in some ways a reflection of himself. They were also his atonement.

When he completed the statutory requirements of his public education at Tachkemoni School, Yossi got a job working in the Castel quarries to help out his family, and soon thereafter he also worked for the post office in Jerusalem, laying underground telephone wires. At age fourteen he enlisted in the Haganah, the Jewish army, along with his friends from the Boy Scout Legion; in one way or another he stayed within this framework until he became a man of forty.

While his close friends studied at high school, Yossi continued to work and was forced to prepare for the external exams of the London Matriculation. At age eighteen, when he was still active in the Haganah, his father,sister, and twin brother went down to Sodom to run a cafeteria for the Dead Sea project, a community undertaking initiated by the workers movement. Yossi remained alone. His circle of friends in the movement and in the Haganah replaced his family, even while he kept supporting his mother, whom he no longer saw.

One of his strongest memories–one that later grieved him and served as a milestone in his Haganah ventures–was connected to the riots of 1929. At age eleven he went with the Boy Scout Legion to a workers camp in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, near Jerusalem. Two days later, early Saturday morning, the campers were notified they were being disbanded and returned to Jerusalem. Loaded onto a truck, they were driven home with an armored escort. En