Word: akir
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Cowboys & Indians. Until last May, Akir's baked-mud huts were inhabited by some 500 Arab families who worked the nearby vineyards and orange groves, occasionally sniped at a passing Jewish convoy. As the Jewish troops approached, most Arab families fled, the rest were chased out. Today Akir is a community of 300 Jewish families from Bulgaria, Poland, Rumania and Yemen. These new inhabitants have moved in to stay...
Where the road widens slightly to make Akir's village square, Jewish children romped around a gnarled sycamore tree last week, playing a popular game, the local version of cowboys & Indians; it is called "Jews & Arabs." Watching them was an elderly Bulgarian Jew who was selling small balloons from a folding table. Fifty yards away was the two-story stone building where, in old days, Arab fellahin used to sit gossiping over Turkish coffee. Part of one wall of the Arab cafe lay in rubble. The cafe had been hit by an Israeli shell. On the undamaged section...
...months ago Akir was deserted," said an Israeli captain. "There wasn't even a stray cat here. We didn't consider these Arab villages fit places for our people to live, but we had to have some place to put them." First the government sent workmen to spray Akir with DDT. Cement was poured over the earthen floors; boards or tin roofs replaced Arab thatching. Water pipes were laid between the courtyards...
...Life in Akir has few refinements. Moshe Ben Yaacov Libby, a lean, swarthy immigrant from Yemen, lives with his family of five in a rusty, corrugated-iron shelter. They cook Arab style over an open clay oven and eat from a rough board supported by orange crates. Moshe's wife has found only occasional work picking oranges, and the 'family's stake is going for food. But Moshe, who spent three years in a British detention camp in Aden, plans to stay. He says: "The Arabs of Yemen hated us. There we had a three-story house...
...Most of Akir's Jews come from Bulgaria ; the town is jokingly called "Little Sofia." Nissim Shamle, a Bulgarian electrician with four children, summarized the hopes and complaints of Akir. "We are far from 100% organized, but we see a good beginning," he said as a crowd of roughly dressed settlers in work caps nodded approval. "Of course there is still the Arab cemetery. We have left that untouched. We have a school and a small synagogue...