Friday, November 8 - Tel Aviv

Friday November 8: Tel Aviv

In the morning we needed to pack up, again, for the purpose of changing rooms when we got back. Good news – I could no longer smell the cigarette smoke. But because of the bad news – my head was completely stuffed up.

Breakfast not impressive. The selection was the poorest of all the hotels so far.  That with the lack of a “hotel book”, poor quality T.V. and a bad selection of T.V. stations – this hotel was not a bargain.

Today’s agenda included two more military related sites – a museum at the Ayalon Institute and the Palmach memorial.

Our Ayalon Institute’s tour guide name was Shachar – I’ve totally forgotten all the names of all the other tour guides of all the other sites we’ve visited, but his has stuck because it means “morning”. That and he was very entertaining in his presentation.

Before there was an Ayalon Institute there was a kibbutz on that site. Knowing that sufficient ammunition would be critical for the survival of an eventual Jewish state, the Haganah recruited kibbutznicks  for a super-secret ammunitions factory – buried deep in the ground under the kibbutz.  No one else at the kibbutz could know – the secret had to be maintained by the factory workers to minimize the risk of exposure. That and the British were stationed not far away.

The equipment was installed in 3 weeks. There were two entrances – one under the bakery oven. This entrance was only opened 3 times – to install the equipment, to move it out after the declaration of the State of Israel, and to re-install the equipment for the creation of the museum. The kibbutz baker was in on the secret – he was involved in the midnight delivery of finished bullets and receipt of the raw materials for the next batch.

The other entrance was under the industrial washing machine in the laundry room. This was the entrance the workers used twice a day. The laundry manager was in on the secret as well, and helped time the activity in the laundry to allow for the workers to go come and go to maintain the appearance of normality.

Laundry room with the entrance exposed

Kibbutzniks not in on the secret were called “giraffes” – because their heads were in the clouds and didn’t know what was going on under their feet.

Since the munitions machinery was noisy, the laundry machine needed to be constantly busy to cover it. So the kibbutz took in laundry from outside clients – including the British!

Because the workers spent so much time underground, they didn’t have the same dark complexion as the rest of the kibbutzniks – a dead give away. So a UV lamp was installed in a closet (“the spa”).

QC testing took place at the “firing range” – in the same space as all the munitions machinery.

Bullets were cranked out underground (40,000 per day) - all by hand – from 1946 to 1948. After the declaration of the State of Israel, the factory was moved above ground.

The full length of the factory - that's the guide, Shachar, on the right

 The secret was kept for 28 years!

Lunch was at yet another mall and not memorable. Literally, because I have no clue what it was.

The afternoon’s activity was the Palmach memorial. The Palmach originally were a Jewish brigade trained by the British to fight against the Nazis. But WWII ended before they were needed. Disbanded by the British, they became the crack unit of the Israeli underground army, the Haganah.

The Palmach memorial was not typical exhibit. It was a walk-through of a series of rooms with actors reenacting the events of a real group of friends. The exhibit was all in Hebrew, so we were given translation mp3 players. The English was more of a narrated paraphrasing than a word for word translation, which was awkward at times. But still, it was very well done and moving.

By the time we got back to the hotel it was fairly late in the afternoon, with just enough time for Gila to get home to Jerusalem for Shabbat. {Interesting that it was ok for Gila to home for Shabbat, but it wasn’t ok for Raffi, but never mind, water under the bridge by now…}

We barely have time ourselves to change and walk over to the synagogue we had decided to attend for Shabbat services. It was a 30-minute walk and we arrived just a couple of minutes late – which relegated our seats to the “quiet room” all the way in the back with the not-so-quiet children. The service was 99% Hebrew (including the D’var), but many of the melodies were familiar, even if we didn’t grasp the content of the D’var. We stuck around for a few minutes afterwards to say Kiddush, and then walked back to the hotel for dinner.

Dinner was better than breakfast, thank goodness. One of our group had an intense and dumb “discussion” with the restaurant manager over the obviously plugged in hot water machine. The manager insisted that “the rabbi” insisted that the hot water could NOT be used to make coffee or tea at dinner – it was only to be used at breakfast.

We hung out talking until the manager threw us out.

And our new room was on the 7th - and officially - non-smoking floor. Identical to the previous room, but no cigarette smell and the T.V. was even in worse shape.

Tomorrow - Shabbat in Tel Aviv