Reunion at Lydda

From the viewpoint of a moderately successful Jewish merchant, the future in Bobruisk, Belorussia looked very dim after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1920 Joseph Hecht and his wife decided to send their husky young sons, Shimon and Yehyel, to Palestine. It was a lucky break for the Hecht brothers, because as time went by, the chances of getting out of the Soviet Union diminished to nil. Mr. & Mrs. Hecht were forced to stay in Bobruisk. Shimon and Yehyel became foundation members of Degania B, a communal settlement in the Jordan Valley.

In 1941 the German army rolled into Bobruisk and the Hechts fled to Siberia. Food parcels from their sons saved them from starvation, but when Joseph Hecht died after the war, his wife went back to devastated Bobruisk. Where 30,000 Jews had once lived, there were only 400. Mrs. Hecht felt lonely. One day she wrote a letter to Stalin himself, pointing out that she was 76 years old and asking his permission to join her sons before she died. Bureaucrats descended on Mrs. Hecht. She signed documents, filled in forms; finally she was packed off to Vienna, the second Soviet citizen with an emigration permit for Israel since the state was founded in 1948.

Last week Sarah Hecht stepped down from an Israeli plane at Lydda airport into the bearlike embraces of her husky sons. She wore workaday Russian clothes and new shoes and stockings, but the only article she prized among her effects (in fact, the only article of value she was allowed to take out) was the wedding ring which young Merchant Hecht had put on her finger more than 50 years before. In a few hours Mrs. Hecht was walking among the Jordan Valley banana groves, seven grandchildren beside her and three great-grandchildren tugging at her blue cotton skirt.

As the Kremlin had calculated, the moving reunion of the Hechts was a shot in the arm to Israel's pro-Communist Mapam party, which has been in decline since the arrest in Prague early this year of a Mapam official, Mordechai Oren, accused of activities against the security of the state. It was a short-lived advantage. Few Israelis have forgotten that in Russia there are still about 2,000,000 Jews to whom Stalin will not issue emigration permits.

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