fierce momentum in Europe, Yossi Harel was fighting in Jerusalem and the Galilee against Arabs in the anti-Jewish riots of the 1930s. The Palestinian conflict, too, was already a struggle for existence to determine who would survive.

Yossi was born in Jerusalem in 1919 to Moshe and Batya Hamburger, both of whose families had first come to Palestine in the nineteenth century. His childhood was not a simple one.

His father ran a grocery and looked after his children and his wife, who was a lovely, aristocratic woman, but also extremely fragile emotionally. She was eccentric, withdrawn, and quite troubled, and at that time they did not know how to treat her.

Perhaps in a subconscious attempt to compensate for his mother’s fragility, Yossi was a solid block of decisions, measuredfeelings, and objective facts; he shaped his character consciously and deliberately. He loved his mother as every son does, but in her madness he felt betrayal. When it became too difficult to live with the guilt that took hold of him in her presence, Yossi instinctively recognized the only way to protect himself: he decided his mother was dead. He separated himself from her while she was still living and did not see her again until she died many years later.

Because of all the damage wrought by his troubled childhood and the sense of betrayal bound up in his relationship with his mother, Yossi was later able to identify with the pain of the orphans he brought by ship to Palestine for these very reasons. Those children were