In the archives of Benno Rothenberg, one of the most prominent photographers active during the early years of the State of Israel, is a series of pictures showing members of the Haganah military organization training at Camp Yona. The photo archive was recently scanned and is now preserved at the National Library of Israel, courtesy of the Meitar Collection. These photos of the men and women of the Haganah running, jumping, crawling, undergoing briefings or simply posing – together and individually – can today be viewed on the National Library website. The training drills took place in the “Old North” area of Tel Aviv, close to where the Hilton Hotel and Independence Park (Gan Ha’atzmaut) stand today. I became curious about the story of this camp, which not only hosted the Haganah training sessions, but also witnessed several notable affairs in Zionist history.

It wasn’t always the Haganah doing its training at Camp Yona. The camp came under the organization’s control in late 1947, when the British army withdrew from the area in December of that year. The Haganah quickly seized the vacated former British bases in Tel Aviv, which of course included the Sarona compound (which serves as the IDF’s central headquarters today – the “Kirya” base), as well as Camp Yona. Three days after the withdrawal, Yona Rasin, a Haganah commander, was killed on his way to Jerusalem. His comrades promptly named the vacated military base after him.

 

What happened before all that? In the early 20^th century, the area served as a Muslim cemetery. The people of Jaffa, located further south on the coast, were suffering from a cholera epidemic and had to bury their dead far from the city (for the same reason, the Jewish cemetery on Trumpeldor Street was established at that time). In 1942, during World War II, the British set up a resort on the cliff for Royal Air Force pilots. Why here of all places? For the same reasons people wish to visit Tel Aviv today. The camp was located near the beach, in a town full of cafes, cultural events, festivities and of course – alcohol. British soldiers from all over the Middle East came to the stay at the resort for rest and recreation.

At the foot of the camp positioned on a kurkar cliff, lay the strip of sand known today as the Hilton Beach, named for the hotel which looms overhead. It was here that Sima and Haim Arlosoroff took a stroll along the water on the Friday night of June 16th, 1933, after leaving a café just to the south, where the Dan Hotel can be seen today. There, they spotted two strangers who had been following them for some time, when one of them pulled out a gun and shot Arlosoroff, then the head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, something akin to the Zionist movement’s foreign minister. The murder shook the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine and fingers were pointed at members of the Revisionist movement.

Let’s fast forward a few years – 15 years, to be exact – to June, 1948. Off the coast of Tel Aviv, the ship known as Altalena ran aground after fleeing from Kfar Vitkin beach further north, where the confrontation with IDF forces had begun. In the ship’s hull was a load of weapons ordered by the Irgun for its soldiers. The IDF was ordered to stop the ship, using artillery fire. Where were the cannons that shelled the ship deployed? That’s right, at Camp Yona on the kurkar ridge. Another anecdote is that Abraham Stavsky, one of the Betar youth movement members accused of murdering Arlosoroff, was killed on the Altalena during the conflict.

 

By sheer coincidence, two key events in the bitter struggle between the Jewish community’s left-wing and right-wing camps occurred near the Haganah base which no longer exists. What else transpired at the historic location? New Haganah battalions were established at Camp Yona and it was here that numerous new recruits were first indoctrinated into the Haganah when the War of Independence broke out. Camp Yona was also used by the IDF’s medical corps in its early days. In addition, the Israeli army’s physical training and combat fitness training facilities, as well as the Physical Education School, were located at the camp until they were moved to the Wingate Institute in the 1950s.

During that decade and the next, a bitter dispute ensued between the Israeli government and the Tel Aviv municipality, which sought to evacuate the camp and build a large public park in its place. Ahead of Israel’s first Independence Day, half of Camp Yona was cleared away and in April 1949 the construction of Independence Park began. It was not until the early 1960s that the IDF cleared the entire area and the park was finally completed. The Hilton hotel was built on part of the land, where it stands to this day.

The photos in this article and other photos of the men and women of the Haganah at Camp Yona can be found here. If you recognize yourself or your relatives in these photos, please let us know in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Many thanks to Peleg Levy and Modi Snir of the Toldot Yisrael project, for providing information that assisted in the writing of this article. Thank you as well to Dr. Nir Mann for his research.

 

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In 1921, during a family vacation, Franklin Delano Roosevelt began developing alarming medical symptoms. At first, the 39-year-old attorney began suffering from debilitating back pains. After that, he experienced nausea and uncontrollable tremors, as well as a burning fever. He was bedridden for weeks. From day to day, he felt he was gradually losing the ability to move his feet. The doctor called to the scene provided a diagnosis that would accompany Roosevelt for the rest of his life: a severe case of polio, a disease that ravaged the entire East Coast of the United States during that fatal summer.

Although the future President of the United States was perhaps the most famous victim of polio in history, this disease had been plaguing humanity for thousands of years. First identified in 1789, it wasn’t until the twentieth century – when repeated polio outbreaks claimed thousands of victims – that a Jewish-American physician named Jonas Salk managed to develop the first-ever vaccine for the devastating virus.

Salk’s Vaccine Is Revealed

In 1953, Dr. Jonas Edward Salk published a radio-advertisement announcing the encouraging results of his experiments with a new drug, which he hoped could soon be developed into an effective vaccine for polio.

But after publishing his results, Salk’s work was met with derision and ridicule. His idea of injecting the “killed” polio virus (as opposed to simply weakened strains) into the bodies of children and adults initially seemed too bold – it was believed to be impossible to implement. Many doctors and researchers were quick to declare that the tailor’s son from Manhattan was nothing but an over-enthusiastic young scientist at best, a charlatan and crook at worst.

Salk chose to ignore the criticism. He felt that he couldn’t convey the significance of the vaccine using the conventional method – publishing his results in academic papers in order to convince the scientific community of the validity of his theories. Instead, Salk worked six days a week, 16 hours a day, to put his theories into practice. As he neared the breakthrough he’d hoped for, he searched for funding for the clinical trials that would prove his daring theory.

 

Although two of his employees in the lab resigned in protest at the “feverish and unreasonable pace” of the experiments, Salk was intent on beginning tests on human patients as quickly as possible. By the end of 1953, more than 7,000 children had received the vaccine. The experiment was beyond successful. After another two million children were vaccinated in one of the largest clinical trials in history, Salk was given permission to inform the American public that he had found a way to overcome the horrible disease. He added that he and his lab were giving up all patent rights – the vaccine they had been working on for years would remain in the public domain.

This was just the news the young state of Israel was waiting for.

 

The Israeli Vaccine

The news regarding the polio vaccine soon reached Israel and caused much excitement among its concerned citizens. In the summer of 1950, there was a severe outbreak of polio in Israel. Over one thousand children were hospitalized. Many suffered from paralysis, which was one of the most frightening symptoms of the disease. Parents ordered their children to stay at home, summer-camps were shut down, and the Ministry of Health forbade children under the age of ten (the most at-risk age group) from entering various recreational venues and places of business.

 

 

 

At first, the Israeli government tried to buy the vaccine directly from the US, but public outcry prevented it. Many parents claimed it made no sense for the US government to sell vaccines to foreign countries when not all American children had been vaccinated. Therefore, Dr. Natan Goldblum was appointed to produce the vaccine locally in Israel, based on Salk’s methodology. Together with Prof. Tamar Gottlieb, the two doctors recruited a team and set up their laboratory in Jaffa.

 

 

One year later, the vaccine was ready, and by January 1957, the mass-scale vaccination of Israel’s population was underway.

More often than not, when invited on honorary visits abroad, Dr. Salk declined. But when he was invited to Israel in 1959 for an official visit, he agreed and explained that the reason for his consent was his deep affection for the people and state of Israel. The doctor added that “what is being done in Israel is both profound and exalted. And I think the Israelis understand this, because they are the ones carrying out a revolution in the lives of the Jewish people.” In Israel, the good doctor was greeted with the respect and honor worthy of heads of state. He met with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, from whom he received a certificate of appreciation on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

 

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