The story of Olga Feinberg, a Jewish doctor who lived in Jericho and served the Arab residents faithfully as the city's only physician, could make an exciting movie. Her story took place in the distant, restive years between the 1929 riots and the events of the great Arab uprising of 1936-1939. Feinberg, a native of Nikolayev in Russia, made her way to then-Mandate Palestine in 1927 and fell in love with the City of Dates. She spent her first few days there with an Arab family, and one day she was urgently called to the bedside of a sick boy, the son of one of the town dignitaries. Thanks to her care, the boy got better, and the city elders took note of her medical training and skill. They offered her a chance to live there and work as the only doctor in permanent residence. Feinberg leased a house and a small plot of land that was being used to grow bananas and established herself in the city. But neither the devoted treatment she gave the residents of Jericho nor her acquaintance with Arab leaders like Emir Abdullah from the other side of the Jordan River and King Fuad I of Egypt, both of whom she hosted in her home, helped her make it through the Arab uprising unscathed. In September 1938, her home was burgled and set on fire. Almost nothing of her property or the grounds she had carefully cultivated survived. Feinberg never returned to Jericho, and went on to provide medical care to Jewish communities in India and Aden, Yemen. Her life is the subject of new, as-yet unpublished research by Dr. Reuven Gafni, a member of the Land of Israel Studies Department at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee and deputy head of the Institute for the Land of Israel Research at Yad Ben Zvi. Gafni presented the major points of his research this week at the 2nd Jordan Valley Research Conference. Gafni has identified a phenomenon that few have addressed -- the relatively large number of clearly Arab cities during the British Mandate or even in the late 19th century that were home to lone Jewish families or tiny Jewish communities. He wants to set things straight: "There is no need to rewrite history; in total, there were about 1,000 to 2,000 Jews in all these places. However, we cannot ignore the distribution or the high number of small Jewish populations in so many Arab cities in that period: Beit Shean, Zemach, Jericho, Nazareth, Gaza, Beersheba, Nablus, Jenin, Bethlehem and others." Gafni underscores that he did not focus on coexistence in cities known as home to a mixed Jewish and Arab population like Jerusalem, Jaffa or Haifa, but rather "just the Arab cities where very small Jewish minorities settled down to live." A private move, not a national mission Gafni's work covers, among other issues, plans and attempts by Jews to gain a foothold in Jericho even before Olga Feinberg's time. At the end of the 19th century, it was Moses Montefiore, the Jewish Colonization Association and a group of Bulgarian Jews who sought to settle Jews in Jericho, and failed. In 1900, there were only two Jewish families in the city. Later, a hotel opened, and a Torah scroll was housed there. The revivalist of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, also issued a public call to settle in Jericho, and the city was home to the Mizrahi family, who owned the Edison Cinema in Jerusalem and who worked a citrus grove there, employing a few of the city's residents. "Until the 1929 riots, this kind of settlement was seen as reasonable and feasible," Gafni tells the Israel Hayom weekend supplement. "In Beit Shean [in the Jordan Valley], which was then an Arab city in every aspect, there were 250 Jews. They had a representative on the city council, and there was also a clinic run by [the Zionist women's group] Hadassah, and a Hebrew-language school. The rabbinate sent a kosher slaughterer to Nazareth, and a synagogue was built there. Arrangements were also made for kosher slaughter in Ramallah, Beit Shean and Gaza. About 50 Jews were living in Zemach. In the 1880s, there was an unsuccessful attempt to establish a Hebrew school in Nablus," Gafni says. The bloody riots of 1929 destroyed the Jewish communities and brought an end to isolated Jews living in Arab cities, even though the Jews who were there posed no threat at all, either existential or national -- at least, that was how they saw it. "Their [Jews'] establishing themselves in those places was done in a very private manner, almost always based on business or trade, and in most cases there was no significant purchase of land. The Jews didn't see their setting there as any kind of national mission," Gafni explains. According to Gafni, the fact that "in only one case -- the [Jewish] community in Gaza -- was there a Jewish cemetery, while in the rest of the communities, the deceased were buried in cemeteries in nearby [Jewish] cities," testifies to the relatively hazy national consciousness of the Jewish communities living among Arab populations. Some of the communities in Arab cities (in contrast to the mixed cities mentioned earlier) vanished entirely by the end of World War I. Others held on for some 40 years, until the British Mandate. The tiny islands still standing in Arab areas after 1929 were wiped out in the riots of 1936. Gafni has made an attempt to understand how the institutions of the Yishuv [the Jewish population of pre-state Israel] saw the matter. He learned that they perceived this method of settlement -- small Jewish outposts in the midst of Arab populations -- as a weak one with little chance of surviving. "The institutions provided the Jews of Beit Shean, Nazareth, Zemach and other places, before or after 1929, with very little assistance. It certainly wasn't enough to anchor them there before the rioting, or save them and keep them alive after what happened," he says. Gafni also got the impression that in most of these places, the Jews living there were observant and of Sephardi descent. They were mostly merchants who, to their detriment, had no in with the Ashkenazi, agricultural-centered settlement establishment. This did not help their chances of surviving in these towns and cities. Gafni mentioned that the War of Independence was waged in places where there was a significant Jewish presence and that were home to Jewish communities. "It could be, that the map of the war and the state would be totally different if the option of [Jews] moving into Arab cities hadn't been neglected," Gafni says. However, he insists that we not draw conclusions in hindsight. "My research is not political, it's historical. The time and the conditions are, of course, totally different," he stresses. Before and after 1929 In certain aspects, the work of Dr. Joseph Lehr in Arab Beit Shean was similar to that of Feinberg's in Jericho, and in the same years. He, too, was active in the city on his own initiative and independently, without any real help from institutions. He, too, continued to live in the city after the Arab uprising broke out, and even after the last 10 Jewish families in the city had pulled up stakes. But Feinberg only lost her house and her possessions. Lehr, originally from Germany, was murdered by Arabs in his home. The defunct newspaper Davar reported that "when medical aid was needed, Lehr would go visit sick Bedouin in the middle of the night ... and would treat them for free and give them medicine for free, too. He would say: A doctor helps any and all who need him -- he has nothing to fear. He can serve as a bridge between the two peoples." Shortly before he was murdered, Lehr was attacked by local Arabs and wounded. He moved to Kibbutz Beit Alfa for a short while, and from there to Haifa. But after a few of the local Arab leaders from Beit Shean guaranteed his safety and promised him he would come to no harm despite being the only Jew left in the city, Lehr returned to Beit Shean and resumed treating its Arab citizens. Late on the Friday night of February 26, 1937, some people knocked on his door. Before he could open it, they shot at him through the door, killing him. Until the end of the 19th century, two Arab communities in the north had been home to two small Jewish communities for a few hundred years, one in Shfaram -- which toward the end was comprised mainly of Jewish merchants from North Africa -- and one in Pekiin, which was entirely agricultural and comprised of some of the last local Arabic-speaking Jews. The Shfaram community survived until the end of the 19th century. The one in Pekiin held on until the second half of the British Mandate. Throughout the 19th century, there was also small-scale Jewish settlement in Acre and in Nablus. Gafni says that most people saw none of these places as part of the national settlement enterprise, and were quickly forgotten by the public as well as by history. Of course, the death of the lone Jewish communities in Arab cities also had to do with their geographic distance from the large Jewish population centers; the security risk entailed by their very existence; the perception of agriculture, unlike city dwelling, as an act of principle that symbolized more than anything the creation of the new Jew on his own land; as well as it being easier to purchase land for farming. "Still, the national institutions didn't completely ignore these small communities, and helped them a bit from time to time, by sending teachers, medical professionals, and sometimes money -- mainly after 1929 -- but none of it was enough to keep them alive," Gafni says. The final blow to the cities that dated back to the time of the Mishnah, including Hebron, Zemach and Beit Shean, was the riots of 1936-1937. The arrival of the Peel Commission to look into the future of the land required all the existing institutions to re-examine their priorities in building the land of Israel, and the isolated "islands" in the heart of Arab population centers paid the price. The last of the Jews in Jericho left, and some saw it as the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy: "Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho." (Joshua 6:26) The last Jews in Bethlehem had left long before. The lack of any real Jewish community in that city was due, in no small part, to the city's Christian character. One visitor there, Abraham Shmuel Hirshenberg, said in 1900: "We didn't stay long in Bethlehem, because we were in a hurry to get going. And every time I am in a place holy to Christians in the land of Israel I feel as if there is a threat hanging over me that their [Christian] zealots will attack me and avenge the death of their messiah." In 1896, Avraham Moshe Luntz, the great researcher into the history of Jerusalem, reported an idea he had to expand the Jewish settlement outside the Old City walls, "especially artists who need the space for their art, to cities where our brothers have not yet made their mark: Bethlehem, Ramle, Lod, Ashdod, Majdal, Jenin and other cities to the east of the Jordan." Max Bodenheimer, chairman of the Jewish National Fund, raised a similar idea at the 8th Zionist Congress, which met in The Hague: "It is not enough to establish communities and agricultural settlements in the land of Israel for the sake of gaining status in trade, industry and local administration. We must also gain a foothold elsewhere, and we must help set up Jewish communities in places where there are none, such as Nazareth, Bethlehem, Acre and Sidon [in modern-day Lebanon]." During those years, the Land of Israel arm of the World Zionist Organization adopted a plan from the founders of Tel Aviv to establish Jewish neighborhoods not only in existing mixed cities, but also in Arab cities. The cities mentioned in the initiative were, again, Gaza, Jericho, Acre and Bethlehem. But when the members of the Jewish National Fund committee responsible for purchasing land were asked to decide between buying land in Bethlehem or buying land in the Shaar Hagay area leading to Jerusalem, they opted for the latter. Lemaan Zion ("For the Sake of Zion"), another organization that existed at the time, which actually encouraged Jews to settle in Arab cities. It was headed by Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer of Berlin, and supported a Jewish presence in Ramle, Jenin and Lod. An elite salon in Jericho The last Jewish doctor in Jericho, Dr. Olga Feinberg, not only lived in the lowest desert oasis in the world and traveled on donkey back between the nearby Bedouin tents, she also made her home into a social and cultural center, unique of its kind in the city, where Arab public officials, Jews and British would frequently meet and mingle. The diary of Col. Frederick Kisch, who served as head of the Zionist Commission from 1923 to 1931, includes a long description of his visit to the Jewish doctor's home. Chaim Weizmann, who would go on to become Israel's first president, and Zionist thinker Dr. Arthur Ruppin, as well as the Emir Abdullah and King Fuad, as well as British High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan Arthur Wauchope, members of the Peel Commission, and many others visited the doctor at home, but none of them could guarantee anything. The circumstances, especially the great enmity, and the worsening ethno-religious conflict in the days of the great Arab uprising put an end to Feinberg's enterprise, as well. The funeral of her colleague Lehr in Beit Shean, which was attended by masses of mourners, was held in Haifa and covered extensively in the newspapers. In the same period, Reuven Klapholz, the last Jews living in the Muslim quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem -- which is outside the scope of Gafni's work -- was also murdered. Klapholz was killed on May 13, 1936, a day after an Arab guard had been murdered in the Givat Shaul neighborhood. The Arabs blamed the Jews for his death. The next day, when Klapholz returned home, Arabs shot and killed him. They then went on to abuse his body, stabbing his corpse. Can something be learned from the period in which there was still no Jewish sovereignty in Israel, and no Jewish defense force had yet been established, that applies to the current-day situation of Jews living in Hebron, the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, or the City of David and Kfar Shiloach in the Silwan neighborhood outside the Old City? Can we guess what fate will befall the Jewish settlers -- will they stay where they are under a future peace deal with the Palestinians, outside Israel's borders? Gafni is very careful to draw any comparison. "The conditions [today] are different. A lot of things have happened. Beyond that, I'm just a historian," he stresses.
