Spring • Passover 5767/2007

26
Israel
(cont’d)
In the Yardin Winery
Inside the Rebbe’s room, ‘770’,
Kfar Chabad
The Farbrengen
The Golan Heights, Wine Tasting, The
Palmach Museum and…Kfar Chabad
The next day we had to
alter our itinerary due to
the snowy conditions on
the roads. So, instead of
hiking in the Golan we
opted to see a moving
depiction of the Six-Day-
War, on the very spot that
the fighting had occurred.
Because we had just driven
along the exact same roads
we were watching in the
documentary, our group
was riveted to the screen.
“Totally incredible”, was everyone’s
reaction.
From there we went to a winery
in Katzrin where we were treated to
a tour of Yardin’s state-of-the-art
bottling plant, culminating in a
wine-tasting extravaganza. Happy
anyone? Yes, we campers left smiling
and a little looser than when we
walked in.
We spent the next three hours on
the bus en route to Tel Aviv and the Palmach
museum. Traffic held us up and we got to the
museum just in the nick of time to see the last
show. The movie was a docu-drama describing
the years before and right after Israel became a
country via a group of young fighters called the
Palmach. The Palmach was the regular fighting
force of the Haganah (the Jewish underground
army during the British Mandate of Palestine.)
The Palmach was established in 1941. By the
war of 1948 it had grown from humble beginnings,
as depicted in the docu-drama, to three
fighting brigades and auxiliary aerial, naval and
intelligence units.
We decided it was no mere coincidence that
on the same day we saw how Israel defeated the
millions of Arabs surrounding the small country in
its beleaguered beginnings in 1948 and how they
miraculously won the Six-Day-War. The history of
this young country was not lost on anyone, from
Brandon Goldberg at eleven years old, the
youngest in our group, to Moty Farkas, over eighty.
After our meal we made a short stop at
Kfar Chabad, about five miles from Tel Aviv.
Truthfully, it had been a long day, everyone was
tired and the thought of getting on and off the
bus again was daunting. At Rabbi Zalman’s
encouragement everyone changed their attitude
and ‘came back to themselves’, finding the energy
to keep going. It turned out to be one of the
highlights of our trip.
Kfar Chabad was founded by the previous
Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn in 1949.
The first settlers were mostly recent immigrants
from the Soviet Union, survivors of the terrors of
World War II and Stalinist oppression.
On May 5, 1957 a band of fedayeen entered
the village. They made their way to the synagogue
of the local agricultural school, where the
school's young students were in the midst of
the evening maariv prayers, and raked the room
with gunfire from their machine-guns. Five
children and one teacher were killed and another
ten children wounded; their blood soaking the
siddurim that fell from their hands and splattering
the synagogue's white-washed walls. Four days
later the village received a telegram from the
Rebbe containing a single sentence - three Hebrew
words - but these three words sufficed to save
the village from disintegration and its inhabitants
from despair. Behemshech habinyan tinacheimu,
wrote the Rebbe "By your continued building
will you be comforted." That very night the village
elders held a meeting to discuss how the Rebbe's
directive might be implemented. After a short
discussion, a decision was reached: a vocational
school will be built where children from disadvantaged
backgrounds will be taught the printing
trade. On the very spot where the blood was
spilled, the building will be raised.
Today Kfar Chabad has a population of almost
2000 men, women and children housing many
schools, a restaurant, synagogues and, an exact
replica of Lubavitch World Headquarters in New
York, affectionately referred to as ‘770’. That is
where we stopped to daven Maariv. If anyone
has ever been to 770 in New York they know it
is at the same time a humbling and exciting
experience. Rabbi New had never been to 770 in
Kfar Chabad and he was completely blown away by
the exact replication of the building in New York,
down to the minutest details. His excitement and