 talk about Israel. I asked him to explain to me what was there. He said there is a city, right next to Tel Aviv. I told him that I had a profession, that I was a glass engineer. He gave me a look and said, ‘What a coincidence – that’s exactly what we are looking for there.’ Twenty-four hours later he returned and said, ‘You are sailing for Israel.’ I asked him just to write down where to go, and he wrote: Ashdod Yam."
Haim recalls the ordeals of the first day, the truck they were put on, arriving in the dead of night to the sound of jackals howling, the hut in which his wife broke into bitter tears, the first night, on which he promised her that they would leave immediately, only to get up at dawn and find himself on the beach, with "the water and the sky attached to each other." That was the moment at which he also knew that he would break his promise to his wife and stay there.
And stay he did, watching new immigrants arrive day after day, at first Moroccans and Egyptians, then the Poles, who "at first did not want to get off the buses that brought them, and afterward refused to get on the buses, unless they were promised that they would be taken to Ashdod." Between one thing and another, Haim helped with the immigrant absorption process, and in 1958 the immigrants elected him their mayor. When he took over as mayor, the city had a population of 5,000; when he left, the population stood at 25,000. He also changed the city’s name from Ashdod Yam to Ashdod. Why? Well, that, too, is a story in itself.
One day Haim decided that what the town lacked was a library, but he had no money for the project. Just then he received an invitation to attend a reception hosted by Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Haim devised a plan to make use of his fluency in French in order to extract a donation from the baron. The first part of the plan went well. The foreign minister at the time, Yigal Allon, introduced him to the guest as the mayor of Ashdod Yam. But then the baron was surrounded by people and Haim found it difficult to approach him. As soon as he saw him standing by himself, he went over to the baron to remind him who he was. "I remember," Rothschild said. "You are from that kibbutz [Jewish collective farm], from Sdot Yam." Haim was deeply hurt. "What kind of kibbutz?" he rails, 50 years on. "In my imagination I was actually the mayor of Paris."
Offended by what he saw as a rebuff by Rothschild, Haim determined that his ‘great city’ of Ashdod Yam would never again be mistaken for a mere kibbutz. The intensity of that affront gave him a sleepless night, he continues, and in the morning he went to see the interior minister, Haim Shapira. "How much is it going to cost me today?" the minister said as he entered, but Haim explained that it would cost nothing – all he wanted was to change the city’s name. The minister agreed, asking only that Haim get the authorization of the municipal council. Haim went into the next room, dictated a letter to the secretary and returned to the minister’s office. "Here is the authorization," he said.
Thus, he says, because of his wounded ego, the name of the city was changed. "What kind of Paris?" he chuckles about himself, looking back nearly half a century. "Even Tel Aviv was light-years away."
Haim strikes a serious note only when he talks about the character of the city. "This is a city that has never known ethnic discrimination," he asserts. "We did not have Ashkenazim and Sephardim [two types of Jews – European and non-European — which are given different statuses in Israel]. I erased that issue from the outset. That is what I drummed into their heads and that is the way it has stayed. We all became Ashdodis."
A Palestinian perspective:
A very different history is told by Abdullah Zaqut, who was a resident of Isdud village who was expelled in 1948. The great, multicultural city of Ashdod described by Haim, its first mayor, was for Palestinians who had lived there for centuries, a site of expulsion, pain, blood and tears — separation of families, curfews, martial law, imprisonment and forced removal.
