Coexisting with the “Palestinians”

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bInside, the yeshiva students stand frantically against the doors, battempting to hold back the murderers. But suddenly there is a bloud crash. A huge hole has been made in the front door! Shots bring out. Avraham Yanai, fifty-six, a poor Jew from Con- bstantinople, falls, struck in the arm. A second shot catches btwenty-seven-year-old Zalman Vilenski, secretary of Yeshiva bKnesset Yisroel, in the face. He collapses in a pool of blood. Yet banother bullet rips the stomach of Yisrael Mordechai Kaplan, a btwenty-two-year-old yeshiva student from Vilkomir in bLithuania. Even as he falls, he continues to hold onto the door bto try to keep the Arabs out. But only for a moment; he collapses band dies.

bThe yeshiva students show superhuman strength and bbravery as they hold back the hordes. But under the assault of bbullets they are forced to retreat with the rest into the inner brooms. The door to the roof bursts open and Arabs leap into the bhouse. Two more yeshiva students now fall, twenty-six-year-old bDov Ber Lipin of Vitebsk and Alter Haim Shor, twenty-four, of bRozalia, Lithuania. Their bodies tumble out onto the steps, and bthe mob tramples them as it rushes inside. Eliezer Don Slonim, bcool and strong to the end, fires his pistol at the mob, but a bheavy metal pipe strikes him viciously in the head; he collapses.

bNow there is no hope left, but the yeshiva students fight like blions. The sound of swords and knives slashing and cutting is bmixed with the cries of women and children. Someone cries, b“Shma Yisrael . . .!” Yisrael Lazarovski, a student from Letsch, bRussia, is brutally stabbed and dies. He is only seventeen. bYisrael Hillel Kaplinski is older; he is twenty-one. Lying on the bground, felled by a bullet wound, he is attacked by a dozen Ar- babs who stab him repeatedly. A survivor recalls him shouting, “I bam already dead and they still hit me!” And in a corner, in a bpool of blood, wrapped in his prayer shawl, lies the Rabbi of bZichron Ya’akov, Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Orlinski, next to his bdead wife, who had come to Hebron to spend a quiet Sabbath bwith their daughter and son-in-law, Eliezer Don Slonim.

bRabbi Tzvi Drobkin, sixty-seven, from Bobruysk, Russia, is bknown as “the Iluy [“genius”] of Shklov.” The Arabs literally brip his belly in two and his insides pour out. He arrived just half ba year earlier from bloody Russia, hoping to live a life of Torah band peace in the Holy Land.