. Against the wishes of his parents and family, who called his mission crazy, he set sail from New York Harbor on September 12, 1928.

When he landed in Palestine two weeks later, he spent a few nights in Tel Aviv, visited Jerusalem and the Kotel, and then made for the Hebron Yeshiva, the largest in the Holy Land.

His letters home provide a detailed picture of Palestine at the time and portray Hebron as a peaceful city, with Jews and Arabs living and working side by side. He tells of Jewish holidays and weddings, says Schwartz, “attended by Hebron’s Arab leaders and sheikhs, who danced into the night alongside rabbis.”

On August 24, 1929 – a Shabbat – some 3,000 heavily armed Arabs marched into Hebron and attacked the Jewish Quarter. They went from house to house raping, stabbing, torturing, castrating, and burning alive their unarmed victims. Sixty-seven Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered – among them David Shainberg.

Schwartz perceives a direct link between that Hebron massacre and the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, also a Shabbat.

“The forces that drove Arabs in Hebron to slaughter their Jewish neighbors in 1929,” she writes, “were identical to the forces behind October 7.” Schwartz’s title, Ghosts of a Holy War, indicates the centrality she ascribes to the religious element in the two episodes – in 1929, passions about protecting al-Aqsa Mosque, and in 2023 the fact that Hamas named its onslaught Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Schwartz takes her readers through the hundred years separating the two pogroms. She records how Britain tried to reconcile the opposing interests of the peoples under its control – the Arabs and the Jews – and finally admitted the failure of its Mandate government and withdrew. She recounts the foundation of the State of Israel, the refusal of many of its Arab neighbors to recognize it, and their several attempts to crush it.

Extensive research and detailed interviews with people on both sides of the conflict lie behind Schwartz’s accounts of how controversy surrounding the Temple Mount and the Western Wall helped fuel Arab-Israeli conflict on and off throughout the century.

Always present were Arab fears, easily ignited, that Israel intended to restrict Muslim rights over al-Aqsa Mosque and the adjacent Dome of the Rock. Yet she is also alert to political realities and does not fail to mention that in waging the deadliest attack in Israeli history, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s “alleged goal was to scuttle an imminent peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

Schwartz does her readers a real service by providing the historical background to the extremist philosophy at the core of Hamas jihadist rejectionism. She does this by tracing the rise of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, endorsed in that position by the British Mandate authorities. She describes his anti-Jewish fanaticism and his powerful influence on Arab opinion. Among the numerous photographs that illustrate her text, Schwartz includes the notorious shot of al-Husseini in close discussion with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1941; and another, less well known, showing him giving the Nazi salute as he inspects Waffen-SS troops in November 1943.

Al-Husseini is on the record as participating in the planning of Hitler’s “Final Solution” and urging the Nazis to hasten the elimination of Europe’s Jews. The line of philosophy from these beliefs to the founding principles of Hamas is clear.

What Schwartz might have made a little more of are the realpolitik considerations that led the Shi’ite revolutionary regime of Iran into supporting, financing, and weaponizing the Sunni Hamas organization to help achieve their common goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

Ghosts of a Holy War tells a gripping story, recounting not only events of historical magnitude but also the reasons behind them. Schwartz has an especially attractive writing style, which keeps the reader turning the pages. For anyone interested in understanding the back history of Black Sabbath – namely, October 7, 2023 – this is a must-read volume.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-824086

Remembering the 1929 Hebron massacre

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, built in 1540 by returning Sephardi Jewish exiles from the Spanish Inquisition, was abandoned after the infamous 1929 massacre.

But recently 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 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 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) 

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.

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 

In her role at the museum, Schissel meets a wide range of people including family members of the old community, something she says brings her inspiration.

“A soldier stationed in Hebron brought his 99-year-old grandfather, who recognized his own father in an old photo of the Avraham Avinu Synagogue,” she related.

Today, with only a handful of survivors, efforts are being made to preserve the memories. The Jewish Community of Hebron has posted interviews of many survivors on YouTube, which feel almost like many of the Holocaust testimonies prepared by Yad Vashem.

Both have mentions of ghettos, pogroms and lost communities.

Old newspaper articles are now accessible on website such as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. One, dated September 27, 1929, describes the trial of the few rioters who were brought to justice: “The simple-worded testimony of thirteen-year-old Judith Reizman, of how she saw her father, mother and uncle pursued by a mob of howling... brandishing knives and daggers, later finding the bodies in the gutters, produced a dramatic atmosphere in the Hebron court.

“When the Reizman girl had told her story in the breathless silence of the courtroom, the judge asked her if she could identify anyone... she calmly walked up to Ibrahim Abd El Assiz, a young Hebron merchant, her father’s next door neighbor, saying, ‘Yes, Ibrahim was nearest my father with a knife uplifted when the mob overtook my father.’ Then addressing the Arab, who hung his head in shame, the girl asked him in the kindest voice imaginable, ‘Ibrahim, how could you?’” The article later described Hebron as “commercially a dead city. Merchants’ stalls are heaped high with unsold fruit and vegetables...”

In a follow-up on December 18, 1932, an article titled “Decline of Hebron Since Massacres of 1929” noted “nearly 50 percent of Hebron’s dwellings are untenanted.”

Reciting the Kaddish prayer at the city’s ancient Jewish cemetery

Another article dated October 4, 1929, quotes Rachel, seven-year-old daughter of Eliahu Pelazzi (also spelled Palachi): “I remember the day of the riots. We were all at home, I, father, mother, grandmother and some neighbors,” she stated at the trial. “Muslims suddenly began knocking at the doors, broke one down and beat at another with iron bars. The room suddenly was filled with Muslims, but I recognized only Ismael. He had a knife in his hand. With this he stabbed my father. I saw it. I know Ismael from before,” the child declared.

A follow-up article dated April 24, 1930, stated the accused “was acquitted in the High Court, because the court was not satisfied with the witnesses offered by the prosecution.”

A video testimony posted on YouTube shows Rachel, an older woman with gray hair, describing life in Hebron in the 1920s.

Other articles that covered the trials describe Jewish witnesses identifying former Arab friends as those that participated in the massacre. Several of the victims were Americans, who had moved to Hebron to study in the prestigious Slobodka Yeshiva. The State Department listed eight Americans killed: William Zev (Wolf) Berman of Philadelphia; David Sheinberg of Memphis; Benjamin Hurvitz and Wolf Greenberg of Brooklyn; and Harry Frohman, Hyman Krasner, Aaron David Epstein and Jacob Wexler of Chicago.

Most of those caught received only light sentences.

After a dozen or so were sentence to death, the British government commuted the sentences. In the end, three rioters were executed by the British. A June 17, 1932, article stated that Arab leaders called to “remember the Arab ‘heroes’ who were executed... The Arab Executive announced a general strike on the day of the executions, and there were demonstrations by Arab school children.”

The conference ended with a memorial service at the ancient Jewish cemetery in Hebron. The graves of such Torah luminaries as Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas (Reshit Hochma) and Rabbi haim Hezekiah Medini (Sde Hemed) are located here, as is a memorial to the 1929 victims. Kaddish and the traditional El Malei Rahamim prayer were said, and as the sun set over the city and the large Israeli flags waved over the plots, the mourners stood in silence.

Hebron seems to be a city of ironies. Today, almost 700,000 people visit every year, especially to see the monumental Cave of the Patriarchs, burial site of the biblical Matriarchs and Patriarchs. Yet the city is also known for violence and religious/ethnic tension.

As the mourners faced the quiet cemetery in the old section of the city, behind them in the distance could be heard the honking cars and busy factories of the Palestinian Authority side of Hebron, the commercial center of the region.

Perhaps Schissel summed it up best: “I think it’s impossible to understand the reality we face today, without knowing the history of Hebron.”

https://www.jpost.com/metro/remembering-the-1929-hebron-massacre-464460