Grandma's army

In blog no. 60 I wrote about my grandson who was inducted into the Armoured Corps a short while ago. Last Friday,   the immediate family (including myself) and friends participated in the second ceremony of the Armoured Corps. It is known as the “Beret March”. It begins at 3 a.m., when the   Armoured Corps’ four brigades, with their faces camouflaged with black mud, begin a grueling march in the desert carrying equipment weighing 17 kgs. reaching 32 kgs. when the stretchers are opened and filled with sacks of sand. We visitors joined the exhausted and sweaty boys for the last km. of the march to the places where the ceremony was held, in which they received the black berets particular to the Armoured corps. Every battalion in the IDF is distinguished by a different coloured beret. Prior to the ceremony, the new recruits just finished eight weeks of basic training, followed by six weeks in their particular speciality. After completing this training, the cadets a...

  And to round up my trio on Latrun , Charles Smith, who joined the Senior Residence complex where I live, together with his wife Shirley, sent me the following   short story. One of many among his reminiscences from their 37 years on a moshav (agricultural settlement) overlooking Latrun . “In 1978, after 3 years in Rehovot, our family moved to Moshav Bin Nun, an agricultural village in the beautiful area overlooking the Valley of Ayalon (where Joshua Bin Nun fought and subdued the locals a few thousand years ago), and the Latrun Monastery. Attached is a picture of the view from our farm and another of our vineyard which is relevant to the story below. At that time, whenever any Israeli – from my barber to taxi drivers - heard that we were going to move to that spot, he/she immediately trotted out the quotation from the Bible in Hebrew: “ The Sun stood still at Givon and the Moon in the Valley of Ayalon” - Joshua   [10:12]. This was, o...

LATRUN - II One of the fiercest and most crucial battles of the War of Independence was the fight for the fortress of Latrun , which commands the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This series of engagements is important in its own right, and also because some who fought there went on to become important figures. Two would even rise to the office of prime minister: Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon . The fortress at Latrun, and the nearby Trappist monastery overlook the scenic Ayalon Valley, about 16 kilometers west of Jerusalem Its commanding location along an ancient route gives it great strategic value, making it the site of many battles, going back to biblical times. Here, Joshua prayed for God to make the sun stand still so he could finish defeating the Amorites (Joshua 10:12-13). In 167 BCE the Ayalon Valley was where Judah the Maccabi won an important victory over the Seleucids. The Templars built a fortress there in 1187.   In the late 1930s in Mandatory Pale...