Massacre in Tiberias, October 2, 1938, Yohanan Zandberg
"Khirbet" Tiberias[1]
It happened exactly as I had feared; people didn't understand why I was afraid—after all, we were in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood, an entirely Jewish area. Yet my instinct told me nothing would stop an Arab from penetrating the heart of the neighborhood and wreaking havoc at will. And that is precisely what happened: they entered through the kindergarten located east of the vacant lot designated for the school building, made their way up to the Great Synagogue, and set it ablaze. I caught sight of the synagogue caretaker, his face ashen, clutching the charred remnants of two Torah scrolls he had tried to save; he had been sleeping in the synagogue, as was his custom during the Ten Days of Repentance. From the outside, one could see only a bit of soot on the plastered window frames, but inside, it looked like the aftermath of a Lag Ba Omer bonfire - only the metal parts of the Torah reading stand remained standing.
The house next door belonged to the Kotin family. An elderly couple from America—they had likely come to the Holy City of Tiberias to die. They, too, were charred, though slightly less so: one could still make out a few remaining patches of flesh. A child’s curiosity drove me to keep looking and see it all. I continued along the field path leading to Street D. By following the trail of smoke, one could trace the path of the attack launched by the "heroic" Arabs. It was the home of the Ben-Aryeh family - owners of the Tnuva store. They used to eat dairy dinners at his place. Him, his wife, his daughters, and Limer’s daughter (who had gone up to the second floor to find shelter in a safer spot—or perhaps her mother had sent her there) - they were all piled together beneath the window. That was where the smell came from. The bodies hadn't burned completely; the scent and sight resembled smoked meat, only fouler. I wondered if they had been killed before burning or set alight while still alive, if they had begged for mercy. Because of the stench, I quickly moved away. Across the street, slightly to the right, in a basement apartment belonging to a large family of Mizrahi origin, there were small piles of ash resembling the loaves of chametz burned before Passover. The heart-rending wails of family members drove me away just as the weeping was about to erupt from my own throat. The spree also ended at the home of the teacher, Artzi, located on the left flank of the circular wave. There, they finally found something to soothe them - a refrigerator stocked with all manner of good things to feast upon. The residents had managed to flee; there was no reason to set the house on fire.
The Kirya was teeming with Hagana members, their pistols strapped to their waists. They paced back and forth by the hundreds, clad in khaki shorts, in the scorching late-morning heat of a summer day in 1938. Where had they been that night, at the time of the attack? After all, Minu Goldzweig—the "Fish King"—had managed, with a single pistol shot, to drive them away from the primary target of their assault: Café Shor, where thirty drunken British soldiers were hiding, weapons in hand, in the café’s kitchen. Did they not know that a day would come when they would be accused of "Khirbet Khizeh"?
[1] The Tiberias massacre was an attack by Arab rioters on the Jewish residents of the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood in Tiberias, which took place on the night of October 2, 1938 (the 8th of Tishrei, 5699), as part of the Great Arab Revolt. Nineteen Jews were murdered in the attack, eleven of them children. My late father, Yohanan Zandberg, was an eleven-year-old boy in Tiberias on the night of the massacre. Among his papers, I found a text written in the 1970s—part story, part memoir—based on what he had seen and heard as a child. He wrote it in response to the broadcast of the film "Khirbet Khizeh" (based on the work of S. Yizhar) on Israeli television. It is unclear to what extent the account is based on hearsay versus firsthand observation. Readers are invited to judge for themselves.
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