During World War Two Nehemiah volunteered for service in the Jewish Brigade of the British army and fought the Germans in Italy. In 1948 he fought the Arabs from the trenches of his northern kibbutz. His war-time experience would be put to good use. During the Six Day conflict last June, he coordinated Ayeleth's defenses, consisting mostly of an elaborately trenched promontory of high land jutting into the Huleh basin. No attack ever came, thanks to the lightning victory of the Israeli army. But captured documents listed Ayeleth first on the Syrian plan of attack. Ayeleth controls the main road to the Huleh valley.
During peace-time, his work was agricultural and manual. Moving to Ayeleth with his family in 1952, he spent several years in its fish-ponds, sloshing waist-deep in water, hefting loads of squirming carp. Then he transferred to supervising the citrus orchards. He spent long days pruning dead limbs off grapefruit trees, or pacing the orchards' endless rows with a sprayer.
In this way, Nehemiah has come a long way from Frankfurt, his birth place. But he has not left his past behind him yet. Nehemiah is secretary of Ayeleth Hashachar--a combination of mayor, personnel supervisor, presiding elder and youth coun selor. Essentially, he is responsible for the immediate well-being of 1000 men, women, and children. The job requires all the managerial talent of a Ford presidency and sets a pace that would leave any tycoon panting. He has more than handled the challenge. This is his second term as secretary, and he's been asked to stay six months beyond the usual two year period. Before it drove them out, Europe gave a generation of Israelis the tools to make a new start.
And the culture of the Ghetto also gave them the tools to make that start meaningful. Nehemiah has no problem with his leisure time. On weekends he scrambles with tourist groups over the ruins of the ancient city of Hazor across the main road from the kibbutz. His lips tremble with a trace of a smile as he watches his audience respond to his saga of 5000 years.
Books in four languages (Nehemiah is fluent in French and English as well as Hebrew and German) line the walls of the modest two-room home he shares with his wife, Alisa -- a short, heavy woman with a hesitant but pleasant smile. When his work permits, he often spends evenings over a chess-board. As a child, he used to play four of his friends simultaneously -- while blindfolded himself. Now he is one of the two internationally recognized chess referees in Israel. During August, he referees a three-week tournament in Jerusalem, with fifty-one nations competing.
Nehemiah has made the best of two worlds, but he has also made a choice about which he prefers. When he leaves his secretariat, he wants to return to the citrus orchard. More important, he has not pushed his children toward higher education. All bright, his three sons--aged 17, 19, and 24--did well in the kibbutz high school which serves three other settlements in the region. But only the 19 year-old has matriculated for university admission, and he probably won't go. A farmer does not need four expensive years of college. The oldest, tall dark and vigorous, is a member of an elite paratroop reconaissance unit which took high casualties during the war. He has already moved with his wife and child to another kibbutz.
Not all kibbutz parents have followed Nehemiah's lead with their offspring. If they did, it would not matter much to the country, since the kibbutz population is only three or four per cent of Israel's total. And many kibbutz children are demanding education, regardless of their parents' preferences.
Still, Nehemiah's decision is the predictable conclusion of a life of forgetting. He has bequeathed his children a life free of the faintest taint of the holocaust; a life which, despite the benefits of European skills and culture, he would have cherished for himself.
(Tomorrow: the people of Ayeleth Hashachar-three sketches.