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The Sych family arrives in Israel
Not long before Eric Weiss left Israel, Peres Sych arrived -- another branch of Naomi Weiss' extended Israeli family taking root. Sych's daughter, Miri, eventually married a nephew of Gerda Weiss. Sych was another of the few who survived Hitler's camps. When American troops liberated Dachau, Sych had typhus, weighed 89 pounds and was near death. The Americans gave him tablets and a bed in a field hospital to recuperate. After four weeks, he walked home to Czechoslovakia. He found the family house, but none of the family. But he met another Holocaust survivor, Devorah, and they were married. The country was only months old, and all their belongings were in one suitcase. They went to Jaffa, a few miles south of Tel Aviv. Jaffa is mentioned in the Bible and its tiny fishing harbor is said to be the oldest port in the world. According to a study by a Palestinian relief organization, some 37,000 Arabs were driven out of Jaffa and the surrounding communities by Jews between 1948 and 1967. Now, the city caters to artists and tourists. The Sychs had two children soon after arriving in Israel. They were living in a tent in Jaffa when they heard about a moshav -- a cooperative farm -- being settled by Czechoslovakians at Mazor, a few miles to the north. So they took their suitcase and their children to settle at Mazor. There were no roads when they got there, no houses. The settlers picked the fields clean of rocks and built the hamlet themselves. The moshav was an invention of the Zionists, who set them up as private farms, owned cooperatively by their members. The residents lived in villages and often hired Arabs from neighboring communities to till the surrounding fields. What money the owners made from their own crops or orchards was theirs. Later immigrants set up a similar group-farming system, the better-known kibbutzim. The kibbutzim had group ownership, with common buildings for dining and raising children. Kibbutzniks shared the work and the wealth. The kibbutzim have changed in recent years. Many have branched out into high-tech manufacturing to bring in more money and all have abandoned the practice of raising children separately from their parents. The moshav has changed, too. Many moshav owners have become "gentleman farmers," with jobs in the city and a little bit of acreage to putter around in on the weekend.
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