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(JTA) — In Might 1948, a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship, the Marine Carp, was carrying passengers from New York to Haifa when, stopping in Beirut, it was met by 400 Lebanese troopers. Israel had simply declared its independence and battle was underway — the Lebanese had no intention of permitting Jewish males of preventing age to sail on to the nascent Jewish state.
Among the many 69 passengers faraway from the ship and trucked to a former French army camp within the metropolis of Baalbek was a Jerusalem-born polymath and former Haganah fighter named Aharon Ariel. Ariel had been learning historical past at Columbia College and Talmud on the Jewish Theological Seminary when the battle broke out and rapidly rushed dwelling.
After the U.S. authorities brokered the discharge of the prisoners in late June, Ariel was despatched again to the US and tried once more to get dwelling. Finally, he and quite a lot of the detainees “discovered inventive methods to get again to Israel,” as one historical past of the incident places it, and he rejoined the Israeli army.
Nonetheless in his 20s, Ariel had already appeared to embody the historical past of Israel — a sample he would maintain the remainder of his life as a scholar, broadcaster, encyclopedia editor, translator and father of a son who would himself develop into a prisoner through the Yom Kippur battle. He died June 20 in Jerusalem at age 97.
“My grandfather was a real son of Jerusalem,” a granddaughter, Tamar Ariel, wrote in a tribute posted shortly after his loss of life. “Born simply outdoors of Jerusalem within the Palestinian Mandate in 1925, the youngest of 6, and raised on King George St., he was a scholar and lover of Hebrew, historical past, and Jerusalem. “
Aharon Ariel labored as a journalist whose assignments, in keeping with his granddaughter, included the trial of Nazi battle prison Adolf Eichmann. He labored as editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” a monumental reference work issued between 1949 and 1983. His books embody a historic lexicon, written with the historian Joshua Prawer in 1964, and a translation of “Annals of England” (1968) by the British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan.
The son of immigrants to Israel from Hamburg, Germany, he spoke a exact tutorial Hebrew and delivered an everyday Hebrew lesson, “Rega shel Ivrit,” on Kol Yisrael, Israel’s predominant after which solely radio station.
“This was earlier than Israel had a tv station, and … when it had only one radio station,” remembered one other granddaughter, Yael Ariel-Goldschmidt.”I’ve by no means met or heard anybody converse higher Hebrew. As a toddler I assumed his job was … merely to talk Hebrew.”
In his youth he attended Ma’aleh, a spiritual highschool in Jerusalem, the place his finest good friend was Yehuda Amichai, who would come to be considered Israel’s best poet. At 14, he joined the Haganah, the final protection power of the pre-state Jewish neighborhood, ultimately changing into a junior commander.
Aharon Ariel rides on the shoulders of his childhood good friend, Yehuda Amichai, at left. The 2 attended the identical highschool in Jerusalem earlier than Israel grew to become a state. (Courtesy Yael Ariel-Goldschmidt)
He studied arithmetic at Hebrew College earlier than, in 1947, he went to New York Metropolis for his graduate research.
When the battle interrupted these plans, he joined the preventing that might final till March 1949. His models suffered main casualties, together with quite a lot of his shut pals.
After the battle he labored as a Hebrew trainer whose college students included an American immigrant named Batya (Betty) Cohen, who had been raised on New York’s Decrease East Facet and got here to Israel as a member of Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist youth group. The 2 married in 1951 in the US, the place Batya had returned for graduate research, and returned to Israel to dwell. Batya died in 2021.
They’d three sons and 9 grandchildren, one in every of whom predeceased them.
Throughout the Yom Kippur battle, a kind of sons, Yaakov, was wounded, captured and tortured by Syrian forces. He spent 9 months as a POW; as a result of the Syrians refused to launch the names of prisoners, his mother and father knew he was alive solely after they noticed {a photograph} of him taken by a Turkish journalist. Throughout his captivity Aharon and Batya lobbied in Israel and the US for his launch.
“My father, with a gaggle of different mother and father, went to the US and met with anybody prepared to satisfy them,” recalled Yaakov Ariel, now a professor of non secular research on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Along with withholding the names of the captured, Syria refused Pink Cross visits or mail. “Many mother and father didn’t know what was happening.”
As soon as once more the US brokered a prisoner change. Afterwards, the elder Ariel not often talked about his personal captivity in 1948 nor his son’s ordeal, in keeping with Ariel-Goldschmidt.
“My grandparents by no means spoke to me about this, apart from as soon as,” she recalled. “My good friend Jordana came to visit on Shabbat for lunch and introduced her little sister, who was simply younger sufficient and daring sufficient to ask questions nobody else requested. My grandmother took out picture albums with newspaper clippings from when my father was MIA, from when he was a POW. That’s how I discovered that my grandfather was elected by the mother and father of the POWs to fly to the U.S. and marketing campaign on their behalf, to induce the U.S. to exert stress on Syria and dealer a prisoner change, which the U.S. (and [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger) ultimately did.”
Her grandfather was forthcoming on many different matters.
“He was a connoisseur of whiskey, artwork, pescatarian meals, and low,” wrote Tamar Ariel. “He and my grandmother launched me to Impressionism, taking me to artwork museums throughout Israel, the U.S., and Europe from a younger age.”
He may additionally expound on the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the historical past of the nation whose biography parallelled his personal.
“My grandfather was a strolling encyclopedia,” wrote Ariel-Goldschmidt.
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