*When I wrote the American Jews Who Secretly Helped Build Israel, I had no idea it would lead me into more research. I ended up being curious about Canada. Which then turned into the rest of the world. So… this is the 2nd part of an unintentional series. *
Part one is here:
Ben Dunkelman had been home from Europe for only a few years when he was asked to help recruit an army. He happened to know a little something about armies. Dunkelman had enlisted as a private in the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada during World War II and landed in Normandy on D-Day. He fought through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, rose to major, and came home with the Distinguished Service Order.
He knew Palestine too. His parents had given him a ticket there for his eighteenth birthday in 1931, and instead of making a quick visit, Dunkelman stayed for about a year and worked on a farm near Kfar Saba. He eventually returned to Canada, joined the family business, Tip Top Tailors, and after five years of war settled back into civilian life.
There were thousands of men like him in the Canadian Jewish community. More than 17,000 Jewish Canadian men and women had served during World War II, out of a Jewish population of only about 168,000. Nearly 450 had been killed. Jewish Canadians had fought at Hong Kong, Dieppe, Ortona, Normandy, and across northwest Europe. Some had flown bombers and fighters, served at sea, driven tanks, worked communications, or learned artillery and mortars.
Three years after the war ended, some of those veterans were being asked whether they were willing to go again.
By January 1948, Dunkelman was back in meetings. This time they were in Toronto, and the men around the table were trying to figure out how many Canadians they could get to Palestine before the war everybody expected finally began.
The first idea was to recruit 1,000 Canadian veterans. Dunkelman brought in Lionel Druker, a law student who had served in the Canadian armored corps, while Arthur Goldberg had already begun gathering students and veterans who wanted to fight for the future Jewish state but had no idea whom to contact or how to get there.
The target eventually came down to about 300 men, but the network spread quickly. Toronto became the center of recruiting, Montreal became important for aviation, and Jewish communities across the country supplied people and money. Druker remembered that the Canadians planned to raise C$1 million to equip their volunteers, and during January and February he was sent through the Maritime Provinces raising funds.
David Ben-Gurion knew what they were doing. On February 3, his diary was filled with the things consuming his attention in the months before independence. The Haganah needed copper for millions of bullets. Yehuda Arazi was buying weapons. Money was moving through Switzerland. Pilots were being found. Among all of it was a short entry about Canada: “In Canada they want to organize a Canadian battalion.”
The battalion never reached 1,000 men, but the Canadians were already preparing to leave.
Lionel Druker took the first group, about 30 men, from Toronto to New York by train. They needed French visas, which meant they needed perfectly ordinary explanations for why a collection of Canadian men suddenly wanted to cross the Atlantic. Some said they were taking vacations. Others said they were visiting relatives.
They sailed from New York in early March and landed at Le Havre before being taken south to Grand Arénas near Marseille, a sprawling transit camp filled with Jewish refugees and displaced people. The Canadians were headed toward the place many of those Jews were desperately trying to reach.
The men later moved to Tretz, where they waited and trained. When the time came to leave for Palestine, false passports and visas became part of the journey. They reached Haifa at the end of March and joined the Haganah the following day, becoming a Canadian platoon in the 52nd Battalion of the Givati Brigade.
Not everybody arriving from Canada knew how to fight. Irving Matlow of Toronto had been too young to serve during World War II. He heard about a Haganah recruiting meeting at the Brunswick Avenue Talmud Torah, passed a medical examination, traveled to New York, and eventually sailed for France using false papers. He trained there before boarding a converted freighter for Haifa.
Arthur Goldberg was doing much the same work thousands of miles away in Vancouver. He was studying law at the University of British Columbia after volunteering for the RCAF in 1945, too late to see combat in Europe. Goldberg began recruiting veterans who wanted to help Palestine, and somewhere along the way the recruiter became a recruit himself.
He traveled through Grand Arénas and boarded the Marie Annique, an old Italian three-masted sailing ship, with about 180 volunteers crammed aboard. Goldberg reached Israel in June, joined the artillery, and before the war was over the Vancouver law student was firing French guns against Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian forces and serving with an anti-tank unit in the Negev.
The recruiting network was stretching from one Canadian coast to the other.
Harvey Sirlin was sitting through a cold Winnipeg winter when his cousin Hershie Stein called him in early 1948 and asked whether he still wanted to go fight in Palestine.
Sirlin did.
He was told to go to a small café on Main Street near Atlantic Avenue and find a man sitting in a rear booth. That contact sent him to a rifle club at the police station on Rupert Avenue. From there he was sent to a house on Salter Street, where about ten other young men were waiting to be interviewed.
The Jewish community quietly took care of the practical details. Doctors gave the volunteers physical and dental examinations without charging them. Sirlin got a passport and a visa to France, bought himself a good pair of paratrooper boots, packed lightly, and was given a train ticket to New York.
His parents knew where he was going. His father tried to persuade him to wait until the fall but eventually told his son that if he were his age, he would probably do the same thing.
Sirlin left Winnipeg on May 2.
The Canadian recruiting network didn’t need a headquarters sign on the door. Sometimes it was a phone call, a café booth, a doctor who didn’t send a bill, and a father watching his son board a train.
