small grocery store that served as a chess club at night, from a grandfather who was a fourth-generation Jerusalemite and built a synagogue, from a traditional Jerusalem home. Although Yossi grew up in a landscape of sentimental sunsets, of song and declamation in youth-movement gatherings on kibbutz lawns, he was also present at synagogues and cemeteries of the Old City in the Mount of Olives, where notables were buried as close as possible to the Temple Mount in order to be the first ones to greet the Messiah.

As very young men, Yossi and his friends read The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book by Franz Werfel about the Armenian revolt in the mountains of Anatolia. They found in this book a moral code. Hidden within it, thebook contained pain and bravery, loyalty and isolation, and it won the hearts of the young Palestine Jews.

Years later, on the nearly empty deck of a ship teeming with refugees and under a full moon, it would all come together–Masada, Musa Dagh, the lessons of Yossi’s youth. As the ship sailed in blood-curdling quiet along the Turkish coast, what preoccupied Yossi on this junkheap ready to capsize was his compulsive probe through binoculars, maps, intuition and childhood memories, in search of Mt. Musa Dagh. It was winter, the ship was packed with almost 4,500 people, but Yossi–like an ultra-Orthodox Jew clutching the Wailing Wall–held onto the mountain. He was Musa Dagh on the deck, approaching the mountain where the American survivors of genocide entrenched themselves and fought. Finally,