Hidden under an innocent-looking laundry and bakery, in what appeared to be a normal kibbutz in central Israel, lay a great secret. If the wrong person were to ever discover this secret, it could have greatly endangered the fate of the Jewish State.
Every morning at seven o’clock, forty-five young men and women quickly made their way to the laundry, endangering their lives for the state which was soon to be born. They disappeared into the building until the afternoon hours. In fact, they descended deep underground, to where a clandestine Haganah weapons factory had been established, as part of the secret project known as “The Ayalon Institute.”
This is no tall tale – within the unassuming laundry building was a secret opening which led to the hidden underground factory. It was here that weapons were produced for fighting against both the British Mandatory government and Arab terrorists. Above ground, a seemingly ordinary kibbutz, established on Givat HaKibbutzim (“Kibbutz Hill”) near the town of Rehovot, was in fact a cover for the lively and industrious factory, built underground in 1945. Its existence was only revealed many years later after the State of Israel was already well-established. In its three years of existence, the Ayalon Institute produced some 2.25 million 9 mm bullets for a locally produced version of the British “Sten” submachine gun, all under the suspicious noses of the British Mandatory authorities themselves. The ammunition produced here would prove vital for the Israeli army during the first phase of the War of Independence.
Four different groups worked at the factory. They included: members of Ta’as, the Haganah’s military industry, who managed the Institute and served as the technical professional staff in charge of production; members of the Hebrew Scouts Movement who sought to establish a fishing kibbutz one day; members of the Regavim settlement group from the Palmach fighting force, and a number of members from the Habonim or “builders” settlement group who later founded Kibbutz Kfar HaNassi in the Galilee.
The Haganah’s military industry had already been producing all sorts of weaponry, including the Sten gun, but the ammunition shortages remained a major bottleneck until the founding of the Ayalon Institute.
The factory was established at the initiative of Yosef Avidar with the aid of machinery smuggled from Poland by Yehudah Arazi. The project was headed by Pesach Ayalon. They understood that the only way to operate a factory of this scale and not draw suspicious eyes was to bury it underground.
They searched for a location not far from Tel Aviv, and “Kibbutz Hill” fit the bill perfectly. Its location was isolated but not too out of the way, it was possible to dig out the necessary area, and the cover story worked. Settlement groups who would go on to found communities across the country were trained in the above-ground compound, providing a suitable pool of young men and women for the factory beneath it.
To conceal the noise generated by the factory, the laundry needed to run constantly, but the locals did not generate enough dirty laundry to justify that. To make sure the cover remained airtight, additional laundry was sent from people in Rehovot and from the maternity hospital. In order to ensure the residents did not come to the hill to get their clothing, a delivery service was put in place, just like a modern laundromat, which sent the clothing to a pick-up spot in Rehovot itself. The local carpentry shop and vegetable garden also served to conceal what was taking place below ground.
The workers thus lived a double life, always risking discovery. With resourcefulness and creativity, they dealt with all sorts of problems and malfunctions. From the start, working with gunpowder underground was fraught with risk. There were also fears that went beyond the danger of a sudden explosion. Yehudit Ayalon, one of the local workers, said – “we had children, which refuted the rumor that working with lead and casting it could cause impotence for the guys.”
Working conditions were not simple. The men and women spent all day underground, with no sunlight or fresh air, and this affected their health. They increasingly suffered headaches, eye problems, and general weakness, until the Institute director appealed to the Haganah’s chief doctor, Dr. Yosef Kot, who toured the factory personally. The doctor came back with a recommendation: The workers must be exposed to a quartz or halogen lamp for a few minutes each day. Thus, even in the middle of winter, workers at the Ayalon Institute looked as tanned as if they’d come “from the (French) Riviera”. The Haganah doctor also told the workers to drink extra quantities of milk, swallow fish oil for the vitamins, and allocated a single whole egg for breakfast! This was a time of food shortages – others had to make do with half an egg.
The fact that the other entrance to the secret Institute was in the local bakery was also a source of health concerns. The bread could only be cooked at night or when people weren’t working below, as the oven smoke would enter the factory with the hot air via the chimney. Yosef Blit, a Palmach member who was among the local workers, recalled “one night I was working at the bakery. I turned on the oven at a high heat and turned to prepare dough for bread. While focused on work, two guys I didn’t know at all burst into the bakery and yelled at me ‘Are you nuts? You could have killed us. We almost suffocated down there!’ And indeed, it turned out that these two were from the Haganah, and had come to calibrate guns in the shooting room, but they forgot to tell me about it.”
There were also people who lived on the site and walked around above ground but knew nothing about the Institute below it. Those who were in on the secret referred to these people as “giraffes”. One day, one such “giraffe” named Sara’leh sought to wash some clothes at the laundry, which was empty because the Institute workers were about to leave through the laundry building for lunch: “Sara’leh ‘the giraffe’ put her laundry in the concrete sink, added soap and opened the faucet … at that moment they pressed the electric button hidden behind the bakery. With a great amount of noise, the washing machine was lifted into the air before Sara’leh’s stunned face, turned on its hinge and a hole opened in the floor which people began to climb out of … She burst out shouting ‘People are coming out of the ground! People are coming out of the ground!’, and slipped and fell. Esther, who was responsible for the laundry that day, heard her, ran inside, and poured a bucket of water on her pale face to help her recover, but it was soap water…” The next day, poor Sara’leh was brought in to work at the factory, thus preventing other ‘giraffes’ from learning the secret.
But what about relatives or guests coming to visit? The locals found a clever solution to this problem: “Every day, the gate to our kibbutz would have all sorts of notices: ‘foot and mouth disease,’ ‘bird plague,’ ‘infant illness,’ ‘quarantine,’ etc. – all to keep people away from the place,” recalled Yehudit Ayalon. Rumors of this extremely unlucky place must certainly have spread.
By the end of June 1948, there was no longer any immediate threat to central Israel, and the British had already departed. There was now no longer any need for an underground weapons factory. After three years of hard work, the weapons-making machines were moved from the Institute to other locations. Some of the workers who had settled in the area left in September 1949 to establish a new kibbutz -Maagan Michael – located between the Carmel mountain range and the sea.
They were replaced on Givat HaKibbutzim by the IDF’s Science Corps, which maintained the secrecy of the location. The place later changed hands several times, with the secret of the Ayalon Institute being kept under wraps for decades after the project came to an end.
Only in 1975, thirty years after it was founded, was the Institute’s amazing story made public. The coordinator of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel in Rehovot sought to prepare a tour which would ensure the preservation of sites around the city. When gathering material for this purpose, she discovered the site’s great secret.
On October 29, 1987, the former underground factory was officially designated a national preservation site.
This article is based on the booklet The Ayalon Institute – Givat HaKibbutzim, Rehovot [Hebrew], published by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel. Liron Halbriech and Amit Naor took part in the preparation of this article.
