Israel Peleg at Moreshet, The Mordechai Anielewicz Holocaust Study Center at Givat Haviva
Israel Peleg was born and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay but made aliya in 1963 with the Youth Aliya organization. At the age of 10 he became a member of the Zionist-socialist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and five years later left South America – and his parents – for a new life on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz in Israel.
In Montevideo he attended a state school in the mornings and the Shalom Aleichem Jewish school in the afternoons.
In Israel he was sent to complete his high-school education at Kibbutz Ga'ash and although he didn't know it at the time, this kibbutz was to become his permanent home. He eventually married a kibbutz volunteer from Argentina and became an educator in the regional school where he also took care of groups of Youth Aliya adopted by his community.
These days Israel Peleg is an accomplished educator in the field of Holocaust studies at Moreshet, The Mordechai Anielewicz Holocaust Study and Research Center, established in the 1960's at Givat Haviva for collecting testimonies of concentration camp survivors and resistance fighters from the ghettos.
The love of his life, apart from his family and community of course, is the Yiddish language and culture. When he begins to speak of the richness of that language and culture, much of which obliterated by the Holocaust, Peleg's face shines and his hands become as expressive as his words.
Peleg's maternal and paternal grandparents had settled in Uraguay after leaving their families in east Europe in the 1920s. Apart from one great-uncle, the extended paternal and maternal families were completely wiped out in the Holocaust.
"All of my grandparents spoke Yiddish fluently and although my parents did also they only spoke Spanish at home," says Peleg an only child. His parents separated and his father made aliya in 1967 and mother some years later, each with a new family. Today there are some 11,000 Uruguayan Jews living in Israel and the community in Uruguay today is around 20,000 – 25,000, the majority living in Montevideo and in the town of Paysandu, the second largest city in the country.
Peleg's mother was actually born in the small Jewish town of Mezrich in the region of Lublin. She was only a year old when her parents left Poland for South America in 1929. His paternal grandparents hailed from Besarabia, present day Moldavia, and arrived in Montevideo – where his father was born – in the mid-1920s.
Although he studied history at the Seminar HaKibbutzim teachers training college in Tel Aviv, Israel Peleg became more interested in the pre-Holocaust period of Jewish life in Europe and the effects of the Holocaust on the language and culture following a post-studies chance meeting with Haike Grossman. Grossman, a member of Kibbutz Evron on the Lebanese border and one of the founders of Moreshet, was a leader of the Jewish resistance against the Nazis in occupied Poland. She had passed up on the opportunity to leave for Palestine after being issued with a British immigration permit. A leader of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, Grossman participated in the Jewish uprisings in the Vilna and Bialystock ghettos and together with other ghetto uprising survivors escaped, joining Jewish partisans.
"That chance meeting with Haike Grossman and her persuading me to come to work at Moreshet – part time in the beginning – opened up opportunities for me to be able to express, further develop and learn more about life of my forefathers in Europe whose lives were so brutally cut down by the Nazis and their henchmen," explains Israel Peleg.
The way they were – photographs of Luboml on the wall, Israel Peleg keeps A.A.C.I seniors spellbound with tales of Yiddish yesteryear
In the course of his work at Moreshet, Peleg meets with groups of high-school students and teachers about to undertake an Israel Ministry of Education supported educational and highly emotionally charged journey to Poland. He also guides groups himself, and for the last few years has been the main educator for the Mexican contingent participating in the annual March of the Living in Poland.
When asked how many times he has accompanied groups to Poland, Peleg nods his head and says he cannot remember but probably around forty.
A recent 3 day seminar of the Internatonal Department at Givat Haviva catered to 30 former Americans and Canadians resident in Israel for many years. As part of their program, the A.A.C.I. seniors experienced a more than emotional workshop with Peleg. Members of the A.A.C.I. (Americans and Canadians in Israel), either spoke or had some level of knowledge of Yiddish. When Peleg began to read from Yiddish prose and sing well-known Yiddish language songs, they heartily joined in the humorous ditties and became saddened by the lullabies, familiar to some from their own childhood days.
"In our household in America Yiddish was spoken far more than English, that I had to learn at school," explained one of the North American born participants whose parents had originated from Poland.
A powerful exhibition of photographs, artifacts and documents depicting life in the Polish shtetl of Luboml is on permanent display at Moreshet. As the A.A.C.I. seniors took in the exhibits, Israel Peleg played music from that period, explained more in depth about the people, places and period depicted in the pictures of a way of life that was about to be annihilated.
Peleg has also developed a one-man presentation where one has the opportunity to meet with the educator's educator, Janusz Korczak – a doctor, author, educator who above all loved children and who accompanied his charges to their brutal deaths.
"After I became involved with Moreshet, I began to realize that through dramatic presentation, songs and music – and of course especially the stories – there was a possibility to truly bring the richness of the culture in the Jewish communities, such as Luboml, to young and adult audiences today.
"The photographs, music and poetry are the trigger to making a deep connection - particularly for the youth of today - with life in the shtetl at the beginning of the 19th century," he adds.
When he is accompanying groups in Poland, he sometimes feels the need to stand in the street at specific sites and sing some Yiddish songs.
"Polish people usually stand around and listen, and often clap at the end of my street performance – shame they don’t realize as well what they lost," he says wistfully.
"However there is of course a revival of klezmer music today in Poland, non-Jewish musicians of course …but just think what there would have been if not for ...," his voice drifts off.
Text and photos: Lydia Aisenberg
