Raquela (58 page)

Before the council could act, the University of the Negev offered Moshe the post of president. He tried hard to explain that although he was greatly honored, his interest lay not in the presidency but in the creation of a new, revolutionary community-medical school.

In November 1972, Yigal Allon, then minister of education and culture, called Moshe to his office. “This new university in the Negev needs a president with your skills and experience.”

“But my interest,” Moshe protested, “is in the medical school.”

Allon smiled. “Your taking the presidency may be helpful in promoting it.”

While Moshe still hesitated, Allon added, “Mrs. Meir would like it very much.”

Moshe agreed to take the presidency until the medical school could be created. But heated debates raged. Why did a little country like Israel need four medical schools? What was wrong with the ones they had? And why more doctors? Israel already had more doctors per capita than any country in the world. In his years of innovation Moshe had won strong friends and powerful enemies.

He won the battle.

He estimated it would take him a year to assemble a faculty and students and get the school off the ground. Meanwhile, he would become president of the university, whose name he would soon change to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, to honor the modern-day prophet whose dream had been to open the vast empty desert frontier.

On the afternoon of December 7, 1972, Raquela sat in the front row of the university hall in Beersheba. Mama and the children sat beside her. On the podium, Moshe was being sworn in as president.

She looked around; the hall was filled with dignitaries from Israel, from Europe, and from America.

Outside the window of the modern concrete building, she could see cars roaring down the road. Crowds of people moved swiftly. The dusty Wild West one-horse town she had come to live in with Arik twenty-three years ago was now a metropolis of one hundred thousand people.

Industries sent their smoke into the air; thousands of children were in elementary and secondary schools; Russian violinists and cellists sitting beside Sabras and musicians from other lands filled the seats of the Beersheba Symphony Orchestra; artists exhibited their painting and sculpture in the new Beersheba Museum; Arabs and Jews sipped coffee together in countless cafés and restaurants and rubbed shoulders in department stores and shopping centers.

Beersheba
, she thought—
this is the living absorption center for new immigrants. No refugee camps—not even good ones like Fawwar. No tents. No metal huts
. Beersheba had shown how refugees could be absorbed into a country's life.

She looked at Moshe on the dais, his handsome face and graying temples set off by his dark suit. He was talking of his plans for this new university—how it would serve new immigrants, how it would reach Arabs and Jews.

He can be anything he wants
, she thought.
Dynamic. Original. He can speak a dozen languages as if he were born to each one. His fame is spreading. He could be Israel's ambassador anywhere
.

But no
, she thought, continuing the dialogue with herself.
Politics is not what Moshe wants. He wants to educate young men and women. He wants to improve our whole nation's health. He wants his students to have seeing eyes and feeling hearts
.

She saw this day as a rehearsal for her next decade. She was forty-nine; more than ever before, she would have to divide her life. She would spend half the week in Beersheba as Moshe's wife, hostess to his faculty, his students, and the myriad guests and visitors from home and overseas. They would live in the ranch house the university provided its president in Omer, the growing suburb of Beersheba—its horizons, the mysteriously beautiful desert. She had already given the house her own touch, with exotic memorabilia from their trips abroad and, on the walls, her own needlework tapestries in the vibrant reds and yellows and turquoise blues she loved.

The second half of the week belonged to her life in Jerusalem: mother to Amnon and Rafi, stepmother to Jenny and Vivian, daughter to Mama, who lived alone in the little cottage Papa had built, and who now leaned on her for protection and love in the last years of her life.

Feminine, aware of her beauty, aware of her face, her statuesque body, and her deeply sensual needs. A working woman. Always she would define herself as a working woman. Sharing the language and destiny of all women of Israel. Women had to work. Women had to stand with their men, carrying on their backs the burden of life in a besieged land. Surrounded by hostility. Isolated. Nearly half the country's still-meager resources spent on defense. On survival.

She sat up tall in her chair in the university hall. Yes, she could handle her life, balance it all.

She looked at Moshe on the podium; he was concluding his speech, painting his picture of the future, how his university would help open the desert for the future, for life itself.

A smile moved her lips apart. She was in love. The passionate love of a mature woman. And she was happy. Fulfilled.

Once again she filled the house with Papa's calla lilies.

Vivian was marrying a popular and handsome young captain in the Tank Corps. His name was Gideon Weiler, and both were twenty-two.

Vivian, soft and radiantly beautiful with Moshe's patrician features, stood beneath the velvet canopy under the Jerusalem sky. Gideon fixed his eyes on her, openly, passionately, oblivious of everyone else in the garden.

In the weeks and months of the young couple's courtship Raquela had grown to know Gideon well. He had come from South Africa as an eight-year-old child, with his four brothers, his sister, and their parents. His father, Rabbi Moses Cyrus Weiler, once the leading progressive rabbi in South Africa, was now chairman of the board of Progressive Rabbis in Israel.

“I have given all my children a military education,” Rabbi Weiler had told an audience in a Shabbat service attended by Raquela and Moshe in a crowded little synagogue in Jerusalem. “I dedicated my children to the defense of Israel. My Judaism follows the prophets and sages of Israel, whose wisdom encompasses the universe. I believe in justice and righteousness as the great ideals of the Jewish people. But this is not in conflict with our dedication to the State of Israel, the greatest experiment in Jewish life in the last two thousand years.”

Raquela had listened to the sermon, holding back the lump in her throat. He had already given one son to Israel.

Adam, Gideon's older brother, a brilliant student at Sussex University, in England, had rushed out of class in June 1967, forced his way on an El Al plane without passport or ticket, to fight with the Armored Corps in the Six-Day War. He had survived that war—young Major Weiler—only to be killed in 1970, twenty-five years old, in the northern sector of the Suez Canal. It was Nasser's War of Attrition, his undeclared war to destroy Israel economically through blockade, through terrorism, and by killing her soldiers guarding the Canal.

Gideon had followed in Adam's footsteps: a graduate of the military academy at Haifa, an officer in the Armored Corps, a born leader; single-minded; fearless; a career army man who adored his men and his tanks.

Gideon was Rafi's idol.

An army chaplain, standing before the bridal couple under the
chupah
, sanctified the wine and handed the glass to Gideon and Vivian to sip.

Raquela's heart pounded against her chest. She saw Rabbi Weiler's light-blue eyes blur with tears. Was he thinking of Adam?

What did it mean to be a mother and a father in Israel?
she thought. Gideon was being married in his captain's uniform. Amnon, though he had finished his three-year army stint and entered the first year of medical school, was on active reserve duty as a lieutenant. She turned her eyes to Amnon, quiet, dependable, a reservoir of inner strength.

Rafi stood next to Amnon. Rafi. She could feel his warmth and laughter filling the garden even as his guitar flooded the house each evening with his music. Rafi, the humanist, writing poetry, devouring books of philosophy and classical literature, prowling through the bookstores, buying books as his treat to himself, inscribing them
TO RAFI. FROM RAFI
. Rafi, who could court five or six beautiful girls, totally unconcerned that each one knew about the others.

Rafi, who had nearly died from her virus, was just turning eighteen. He would finish his last term at high school and in August enter the army for his three-year service. Rafi had already told her, “I'm going into the Tank Corps. I want to be with Gideon.”

The chaplain was intoning, “I pronounce you man and wife. May the Lord bless you and keep you…”

Gideon stamped on the glass.

“
Mazal tov. Mazal tov
.”

The words of joy rang through Papa's garden.

On Saturday, October 6, 1973, the synagogues of Israel were filled. It was the holiest day of the year—Shabbat and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

In Israel, as all over the world, men and women and their children were intoning the prophetic words: “
On Yom Kippur, it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die
…”

The Arabs struck.

Young and middle-aged Israelis, many with their prayer shawls still on their shoulders, raced out of the synagogues to join their units.

To the survivors of Hitler's death camps, this was a grim reminder. The Nazis had always chosen the Jewish holy days for an
Aktion
—systematically rounding up and murdering Europe's Jews. Yom Kippur was a favorite day for terror. It was to catch the Jews unprepared. It was to break their spirit.

Now it was not the Nazis; Egypt and Syria had launched the surprise attack. And Russia had given them the tools of war.

In the south the Egyptians flung pontoon bridges across the Canal. They sent waves of Russian tanks across the bridges. Thousands of soldiers forded the Canal in rubber dinghies. The Israelis had built a line of fortresses along the Canal—the Bar-Lev Line. The Egyptians surprised the soldiers in their bunkers; some were killed in their underwear before they could even reach for their guns.

In the north, one hundred Soviet
MIGS
streaked through the sky, strafing and bombing Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. Beneath the
MIGS
, seven hundred Syrian tanks attacked. They broke through the 1967 cease-fire lines, and, in a wall of fire, hurtled through the Golan into kibbutzim. They were headed for the heartland of Israel.

Amnon burst into the house and grabbed his uniform and gun.

Raquela bit her lip. He must not see her fear.

Rafi was already in training camp. Gideon was somewhere in the Golan with the Tank Corps. Now Amnon was leaving.

She dared not weep.

She looked at her serious-faced firstborn. What does one say to one's son? Are there words in any language?

She searched her mind. Are there special words to send your son into battle?

He came toward her. “Good-bye, Mother,” he said.

“Good-bye, Amnon.” She held him tightly.

Then she kissed him and let him go.

A deep depression spread across the land.

The people were stunned. How could their leaders have been so taken by surprise? How could their invincible army have been caught literally sleeping?

There had been signs, if they had only read them, that President Anwar el-Sadat was planning a new war.

In 1972, General Saad el-Shazli, Egypt's chief of staff, beating his drums, had made the grisly prediction, “We will chop the Israelis up in a meat-grinder war.”

Sadat himself, in March 1973, had told an American journalist, “Everything in this country is now being mobilized in earnest for the resumption of battle, which is now inevitable…Everyone has fallen asleep over the Middle East crisis, but they will soon wake up.”

On Friday, October 5, 1973, the Russian advisers in Syria packed, pulled up their families, and flew home. Prime Minister Golda Meir waited for more signals.

Then, at dawn on Yom Kippur, the signals came. Egyptians were massing men and tanks along the Canal. This was no military exercise. Golda's chief of staff, General Dado Elazar, pleaded for total mobilization and a preemptive strike. But Moshe Dayan, her minister of defense, disagreed. The United States had warned them against taking a preemptive strike.

It was a tragic dilemma.

Whoever strikes first in the Middle East has all the advantages. The lives of hundreds of soldiers would be saved; the war would be swift. But weighed against that strategic advantage was the threat of losing U.S. aid.

In the end, Golda agreed with Dayan. No total mobilization. No preemptive strike.

Not only Israel but the rest of the world as well, even U.S. Intelligence, was caught by surprise. And suddenly, throughout America and Europe, millions of people, Christians and Jews, galvanized themselves into action, expressing tangibly, emotionally, their ties with the beleaguered country.

In New York the associate dean of the Catholic Fordham University, Joseph Mulholland, sent a letter to the United Jewish Appeal: “We have already made a financial contribution,” he wrote of himself and his wife. “We are willing to help in any other way you feel possible—to answer phones or lick stamps. I would be willing to go to Israel to relieve a man for other duties. You know, the world stood silent while the Six Million went into the gas chambers, but I do not intend to remain silent while millions of the survivors are flushed down an oil well.”

Raquela, returning to work in the hospital, found a whole cadre of American, Canadian, and South African orthopedists, surgeons, burn specialists, and nurses who had rushed over to help.

The Israel Air Force was being decimated. Its planes were disintegrating in midair, destroyed by Russian-built
SAM-6S
. On Yom Kippur, ten Phantom jets and thirty Skyhawks were burned in the air. Most of the pilots' bodies were pulverized before the men could even open their parachutes.