A Letter to Esther Shawmut-Friedman

I'm saddened when I called my friend Esther Shawmut-Friedman and learned that she passed away. The following is an email exchange we had together.

Dear Dickey (my name changed from Max to Dickey)

I just picked up your email. You can mention my name as you like. In the future, just let me know when your next speaking engagement comes up as you have done here..

I have asked Esther Shawmut-Friedman if I can quote her in my new book. As you can see, I received the OK. If you recall, my US passport read "NOT GOOD FOR PALESTINE" and "penalty of death, loss of citizenship and or life imprisonment if you serve in a foreign army. The last amnesty was granted a few years later by President Harry S. Truman.

Esther Shawmut-Friedman is telling me her story over the phone. After the Roosevelt Administration failed to help the Jews of Europe, "Government in the Murder of Jews" protests from Jewish leaders criticized the administration's failure to act. Growing political pressure for action on the refugee issue resulted in an organization to rescue the Jews of Europe. A story was told of a medic with the 8th Brigade.

Raised in an ardently Zionist home in Boston, the doctor gave up her identity to join Machal (referring to the group of overseas volunteers who fought alongside Israeli forces during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War). At the risk of losing her US citizenship, she traveled to Israel under the name of a survivor of Auschwitz and changed her identity. The survivor went on to America. To make her new identity as believable as possible, officials of Haganah, Israel's pre-state army, shaved her head and removed moles from her cheek, shoulder, and buttocks using electric needles. From her hometown in the USA, she traveled to France. From France, she traveled to Israel on a packed ship with no water, no toilet facilities (passengers relieved themselves on the floor or over the vessel's side), and no menstrual supplies.

Subsisting on a diet of canned peaches and hard biscuits, she dropped 40 pounds in two weeks. By the time she arrived, she had looked like a displaced person, she recalls. For several months, she felt weak, "though, under the urgency of the circumstances, you don't realize it." As a medic with the 8th Brigade, see tended to scratches and broken bones and took out tonsils and appendices, often under the most primitive conditions.

Trained to do such work in the US Navy, "I didn't see anything horrible; nothing I couldn't handle," she says. "That's because I had the training. "The Machalnik, who toted a rifle during her service in Israel, says she never felt singled out. "It was a different experience from being in the American Navy because it had comradeship," she says. "I never felt the difference of being a woman." Some Machalnik’s stayed in Israel following the war. Many went back to their native countries and returned to the Jewish state later in life. Michael (the Hebrew acronym for Mitnadvei Chutz L'Aretz, volunteers from outside Israel) includes all those who served in the Israeli Armed Forces during the War of Independence. About 1,000 men and women, Jewish and Christian, from the US and Canada served in the Israeli Army, Navy, and Air Force.

The "Machlaniks," as Israelis called them, arrived to support the ranks of Palestinian Jews who had taken the brunt of casualties from organized Arab armies invading from five different countries. Proportional to population, the number of Israeli deaths in the War of Independence, 1% of the people, was five times higher than the number of American combat deaths in World War II. Machal volunteers were a small percentage of the Israeli fighting forces, but were assigned to virtually every unit in the Israeli Army, Navy, and Air Force. They provided critical military skills and experience far out of proportion to their numbers. They dominated the flying personnel in the Air Force.