The Ingathering

A half-million immigrants have joined the half-million population which the state of Israel had when it was set up in 1948. At least a half-million more are expected in the next two years. The pressure of the flood is felt in every side of life in the new nation. If the phone doesn't work, the electricity goes off, the road is washed away, or a waiter doesn't know his job--Israelis blame it on "the ingathering of the exiles." A current joke in Israel: "For 2,000 years we Jews have been hoping and fighting and praying for The Return--and it had to happen to me!"

Barbed Wire. All Jews are officially welcome. Most of the immigrants now arriving are not educationally, physically or psychologically equipped to build a new homeland.

New arrivals are herded into a former British army camp renamed Shaar Aliyah (Gate of Immigration), for two weeks or so of medical isolation. The heterogeneous immigrants stroll aimlessly: a gangling youth in a heavy blue ski suit that was fine for the weather he knew in Rumania will gawk at shriveled, turbaned old men clad in the pajama suits of North African Arabs; chattering old ladies from Hungary, clutching fur scarves, look incredulously on squatting North African women in long cotton shifts.

The immigrants come up against the tribulations of Israel soon enough. They are bunked in huts, or in tents without floorboards, and their camp is encircled by a fearsome reminder to some--rolls of rusty barbed wire. The immigrants separate themselves immediately into groups of Europeans and Orientals; it is a distinction that transcends all the lesser national differences, holds almost as firmly as the color line in the U.S.

The Jews from Yemen, living culturally and technologically in about the year 1000 A.D., are segregated from all the rest. They have almost nothing in common even with other Oriental Jews. They have to be taught to use forks and spoons, to make up their cots and sleep on them, instead of packing away the sheets in their knapsacks and curling up on the ground. Social workers watch carefully to see that blankets and food issued to children are not immediately taken by their fathers; in patriarchal Yemen, children come last.

Mrs. Golda Myerson, Minister of Labor, whose daughter caused a sensation by marrying a Yemenite boy, tells how a delegation of robed Yemenite elders, their straggling side curls almost as long as their beards, came to her to complain that they could not tolerate the brash army youngsters who worked in their camp. They said soldiers had snatched their children, cut off their side curls, shaved their heads; that determined men in white coats had prodded and inspected their women, even violated the privacy of childbirth. All this, the Yemenites insisted, was against the rule of God.

Mrs. Myerson called on some rabbinical colleagues in the government to back her up, explained that soldiers were under instructions to cut only side curls infested with lice. "The rule of God is not only to let hair grow," she said. "Cleanliness is also part of the rule."

Complaint & Gratitude. In 1948, European Jews outnumbered Orientals four to one. Last year the balance began to swing the other way round: 60% of the immigrants were Orientals. The percentage will go much higher.

In the work camps where immigrants are sent after their medical isolation, the complaints take the tune and pitch of national origins. In one camp of 250 tin huts at the edge of a fertile valley, Rachel Brill, a Rumanian woman, complained about the treatment given her son-in-law, Michael. Michael had degraded himself, was earning his living by building a house. (She omitted to say that his family would get the house.) "Imagine," she wailed in singsong Yiddish, "Michael, a shopkeeper, working with his hands! It would never happen in Rumania. What a country this is! There is nothing to be had, and nothing works properly. People have no respect. Why, in Rumania, now, if there should be trouble getting a shopkeeper's license, you just go to the Ministry and quietly pay 5,000 lei to some official. Here, nothing can be done."

When she was asked if she would rather go back where she came from, she sighed: "What for? Communists have nationalized our shop, and they don't like Jews. It's bad there, but this is Erets Yisrael, the Promised Land! Then why don't they keep the promises?"

In a nearby hut, Miriam Awat, a Yemenite girl, spoke up for her giggling girl friends, all clad in Mother Hubbards, long tight Arab pants, and beaded headdresses fashioned like a crusader's mailed hood.

"We had a larger house in our village in Yemen," she said, "but this one [and she pointed to a tin hut, empty except for a stack of blankets, a little stove and a big pot] is better. Rain makes more noise on the roof, but it doesn't come in. It's true we don't eat so much meat as we did, but there are other things I never dreamed of. Look at that little pipe by the road there. Water comes if you turn the top piece!"

Miriam and Rachel do not compare notes; they have no common language. In a deep sense they never will have, but their children pick poppies together. The miracle is in the children, say Israel officials, who have seen the worlds represented by Miriam and Rachel blended in the children of the collective farms.

The Link & the Fear. Children are the link between the older inhabitants and the immigrants. Townspeople take children into their homes for the winter months. Otherwise, the Europeans have little to do with the newer immigrants. "The older Jewish population wants immigration, but doesn't want the immigrants near them," said one official. "They're afraid of the "orientalization" of their country, but they know we have to save the Oriental Jews."

The fear of "orientalization" lies at the root of the current pre-election politics (TIME, Feb. 26), in which child education is a chief issue. The Orthodox Jews, a great majority of whom are Orientals, perceive that the only long-run hope of the governing European socialist group to keep its hold on the nation is through education of children. The Orthodox Jews object to turning the children of immigrants over to schools run by Histadruth, the semi-official socialist trade union and cooperative movement.

The Europeans, on the other hand, have leaned far backwards in the case of the Israeli army, where they lowered educational standards so as to accept Oriental officers. "We did not want to be known as an army of white officers and black men," one officer said.

Frictions between the middle-aged and older people of East & West will persist for years. A government official at a reception camp gazed over a milling mixture of races and mused: "It took Moses 40 years to lead the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. But it wasn't because he lost his way. Moses wandered in the desert because he wanted the old generation to die off. He wanted only children of the desert who had never seen Egypt to start the new community.

"That would be the best way for us, too, but we can't do it."

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