The sequence of days in blue and white is already part of the local DNA. White shirts, flags and candles, spring allergies, advertisements for barbecues, beautiful songs and dumbbells. I know people who these days are most dear to their hearts. I also know those who can not stand them.
Throughout these week-two weeks everyone feels it is permissible, and even necessary, to tell something about previous generations.
We are not always there.
But as Passover ends, something is happening on social media.
People tell, mostly with love, what the young lives of grandma and grandpa looked like.
What led to their immigration to Israel, and what did they think of this move from the heights of their return and grandmothers.
Another controversy concerns the question of when to start counting the sequence.
I know Israelis who put the funding into the numerator of the days, others count May 1st.
Over time, suggestions for all sorts of interesting names emerged, or not.
Offer the "Ten Days of Salvation," and also offer the "Days Between Flag and Traffic Light."
In our case, however, we are currently marking 100 years since the family immigrated from Morocco.
This is a round, respectable and binding number.
Many members of the family WhatsApp group feel compelled to stop for a moment and look at the family story.
Maybe it’s time to gather all the crumbs, quotes and anecdotes we grew up on;
Sift, polish and edit, and try to arrange from all of this an orderly story with a beginning, middle and end.
That we can tell children and especially ourselves.
I believe it is also possible to keep these snippets of memories as they are, in the healthy rush in which they are crammed into the attic of each of the descendants of Grandma Esther and Grandpa Jacob.
And give them at every opportunity a different beginning, and a different middle.
And never the end.
• • •
In the fall of 1922, a ship carrying Rabbi Yaakov and Esther Levy arrived with the port of Haifa with their four eldest children.
As was customary in those days, their transit visa carried a family photo.
This is, apparently, the only time in Rabbi Levy's life that he was photographed.
When one thinks of the number of selfies his offspring manage to tick at each hour, there is no escaping the conclusion that things have nevertheless changed in the last hundred years.
Rabbi Yaakov Levy was a dayan in Rabbi Anqwa's court in Sally, Morocco.
He made a living from trade and devoted himself to the study of Kabbalah.
It is said that he also dealt with practical acceptance.
What made him board the ship to Israel?
It can be assumed that neither Herzl nor the congresses.
Neither Pinsker nor Mapo's grandparents were read.
They certainly did not flee their homeland.
The situation in Morocco in those days was quite relaxed, and most of the Jews, as is well known, worked for the king.
So why board a ship?
Why now?
We in the family do not agree on anything, but most of us are willing to bet that it all started in a dream.
Grandpa used to dream dreams, and in general, the Moroccan sages of those days attached enormous importance to dreams.
True, the end of Turkish rule and the entry of the British were also a consideration.
But mostly the dreams.
One morning, then, a young couple got out of bed.
She ties the eternal delicate handkerchief to her head, he puts his feet in the pointed slippers, which can be called anphiles.
While they are dressing Moshe and Leah, Hannah and Avraham, they talk about their dreams, and by breakfast they have already decided to close everything and purchase sailing tickets to Eretz Israel.
So far everything sounds almost logical.
But to this equation one small detail must be added.
Grandma was in her ninth month of pregnancy.
How do I know that?
Also a question!
After all, every child with a snout in the family knows that just as the ship's passengers were able to identify the shoreline of Haifa, on a clear day of Elul, labor pains began to haunt Esther.
Shortly after the excited descent into the Holy Land, a grandmother will give birth to her fifth son and give him the required name Zion Mercy.
Zion, because he was born with the return of Zion.
And mercy, for the month of Elul.
This story runs through the family like a bonbonniere and like an old song, and everyone hums it so naturally, that no one ever gets up and wonders: Wait, so Grandpa took Grandma on a journey when she's at the end of the ninth month?
• • •
The Jews who immigrated from Morocco before the establishment of the state, in individual individual aliyahs, were not called Moroccans, not Orientals, and not even Khachachim.
They called themselves Mughrabi.
That is, Western.
As far as I understand, Grandpa did not join the community of members of the community, but rather the small Kabbalistic team of the Beit El yeshiva.
Arriving in the Old City involved a traumatic experience.
For the first time in their lives, they met poor and hungry Jews.
This broke their hearts, and they began to distribute money to charity without account.
How do we know that?
Well, that too every child in the family has heard a thousand times.
One day Rabbi Yaakov Levy was summoned to the dock in the court of the Western community.
The esteemed judges found him guilty, ordered him to stop spending the family money on charity for the needy, and forced him to purchase an apartment and start worrying about the financial security of his growing family.
I admit it's the least reliable part of our family story.
But so many uncles have pledged to me that this is true, that it is inevitable to admit that there were probably such courts here.
And there were such "criminals" as well.
The family has indeed grown.
The children married very young, and Grandma continued to give birth at the same time as her daughters and brides.
Sometimes she had to breastfeed a grandchild.
More than once my aunt Leah breastfed one of her little brothers;
My father, for example, who until his last day treated her like a little mother.
In the tiny house in the old town they raised nine children.
There was no place to lay a table, so on Saturday evenings Grandpa Yaakov would disassemble the door from its hinges and place it on two crates so that the family would have a proper Shabbat table.
I did not know this grandfather, who passed away at an early age.
But he gave me his name, and the melody of sanctification and havdalah that is part of my bloodstream, and also the founding stories of a family that started around a table of two doors and crates, and today to bring together its descendants, branches and leaves, one has to take over one of the great halls in the country.
And will be crowded.
Lots of things happen in a hundred years.
I do not think that Grandpa or Grandma took into account the possibility that a Jewish state would be established here, or that a grouping of exiles would take place here so quickly, but when things happened - it turned out that the family was completely in matters.
The sons and daughters of a dreaming couple from Morocco were already married then to members of all ethnicities and all streams, and turned in every professional direction imaginable.
At least two important rabbis, and one mythological nutritionist.
Kibbutzniks, and people of the big world.
Educational women and hitchhikers.
Senior officers, economists, pilot and poet.
On Memorial Day we will all bow our heads in memory of the fallen family.
One from each generation.
Aharon Alkabetz, Irgun member, Leah's husband. Zvi Asher Levy, son of Rabbi Moshe. And Dvir Emanueloff, Abigail's grandson. We all share a common story, some tunes, Passover customs, and a strange fondness for spicy. Inherited Grandpa's penchant for mysticism, but we did not stop dreaming.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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