Habo’s early days
A wonderful piece from Leon Moss who was a member of Habonim in the late 1940s/early 1950s. See also extensive number of stories and pictures on HABO 100 Facebook .
Scroll down this page to see a list of all the Facebook photo albums, with the number of photos and videos in each album.
To view the actual material go to HABO 100 on Facebook.
Scroll down this page to see a list of all the Facebook photo albums, with the number of photos and videos in each album.
To view the actual material go to HABO 100 on Facebook.
With grateful thanks to Shelley Wollach Zeevi for curating the albums.
Submitted by Leon in 2019
As far as I can remember, we all had to do kitchen duty, partly because we had to eat and partly as punishment should the occasion arise. The food was okay but jokes about the tomato jam and pilchards abounded. The conclusion was that these were the cheapest commodities and anyway, what could you expect for what you were paying? Peeling potatoes was the worst kitchen chore, as it has always been.
One evening my friend David and I were frying potato chips in a Dixie lid. The Dixie was a large oval shaped pot with a deep lid. We built a fire outside the kitchen, filled the lid with oil and waited for it to get good and hot and then started deep frying the chips. A gust of wind suddenly blew under the lid as David was busy with the chips. The lid lifted and turned over, spilling boiling oil onto his arms and hands. The oil ignited from the fire and David screamed and took off, running up the hill behind us. Someone tackled him and half carried, half dragged him down. Someone else ran to call the doctor. Someone else ran to the only phone and called for an ambulance. David spent the rest of the camp in the East London hospital. I’m sure he bore the marks of those burns to his last day.
The sea off Nahoon Beach was reputedly treacherous. There had already been one tragedy at a Habonim Camp. A camper by name of Isaac Merkel ?????? had drowned and every Habonim camp for years after the tragedy held a memorial service for him. I remember how touching and how frightening the service was to a 14 year old boy.
Every morning a select group of Shomrim roped themselves together and waded out to sea to test the depths and currents. When they returned they planted flags where swimming was allowed. Sometimes it was a very small area. The Nahoon River emptied out into the sea near the campsite and near our beach. One of our “engineering” projects was to build a bridge across the river.
— with Leon Moss.
To view the actual material in these summaries of photo albums go to HABO 100 on Facebook.
Click on each image below to enlarge and see the details of each album and the number of underlying photos and videos in each album. Click on the link in the caption of each image to go to the underlying images of the albums on Facebook. With grateful thanks to Shelley Wollach Zeevi for curating the albums.
