Putting a Human Face on People About to be Evacuated from their Homes

Only a few weeks before the government of Israel proposes to evict the residents of the Jewish community of Sanur from their homes, Israel Resource News Agency dispatched a Russian speaking correspondent to meet with some of their residents who were born in the former Soviet Union.

The profiles that follow put a human face on people who would be affected, if the program of the government comes to fruition.

Arcady Livshitz was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1939. He graduated from the Geodesical Engineering Institute of Moscow in 1968. Oil painting of nature scenes and still life is his passion. He immigrated to Israel in 1974 and is one of the original members of the Sanur artists’ colony formed in 1987. He currently lives just outside of Jerusalem and visits his studio in Sanur occasionally. He is a bachelor and an extremely private person. He is now comfortably retired. He has been commissioned for certain architectural works in Israel, he was the main architect for a project in Karen Kayemi.

Vladimir Breitman was born in Minsk, Belorussia in 1922. He served as a pilot during World War II. He is a renowned photographer and has international exhibitions in Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, Canada and England. His early pictures are black and white nature shots of Belorussia. He immigrated to Israel in 1990. He came to Israel after hearing about how it was a land of freedom and hope for the Jewish people. He lives with his wife in Sa-nur. He has a son and daughter and several grandchildren. He enjoys his garden in Sa-nur and loves to cook and chat with the other artists. Sa-nur inspires him for new photography endeavors on a daily basis. In his photolab are several recent photographs of events in Sa-nur, including a touching close up shot of a baby in the village going through the brit milah, or circumcision ceremony. Even his earliest works, from the early 40s and on in Belorussia, can be seen hanging on his studio walls. He is one of the original members of the Sa-nur artists’ colony.

Haim Kapchitz was born in Belorussia in 1937. His father was a physicist. His family always had a mezuzah on the door. His mother tongue is Yiddish. They had no books but a strong intuitive sense of their own Judaism. He graduated as a painting teacher from the Kirgizhizia Art College in Frunze. He is renowned for his architectural works, specifically involving stained glass windows, murals, and mosaics. He immigrated to Israel in 1981. He joined the artist’s colony in Sanur in 1987 when Anna and Victor Boguslavsky invited him to see the budding artist’s colony. “It’s not a physical quality that Sanur has, it’s a spiritual quality. Therefore for no amount of money, could I ever sell it.” Haim teaches private drawing classes in Jerusalem and has done mosaics and frescoes that can be seen in various public locations in Israel. He lives with his wife in Sa-nur and Jerusalem. In Jerusalem he has a small studio that he visits as a sanctuary that has been dear to him since he first came to Israel. About the new religious settlers: “I have a kind of double feeling… on the one hand I feel an extraordinary pity for the village of Sa-nur, the artists’ colony of Sanur, in some ways these wonderful people have destroyed it. It became completely different. I like these people, I really like them, but they’ve destroyed the world that existed here before. I’m not against them, they’re more rightist than I, but they’ve destroyed that world that we had here before. There were these fairytale-like trees, it was a different world. And they destroyed it all. It’s hard to imagine what was here before. I was happy all day, from morning ’til night. I had always enjoyed my artistic work before, but never before had I experienced such a spiritual paradise. There was this atmosphere of brotherhood, we were all more than brothers to each other, it was something unbelievable. So for me it’s nostalgia… But these people, I love these people, what they started here, it’s a completely different story. At the time of the first intifada, I was the communicator with the army, and I was driving through these burning walls, my car was blasted to pieces, I could have died many times.”

“It was a completely different government here before, at the time that Sa-nur was founded. It was a government that wanted peace.” He doesn’t even want to think about disengagement day in August. He hasn’t signed a compensation contract, but thinks he will get it anyway. “At least it’s something,” he sighs. “In the end everyone loses something, and the compensation can cover some of the physical, material loss.”

Julia Segul was born in 1938 in Charkov. She is a sculptor who came to Sa-Nur in 1994, immediately after arriving in Israel. She had heard about an artists’ colony while still in Russia, and it had been her aim to come here. She has been married thrice and has two grown children, one in Russia and one in the United States. She also has some close relatives who live near her in Shomron. She has many heartbreaking childhood tales of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. From her early childhood, she was aware of how brutal the soviet children could be to Jewish children like herself.

She felt that the only way to prevent the children from killing her was to fight back. One day, at about age 12, she saw two boys walking down the road, the kind of boys she knew would hurt her if they saw her. All of a sudden, a self-defensive anger came over her, and she thought to herself, “I’ll kill them first.” She started choosing which rock would serve best as her weapon and by the time she had chosen one, the boys had come upon her. She raised the rock over her head, ready to throw it at the boys, and she had such a look in her eyes that the boys ran away, frightened. “When a person is ready to kill, (even if it’s a little girl) you see it in their eyes.” She says, chuckling to herself.

From the first time she had heard of such a thing as the creation of art she was amazed by it. One day in class there was a boy sitting in front of her with a two-colored drawing pencil. She attempted to steal it, her family was very poor at the time, and the only thing she regrets was that she failed. She was not ashamed of stealing it. “Luck was not on my side,” she laughs.

Some of her sculptural works are very political, others are personal, many are involved with the question of her Jewish identity, some are works documenting her childhood memory, and all of her pieces (displayed in the upstairs gallery of the main artists’ building,) are extremely symbolic. There is a pair of large broken sunglasses symbolizing the blindness of many as to the real situation in Israel. The inner frames show a pretty countryside view and the outer frames show violence and pain. There are many digital art pieces with black humour political messages as their theme, such as a depiction of the Little Red Riding Hood in bed with the Big Bad Wolf. The Little Red Riding Hood has the face of Perez and the Big Bad Wolf has the face of Arafat. She is not afraid of disengagement day, she feels protected by the religious family settlers in Sa-nur. She doesn’t have any grandchildren of her own yet but says proudly about the children of the settlers’ families: “These are my grandchildren.” She doesn’t really know about what kind of atmosphere the artists’ colony had in earlier days since she joined the colony much later. She refuses to sign any compensation contract. “Compensation, what compensation?”

Julia Segul has no home except her home in Sa-nur but she doesn’t even wish to think about what could happen to her in August.

Mark Salman was born in 1938 in Essentuky, Caucasus. He has a son who lives in the States, a daughter who lives in Israel, and another daughter who lives in Russia. His son has two daughters, his two granddaughters. He came to Israel in 1991, he had been wanting to come to Israel since the Six-Day war in 1967. In 1979, immigration to Israel was blocked and Mark Salman’s journey couldn’t occur until 1991. In 1991 he came to Tel Aviv with his younger daughter and the older daughter stayed in Moscow with his wife. His wife was supposed to come the following year but she died before that could happen. Salman hadn’t dreamt of Israel at first: “What was important was not the place I was going to, but the place that I was leaving. I wanted to go to any country…but with the empowerment of anti-Semitism, a protest was awakened within me and it has been expressed in this way, to go to Israel and only Israel. The stronger anti-Semitism became in Russia, the stronger was my conviction that my place is in Israel and only Israel. This went on just after I finished my University studies in 1967, when I was already ready to leave and specifically to Israel.

When I came I lived in Tel Aviv for three weeks. And then when I heard about an artists’ village I realized that it’s for me, as being an artist is my favorite profession. I ended up here by accident, I got lucky at the time. I was commissioned to work as a sculptor for a project at Yad Vashem, I was to create a Wallenberg memorial tablet. And when I was figuring out how to work on my piece, they told me about Sa-nur, an artists’ village that has a bronze workshop. When I saw Sa-nur, I understood that I need look no further. I had never seen a biblical paysage, well maybe in paintings such as Kromskoy’s Christ in the Desert, and some others, but I didn’t associate in my brain this paysage with actual Israel. When I arrived I suddenly felt that this was the place where my ancestors came from, there is a certain mysticism to this earth and it drew me in. It’s fourteen years now that I’ve been here in Sa-nur. There are many places in Israel that I love, (Mark also has a workshop in Natanya) but I love Sa-nur the most.” Mark is very comfortable in Sa-nur because he can pour bronze, live among his fellow artists, and he lives in the beautiful “biblical” nature that he has come to adore. There are not many bronze-pouring workshops in the world, it is a very rare and special art form and takes a true master. Mark studied in Stroganov Art Academy in Moscow.

He has many intricate medals and small statues which are stacked and piled in every nook and cranny of his nigurun, as his small Sa-nur apartment is called. He has worked as a medal and coin designer on behalf of government corporations in Jerusalem and Paris. Mark has won various international medal designing competitions, and his work is indeed extremely impressive, every detail is perfectly sculpted and clearly the work of a master. “In the best case scenario, if you work really intensively, a two sided coin can be completed in a little over a week.”

Mark gave me one of the pins he designed on behalf of an organization fighting against disengagement. “But this isn’t ‘disengagement,'” says Mark, “it is capitulation after victory. After such difficult victories, when they promised to bury us alive on the seashore, to not pollute the sacred sea, so when all the wars have been won, in a couple decades we start to give them settlements, I’m sure that here one can believe Golda Meir who said that ‘it’s enough to dip into the ground with a tablespoon in these places to understand that the earth is soaked with Jewish history.’ It’s the depiction of a wounded lion roaring, mounted onto a slim Star of David. This piece is a symbolic reward for settlers of Samaria such as the settlers of Sa-nur.

Yet Mark doesn’t know what he’s going to do with all of his pieces; he’s worried they might get destroyed on August 17th. He doesn’t know and can’t think about what will happen on disengagement day but for him it is a matter of losing his true home.

“First of all, who are these soldiers? I can’t fight with my children, with my grandchildren. I can’t physically throw rocks at them, I don’t want to do that… They’re promising us that they’ll (the soldiers and police), behave appropriately. But how is it possible, with this kind of mutual politeness, to solve the problem of evacuation? In what times was this, that a person willingly left his home? Well the truth is in our case, for compensation. But what if compensation doesn’t interest us?”

Sygal Azaria is 23 years old, and grew up in Ramnat Gan. Her parents immigrated from Strasbourg, France, 30 years ago. “They were zionists, they came for the people of Israel. They came even though they had great jobs in France, a big house, all their friends. Her parents came with 3 children and Sygal, one of the youngest, was later born in Israel.” Her parents now live in Cravir, a little village not far from Sa-nur. Her five siblings are scattered all over Israel and one of her sisters does social work for troubled children en lieu of army service, an option for young religious women. “At first my family was scared of me coming here, because the place is completely surrounded by Arabs. But now they understand that it’s important. And it’s truly pretty here. ” She has a baby son, Elisha, he is about a year and a half. She has been living in Sa-nur for 6 months, before that she lived in Ternion with her family. When her family first heard about what was happening, she says they couldn’t just stay home and do nothing, so they came to Sa-nur. Sygal and her husband Amos commute weekly to Haifa, where they both study at the university. Sygal is studying to be a nurse and Amos is studying computer science at the Israel Institute of Technology. She believes that Sharon is corrupt, she calls him a “dictator.” She is convinced that if they can get enough supporters to move into Sa-nur, then disengagement in Sa-nur will be cancelled. She’s hoping that 10,000 people will come. (She breastfeeds her baby as she talks to me.) She is not afraid of disengagement, “I have fear of God,” she proclaims. About the demonstration against the army, that day (July 6th): “Now I see that this is the best place for us. Because of the way people think here, it’s the way we think. Like today, when the army had its work to do, there are people in Gushkatif who would have said, ‘No don’t go there, it’s the army, we must do what the army wants. Things like that, ‘we must not disturb the army.’ In Sanur they say, ‘No, it’s important, we’re going there, we’re stopping the army’s work.’ Here they say what they think and they do what they think. Today the army said that they need to build a building for security, but we know that it’s not for security, that it’s to help them block the road later on.” She tells me she didn’t do anything at the demonstration, she was just present, but then she brings out her digital camera and proudly shows me photos from that morning. There’s a picture of her with her child next to her sitting in the shovel of a bulldozer. She states that she’s not at all afraid of bringing her baby to such demonstrations: “These people are gendarmes and police, not people who want to do bad things to me, these are people who want to protect me.”

Even if there’s a chance of violence from them, she says her cause is so important that she’s willing to take her chances. She admits to having little experience with political demonstrations. She doesn’t believe that what she’s doing is dangerous or holds too many risks. “Living here, it’s not that much but it’s something, it’s my contribution,” says Sygal. “When my child grows up I don’t want him to say, ‘just because of me, my mother did nothing.'” Sygal is happy that her baby is a part of this and isn’t concerned that anything serious could happen.

Amos Azaria was born in England because his family was there on shlihut (a diplomatic mission) for an Akiva (which recruits young people for Aliyah) for about three years and when they returned to Israel Amos was a year and half old. They lived in Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Mikre-israel by Holon, and his parents have been living in Betgoniel for the past 15 years. Over a year ago Amos and Sygal decided to come to Sa-nur but they had to wait half a year until a caravan was ready.

“We heard about Sharon’s terrible eviction plan, he said, before that we were active in Haifa but we felt it wasn’t enough we had to move here and make a bigger step and also because it’s our land and we’re not going to give it to Arabs for receiving terror. For security reasons, we understand that this place is very important for Israel to hold, if Israel won’t be here and there will be terror land over here, then Natanya, Hadera, Pula, Betam and all these places will have katanim(bombs) all the time. And also in this are they catch all the time terrorists and bombers.”

“We just, God, God is with us. Riding in the roads sometimes can be a little scary. ” Says riding in car which isn’t bulletproof can be a little scary, if you go in the buses it’s ok. “But I think it’s also a risk driving a car anywhere in Israel, you could have an accident. And accidents happen. There were 3 people from Sa-nur who were injured in car accidents. There are car accidents you don’t here about because it’s all the time. So if people can risk themselves going in a car somewhere inside Israel, just for that, this is a good enough reason. We don’t care, we don’t surrender to the Arabs. And even if they’re going to try to shoot us it doesn’t prevent us from living here, on the contrary, just from them all the trouble that comes to Israel just makes us stronger.” He says Sa-nur has grown phenomenally from what it was before. Amos writes and distributes Sa-nur’s community events newspaper, and now that he has more time after finishing his studies and teaching at the Technion, he helps out with construction work in Sa-nur such the building of tents for newly arriving Sa-nur supporters. “I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going to happen but we expect about 10,000 people coming from all over, from anywhere to here just to be with us. And the army will see the place packed with people and won’t be able to do anything.” He says there are other groups helping to organize the arrival of more Sa-nur supporters. He explains that there are demonstrations that have been up to 200,000 people. He is very optimistic and confident. He believes that most people aren’t scared to risk coming by car, those who can will come armed. Those who are scared can participate in other ways, Amos tells me, such as roadblocking inside Israel and contacting people. He says there are organizations who have been working on this for months already. There are many organizations that group up to something called Hamatei ha meshutaf The Common Organization, United Group, which branches out into 15 or more organizations. Nashim beyerok (Women in Green) Homad megan (Shield Wall, name of the 2003 operation). “We want to make sure that all the Jews in all Israel will have security. And by having our children here we protect all the children in Israel. And I’m sure my child when he grows up will be very happy that he was part of giving help to prevent the eviction plan. And I’m sorry my parents didn’t take me to Yemit, Haveyemit when it was evacuated.” (His baby is a year and a half.)

David Fadida, 25 years old, made aliyah from Paris, France when he was 17 as soon as he passed his baccalaureate exam. From a young age his parents had placed him in a Jewish private school and David was deeply fascinated and touched by his Jewish education. He was immediately extremely receptive to Jewish teachings. “Around age 13 I had decided that I was going to make aliyah. I had already been to Israel several times with my parents for vacation and I really liked it. I realized afterwards that France is not a nice place for me, because of anti-Semitism and because when I was a teenager, after age 13, I became more religious and mature and at the same time I was learning to think for myself. When he first came to France he studied in a Yeshiva in Jerusalem, then he served in the army, then he worked in France for a year in a community organization which encourages Zionism in young people called Binai Akiva. When he came back to Israel he studied psychology for 3 years at Barilen,

David got married around this time and him and his spouse lived in Bethel for 2 years, and 2 years ago he and his family moved to Sa-nur. When David’s family came to Sa-nur they had already been looking for a nice place to settle down for some time. “We were looking to fall in love with a place, and that finally happened when we saw Sa-nur.”

He is now studying to become a Rabbi. He has already studied for 2 months in a Yeshiva in another village. “And now for the past 2 months to be more involved in the fight for Sa-nur, I study in Sa-nur itself. Besides, the rabbi who teaches at the Yeshiva I was at lives here. So I can ask questions right here, there’s no problem.” His wife is a teacher, she teaches math at Karbur, a village 20 minutes away from Sa-nur. She also works in the Sa-nur kindergarten.

He says the bus system in Sa-nur is a pain, as there are not many buses and they don’t come very often. But he says, “life is not easy for everybody, even those who work at home have problems, here we have transportation problems.”

David is optimistic that the disengagement will be cancelled in Sa-nur.

He says that most of the people in Sa-nur don’t want to think about disengagement day not because they’re afraid, but because they don’t want to accept it. “Thinking about it is already a form of acceptance. It’s important to think in a positive manner.” States David matter-of-factly. “It’s not just hope, it’s possible that there are bad things that could happen, but it’s more in the sense to have the means, to concentrate oneself on the means and not on the ends. That means we’re doing what has to be done, and afterwards then we’ll see.

What will happen in the end is not what’s important. Will we have Sa-nur? Will we not have Sa-nur? There is no 100% guarantee. But the ends are less important. It’s most important to do things in a moral way.”

David believes in the military defensive strategy: “I’d rather be at my enemy’s house, than have my enemy at mine. If the enemy is at my house and I have to defend myself then it’s all lost from the beginning…When there are people living here, it gives more security to the big cities.”

“It’s bad that the buses have to be bulletproof normally it’s better for the soldiers to kill the terrorists before they have a chance to fire on the buses. The army knows very well how to enforce security. In general it’s the politicians who tell the army where to go and where not to go, who prevent the army from enforcing security.” David is one of the members of Sa-nur’s directive committee. “It’s not just the soldiers who have to take risks. We are all soldiers.” One of his children is almost 3, one is one and half, and his wife is pregnant. “If there are people who would like to believe that we don’t care or that we aren’t scared for and aren’t worried about our children. It’s false, because it’s clear that those who sacrifice the most for their children are people like us.” The orange rubber bracelet on his child’s wrist says “Let the people decide.” The children play on an old playground set. Because of Sharon’s plan, David says they haven’t had funding for the past year so they can’t do things such are renovate their old playground.

Miriam Adler is 28 years old and was born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. She is the spokeswoman for Sa-nur and is the “frontpage” face representing Sa-nur settlers. She is very passionate about her cause and calls herself a soldier. She is confident and certain of success.

From an early age, she was taught how to revolt against the perceived tyrannical government body. Her parents were refuseniks and her father, a scholar in Judaic studies, homeschooled her in Hebrew and Talmudic teachings. They refused to send her off to the regular soviet school and they refused to not practice Judaism. “Of course I could feel that we were not like everybody else; that we were doing things that were not considered “legal,” the militia would come to our house… But they were things that we had to do… Our parents showed us with their behavior that this was important.” Miriam’s parents always wanted to come to Israel, and were planning on it since about 1979.

When Miriam was 12 her family immigrated to Israel in 1989. First they lived in Jerusalem for a year and a half, then Nitzion, then Kiryat Arba. Her father found work translating texts. She says she has many interests, but has no time to realize them right now.

There was a time when she worked with silver, she is interested in art and in fact one of the reasons Miriam had in mind for coming to Sa-nur was the artist’s colony. She hopes to study art with the Sa-nur artists.

She has also worked as a kindergarten teacher in the past.

“I hope that in 2 months this will all be over, and I can forget about all this, and study in peace. We have a lot of plans but we have to survive these 2 months.”

Miriam sends they ended up in Sa-nur by accident. “My husband found, at his workplace, a flyer that told about Sa-nur. And to our shame, we had to open up a map to see where it was. Sa-nur was in a very difficult state, and nobody knew about it. There were only a few heroic artists that would drive through all of these hostile villages to get there. From what I remember, we drove through this one village by bus and all the Arabs came out of their shops to see all these crazy Jews coming to this place from whence they had long ago expelled us. We decided to prove to them that no one was going to expel or move us out of here. Sadly, it’s now Jews who are planning to expel us from here.”

Miriam and her family moved to Sa-nur in 2003. “There was no talk of the plan yet, we came to support the place and to give it more of a Jewish presence. We came here to live, we left our work, our house, and came here.”

“Soldiers may also get scared when they go into battle, but they have a goal. We are in a state of war, our insane government doesn’t defend us so we have to be the soldiers. Of course we have to drive through this road, we have to live here in absolutely impossible conditions, under bombs, like in Gushkativ, there are constantly bombs falling there. They government doesn’t get it, probably doesn’t even want to; so what happens is the civilian population turns into soldiers. And you know, there is no place or time for fear in a situation like this.”

Miriam met her husband when she was about 17 years old and they were both demonstrating on the streets of Israel. They have six children.

Miriam points out that where there is a yeshuv (settlement), there must be soldiers. Lately the number of soldiers in Sa-nur has significantly risen. Miriam believes it is some kind of government conspiracy in preparation for disengagement.

Miriam is concerned about police officer brutality to political demonstrators and how the police officers may end up conducting themselves towards Sa-nur settlers. She herself has been beat up and abused by police officers at past demonstrations.

“They’re hooligans and we must fight against them.” She declares.

“Scary? Everything is scary,” she says sighing, “everything in our life is like a horrible dream lately. My country instead of defending me, turns into some kind of opponent who wants to throw me out of my house. The government which should have been my government and which should behave honestly in the very least, is bargaining with government seats and votes. And it’s not defending its own citizens. Everything is scary, but what is there to do, run? There are people who don’t have the strength, they are not to be judged, they decided to take the compensation and leave, well, those are their personal beliefs. But doesn’t someone have to fight, for morals, for Jewish morals, for our life, for our country…”

Her husband helps with the construction and gardens and whatever handiwork needs to be done in Sa-nur. Before, her husband used to drive the settlement car and also help with whatever was needed in Sa-nur.

From the time Miriam was 16 and her husband was 17 they have been participating in various political demonstrations and have not had time to study or to acquire a specific profession. She has been compelled to participate in demonstrations against certain government actions ever since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, around the time Arafat was invited to Israel for negotiations, when Miriam Adler was 16 years old. She calls it a “process of suicide” that she must do what she can to stop. She remembers when everyone in Israel had to have gas masks in 1990 during the Persian Gulf War when people were expecting chemical attacks.

She says that people who think Israel’s problem’s can be solved in a democratic way are naive. “This is a country which only understands the language of brute strength. Whoever’s stronger, whoever screams the loudest is the one who wins.”

“The first demonstration I was at had about half a million people, people demonstrated and spent the night there. The people were kicked out of there in a hideous, animal-like manner. The police beat them, kicked them out.”

“I remember that my parents were impossible to break. For ten years everything was attempted on them, they were taken to court, the government tried to scare them, I don’t know everything because they didn’t tell me everything, I was a child.” But the impression of it remains…

As for her ideology? “Take the Tanach, the Bible, and start reading,” she says simply.

She blushes, laughs and admits to having met her husband at demonstrations. “There are very few ideological arguments in our home! They would arrest us together, one time in the Arab Quarter, another time in the city, another time in Yerihod before they gave away the synagogue in Yerihod, people walked all night until they reached Yerihod and there they were all arrested! And a couple other times… That’s how it happened, we were canned together!”