Ralph Anspach
The hulking cargo truck rumbled down the dusty Israeli highway. Sweating in the back beneath a canvas canopy, Ralph Anspach suddenly noticed there were dozens of trucks like his on the road — as well as flatbeds, limousines, hearses and any other variation of engine connected to wheels that could carry a man to battle.
Anspach was outfitted in a mismatched medley of a jacket, pants, a tunic and boots, topped by a helmet that didn’t fit.
The men were as varied as the clothes they wore and the vehicles they rode to uncertain fates. And yet, there was a palpable — and audible — camaraderie.
“We were part of this long convoy full of young people, singing,” recalls Anspach, 82, smiling at the distant memory.
“We were all happily singing, joyfully singing on our way down south.”
Anspach had on that very day joined an anti-tank brigade. He asked his newly minted commanding officer about their artillery guns. The officer flashed him a smile. What artillery guns?
Slightly bewildered, Anspach queried if it might be prudent to turn the hell around.
The C.O. grinned. “Don’t worry. The boys are going in tonight to capture Hill 113. There’s an Egyptian base on top of the hill and they have four six-pounders.”
But Anspach did worry. He was an artilleryman in World War II, and the first thing any soldier learned — really, the first thing — was that if capture is imminent, you must destroy the tiny firing mechanisms within the artillery guns. Without them, the cannons are as useless as a car up on blocks.
The C.O. grinned again. The boys — “he always talked about ‘the boys'” — stole a bunch of firing mechanisms years ago from the British. He was sure everything would work out — and it did. Not for the many young Jews whose bodies were strewn about Hill 113 in the Negev when Anspach arrived, of course. But the guns were there, and the Israelis took them.
“We used to call it ‘Bevan Ordinance,'” jokes Anspach, referring to Aneurin Bevan, a British government minister at the time.
“The British gave the Egyptians all kind of ordinance when they left, and then we would take it from them.”
In a way, it was Bevan who convinced Anspach to put down his college textbooks and pick up a gun to defend a nation he had never visited.
Anspach was a young college student at the University of Chicago, where Bevan’s wife Jennie Lee, a Labor member of the British Parliament, was delivering a symposium.
Following the speech, a professor cornered Lee and asked her why Labor, which ran on a platform of allowing Jews into Palestine, was now sending troops to keep them out by force.
“I will never forget the way she looked at him in this scathing British way and said, ‘Young man, how naïve can you be? Haven’t you ever heard of oil?'”
Anspach, now a retired San Francisco State economics professor, shakes his head. “And that tells you more than thousands of tomes that have been written. The Jews didn’t have any oil, but the Arabs did. That gave me some real insight into the world.”
By that time, however, Anspach had gleaned plenty of insight. His family had left the semi-autonomous state of Danzig just a few steps ahead of the Gestapo. By the time they fled, purity laws formally forbade Jews from going to the movie theater or the beach (Anspach, who had bright blonde hair and turquoise eyes, went anyway).
When Anspach marched into the New York office of the Jewish Agency and said he wanted to fight, he received an exceedingly cool reaction. Fighting for a foreign army would be illegal, he was told. The Jewish Agency wanted no part of any illegal activities. Perhaps he’d be interested in joining an organization called “Land and Labor for Palestine”? He would pick fruit to replace the agricultural workers risking their lives in the war.
Anspach was not high on the idea of sailing 6,000 miles to pick some oranges. And yet, by the time he was sent to his fifth doctor and received his fifth physical, he caught on that Land and Labor for Palestine had bigger plans for him than climbing trees.
So did the FBI. During an initiation in the Catskills, government helicopters buzzed the resort where all the young Jewish men were staying.
“They told us to go outside and play pingpong, because you’re here on vacation,” recalls Anspach.
He was passed tickets to a steamer headed for France. A man with an English-language newspaper tucked under his arm would meet them at the dock. They were to follow him — discreetly.
From there, Anspach ended up at a transit center in the south of France. Israeli volunteers mixed with Holocaust survivors in the illegal camp; all the western countries had agreed to block immigration into Israel. And yet, French gendarmes smoked their Gauloises and bickered among themselves, even while the camp residents performed military exercises in plain view.
“At that time, the French were very good,” says Anspach, who now lives there up to eight months a year.
Finally, a hodgepodge of bedraggled refugees and strong young men disguised as bedraggled refugees was carted to Port Bouc. A 500-ton riverboat steamer “that looked like it would have been used on a movie set as a derelict in the Mississippi” idled at the quay. Names were shouted out, and Jews boarded the ship one by one. But the names had little relation to the people hopping off of the dock.
“These must have been lists of people the French agreed to,” speculates Anspach. “Anyway, my name was Sarah Rabinovich.”
So, it was “Sarah Rabinovich” who ducked for cover and choked on acrid black smoke while Egyptian planes “used us for target practice” atop Hill 113.
“Sarah Rabinovich” fired his six-pound gun — and, later, top-of-the-line German 57-millimeter beauties with the swastikas still on them — at Egyptian armored compounds or troop positions as bullets whistled by (not once, incidentally, did the anti-tank brigade encounter a tank).
Yet it was decidedly not “Sarah Rabinovich” who was nearly shot to pieces outside of Auja. It was easy to tell; after all, Anspach was caught with his pants down — literally.
“One time in Auja, I was relieving myself in the desert; you’d often go a little ways away. And all of a sudden, this Egyptian Spitfire [warplane] tries to kill me!” Now he grins at the absurdity of the situation. He did not back then.
“He made two [strafing] runs. And there I was, hugging the ground. I didn’t even have a gun with me.”
Anspach’s war ended in a remote settlement called Um Rash-Rash. The Jordanians were put to flight and the Jews stripped off their dust- and sweat-caked uniforms and streamed into the Red Sea. In the distance, three British destroyers prowled the waves, providing a visual hint to the Israeli army that attacking nearby Aqaba, Jordan would be unwise.
Um Rash-Rash has a new name now: Eilat.
In the years since he returned to the United States, Anspach has learned a great deal about the war he fought and the Jewish state he helped create. Apparently, he was some sort of imperialist aggressor, and his vastly superior army used high-tech weaponry to stave off bands of ill-supplied and poorly organized Arabs.
“I heard so much of that when I was teaching [at SFSU]. The Jews won because of Holocaust guilt and the imperial feeling behind them. That is not how it happened. All the imperialism — it was on the other side!” he recalls, his persistent smile long gone.
It wasn’t imperialism that motivated Anspach. It was something far more palpable. He remembered his last day on German soil. An SS man in a showy black uniform glanced at Anspach and his brother’s passports.
“He asked us whether we were Jewish and we said ‘yes.’ And he said, ‘Boys, I hope we’re not going to see you here again, fighting us,'” recalled Anspach.
At the time, the Anspachs offered a curt “no, sir” — on the outside.
“Both my brother and I thought the same thing. ‘You son of a bitch. You just give us a chance to get that gun.'”
Jacques Torczyner
Names, places and dates. It was Johnny Cash who sang “I’ve Been Everywhere,” but Jacques Torczyner really has — and he’s got the names, places and dates to prove it.
With startling alacrity, the 95-year-old Rossmoor resident rattles off the play-by-play from Zionist meetings on several continents or recalls long, windswept walks along the Seine with future Israeli heads of state.
It has been an improbable life for a man who would have been content simply carrying on his father’s Antwerp diamond business. But the Nazis had other plans.
The entire Torczyner clan fled Belgium, traveling on the lam from Paris to the Pyrenees, where they walked over the border to Spain. From there, the family took a boat to Cuba. And on Dec. 17, 1940 — Torczyner remembers the dates for everything — they landed in Miami.
“And we made such a big mistake!” he says. “We had cousins who asked us to buy land on Collins Avenue, but we went to New York. Oh, if we’d done that, we’d have made a lot of money!”
In New York, Torczyner soon maneuvered himself to the top of the political department of the World Zionist Organization. Before long he was the right-hand man of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the fiery and outspoken Zionist orator.
Silver told Torczyner to join the Republican Party — “there were no Jews there.” And that suited Torczyner fine. Along the walls of his flat are photographs of him in various stages of life with every major Republican figure from Sen. Robert Taft to President George H.W. Bush.
Silver’s name is not as well known as the men and woman currently pictured on, say, Israeli currency. But the Cleveland rabbi and Zionist Organization of America president was a powerful influence on the people and government of the United States regarding the formation of a Jewish state. And his man in the trenches was Jacques Torczyner.
It was Torczyner who oversaw the North American delegate election for the World Zionist Congress in December 1946. On the table were two courses of action: Should Israel declare statehood, or hold off in exchange for Britain’s promise of allowing 100,000 Jewish refugees into pre-state Israel?
This election was all about rounding up the most delegates. Torczyner had delivered the plurality of delegates to the plenum, and the vote went the ZOA’s way: A declaration of Jewish statehood was recommended. The decision came at 4 a.m., and Torczyner still remembers how future Israeli President Chaim Weizmann and his “moderates” slumped off into the night after losing the day to Silver and David Ben-Gurion.
It was a major day in Torczyner’s life, and for more than the obvious reasons. “Silver had said, ‘Jacques, in your campaign for the World Zionist Congress, if you don’t succeed, I’ll chop your head off.'”
Yet the groundwork for a declaration of Israeli statehood — and the inevitable war to follow — was long in the making.
On July 1, 1945, Torczyner, Ben-Gurion and 16 others filed into the East 57th Street apartment of Rudolph Sonneborn in Manhattan.
For nearly seven hours, Ben-Gurion spoke. At the end of the day, the Haganah had been founded. Sonneborn would soon be running weaponry to Israel.
“Ben-Gurion said something that nobody in America would like to hear. He said we cannot create a state without a war,” recalls Torczyner.
“And he explained how we must be able to defend ourselves — because don’t forget, America had made an embargo on weapons to the Mideast.”
Torczyner recalls walking the streets of New York with future Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, whose pockets were bulging with cash for purchase of guns on the down-low.
When asked where Kollek made his purchases, Torczyner gives a wicked grin.
“I don’t know, he didn’t take me there. This was illegal, don’t you forget.”
On Nov. 29, 1947, Torczyner sat in the stands at a former skating rink in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., that had been converted into a United Nations building. By a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions, the U.N. voted Israel into existence. It wasn’t a particularly nerve-wracking day for Torczyner. He knew the votes were there.
“Let me tell you, I know we had the votes and I’ll tell you why. On Thursday, it was Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, we didn’t have the votes. So we forced the U.N. to observe Thanksgiving and because of the weekend, they postponed [the vote] until Saturday,” he recalls.
Spotted a few days, Torczyner and his ZOA allies began working individual delegates. When asked what methods of persuasion they employed, he grins again.
“I won’t tell you. I don’t want to corrupt you. But the only way for some of them — you know how.”
He rests on his couch, surrounded by books and maps and photos of Silver, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. His more youthful self stares out from many of the photos as well.
“I think I can tell you that this was a historic moment in Jewish history. So I was part of Jewish history,” he says with a nod.
“And now, 60 years later, I am worried about the future.”
Rabbi Jack Frankel
In 1948 it was not a cliché to shout “round up the usual suspects.”
And in 1948, Rabbi Jack Frankel was one of the usual suspects.
When Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Security Council mediator for the brewing Israeli-Arab war, was shot to death Sept. 17 of that year by Jewish extremists, every suspicious character for miles around was hustled into a jail cell.
Frankel was bearded, sunburned and sweaty after fighting in the Negev.
“I looked like a rhapsody in rummage,” he says.
He soon found himself in a cell next to a man who carried a .45-caliber automatic in the same little box as his tefillin.
Days went by. As he protested for the hundredth time that he was an American volunteer soldier who didn’t have anything to do with assassinations, he suddenly found himself being stared at from afar by a pair of stern, unblinking eyes.
And, for just a moment, he was free. He was 11 years old again and sitting at the terminus of 69th Street between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
Back then there were only two houses on the entire sandy block. He would take his old dog out to the rotting scow on the bay, and beneath the blazing Brooklyn sun Frankel would devour Alexandre Dumas or Raphael Sabatini before sprinting home, grabbing a broom out
of the closet and whacking his much older brother on the derriere while bellowing “I’m Captain Blood, and I challenge thee to a duel!”
“I couldn’t sit for a week when he got through with me,” he says.
And, just as quickly, he was back in the dingy Israeli cell.
The piercing eyes focused on Frankel were framed by a flowing beard. The Chassidic rabbi walked, slowly, toward the bars.
“Yankel Frankel — that’s you, isn’t it?”
It was Rabbi Avraham Shapiro, the prison’s chaplain and the headmaster of the Brooklyn yeshiva Frankel had attended for more than a decade starting at age 5.
“Last I saw you, you were running away to join the Marines. Now you’re in a jail cell. What happened to you?”
The former Ner Tamid rabbi loosens his tie, leans
back in his chair and runs a hand through his full head of silver hair. A cable car rumbles and clangs its way past his Powell Street apartment.
He offers a wan little grin and exhales deeply. Simply put, a lot happened to him.
At 81 — or, as he puts it, “four times 20 and 1” — Jack Frankel looks younger than his years. But 15-year-old Yankel Frankel was already shaving, smoking and three years into a job driving a milk truck. When he volunteered for the Marines, they took him.
Three months later, when it was revealed that he was shy of his 16th birthday, he was given his honorable discharge. He enrolled in Brooklyn College (“who could refuse a veteran?”). Not quite a year later, he ran away again and joined up. This time, they didn’t catch him until he was 17, which was the entrance age.
Frankel has taken great pains to extirpate much of his World War II experience from his memory. On being shot down off Saipan and spending nine days as a “guest” of the empire of Japan, he only notes, “They could have taught the Germans some of the essence of torture.”
Frankel was freed when the Americans overran the island.
Another time, when he was in the advance invasion force of Okinawa, a fellow yeshiva boy happened to leap into Frankel’s foxhole. As shells soared over, illuminating the night, the two reminisced about “the rebbe who used to pull the strap off his pants if you came in late — and, one day, he dropped his pants.”
After the war, Frankel began working for the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Ostensibly, he was a roving radio man — and Frankel does have a remarkably good radio voice, even today. In reality, he was smuggling people and armaments to Israel. After moving “a shipment” of 100 refugees out of Hungary, Frankel decided it was time to smuggle something else into Israel — himself.
The 21-year-old left his passport with a friend in France. Posing as a Yiddish-speaking Polish refugee, he and 1,800 other ragged souls trudged onto a creaking death trap of a ship meant to accommodate no more than 400 passengers. (“When Leon Uris came to interview us before he wrote his “Exodus” he said, “I can’t exaggerate this.” And I said, “This is the truth!”)
The coast of Israel was in sight when the British diverted Frankel’s ship to Cyprus. The refugees, many of them camp survivors, were shepherded behind barbed wire once again.
It was a short stay for Frankel. Haganah fighters infiltrated the camp. Anyone who was willing to hoist a gun for the Jewish state was welcome to join them. Frankel and others cut wires and crawled their way to freedom. Once more, he boarded a rusting ship of dubious seaworthiness and was off.
Once more, the British intervened. This time, however, there would be no return to Cyprus. Those who could swim (and even some who couldn’t) leapt overboard and paddled for the Israeli shore. Frankel was fished out of the water by a bear of a man. He was congratulated for joining the Palmach (and if he didn’t like it, he could go back in the water). What’s more, if he didn’t learn how to ask for food in Hebrew, he’d go hungry.
Frankel was outfitted in Czech shorts, an English shirt and a French Foreign Legion cap. Completing the mix-and-match ensemble, his boots were heavy British clogs.
Finally, he was handed a Czech rifle from 1903 (unfortunately, Frankel was not the direct beneficiary of the modern rifles he had earlier obtained for Israel from the Philippine government in a deal struck in Vienna).
Frankel does not go into heavy detail about his combat experience in Israel. But it is safe to say that he did not find himself exchanging gunfire with an enemy as fanatically set upon victory as the Japanese in Okinawa. This was a life-or-death struggle for the Jews — and friends did die in Frankel’s arms — but the average soldier in the invading Arab forces just wanted to survive.
Little wonder, then, that Frankel’s forces prevailed in Safed thanks, in essence, to the world’s largest noisemaker.
Ostensibly, the Davidka was a 3-inch diameter mortar jury-rigged by Israeli forces. As a weapon, it was of limited utility — it packed barely any bang and was wildly inaccurate. The massive, 90-pound shells it fired were actually larger than the mortar itself, protruding grotesquely from the barrel of the cannon (hence the inaccuracy).
But it made a hell of a noise.
“The noise in those hills really reverberates. It was a hollowish, eerie, shuttering sound. Anyway, it scared the hell out of the Arabs, and they took off,” Frankel recalls.
The very Davidka that Frankel credits with “saving our necks” now stands in the center of Safed — in Davidka Square.
Frankel was later transferred into the Israel Air Force. He flew in tiny Piper Cubs, opening the door and tossing grenades onto the Arab soldiers below. The planes flew so low that men hurling grenades out the door were often hit with their own shrapnel.
On other occasions, Frankel and others pushed huge boxes of broken glass out the back of a C-47 cargo plane, scattering thousands of shards across the runway of Cairo’s airport.
“It was that kind of war,” he says of these makeshift methods of maiming and killing.
So, in a nutshell, that’s what happened to Yankel Frankel. That’s what he told his old headmaster, Rabbi Shapiro, when the latter got him out of jail.
And that’s what he told the Israeli soldier he hitched a ride with from the airport — a young officer named Ariel Sharon.
But that’s another story.
Realizing the dream: Six Bay Area men and the founding of a nation
cover design | cathleen maclearie