Cathlamet man explores Israel

This last April, local Hans York, a Reform Jew, traveled to Israel for a five week stay. York, who retired from the sheriff’s department in 2009, is currently the county court security coordinator. He is also active in a Marine Corps League detachment and a board member of the Wahkiakum County Historical Society.

His experience in law enforcement and a 15 year correspondence with a member of the Israeli Police gave him a perspective and experience that most visitors to the Holy Land could never have.

He spent almost three of those weeks in a hostel in Tel Aviv. The hostel was a single three bedroom apartment in a building that also housed several members of the Tel Aviv police force. He learned quickly that he needed to have his passport on him at all times. Occasionally there were women staying in the hostel, and he would choose to use the bathroom down the hall. One time, clad only in a towel and soaking wet, he found himself being dressed down in the hallway by a Tel Aviv officer that lived in the building. “Where is your passport?” she demanded.

York met several interesting people while staying in that building that housed the police force.

He also didn’t have to pay for taxis. One day a very tall, very large blond man knocked on his door.

“I go in two hours, he said. “You come?”

York saw him leave a prayer rug in the trunk of his car before they left. The fellow pulled over during their journey and asked him to point in the direction of Mecca. He got out his prayer rug and did his adulations. It was then that York learned of the Circassian people, he said, “white eastern European Muslims who had been persecuted in southern Russia.”

“There was a young girl,” said York, “that came around and threw us clean towels. She was a dark skinned girl with excellent English and she was a smart ass.” He asked her where she was from. “I’m from Israel,” she replied. “My mother was from Tunisia and my father was from Afghanistan. My mother came here easily, my father came here with some difficulty. When they met they decided they were two of the most miserable people in the world. The most unlucky. And that they should marry.”

“I had language problems I didn’t expect,” York said. He’d grown up speaking Yiddish at home, but soon discovered that the common language of Israel was Modern Hebrew. “I got through my bar mitzvah with a lot of practice and that was 53 years ago. I found five people in Israel that spoke Yiddish.”

He spent a day in Haifa. He floated in the Dead Sea. He saw the Jordan River and did the two and a half hour climb to Masada. He visited 11 museums, mostly to learn about the country and its people. Partly to see how the exhibits were curated, to bring new ideas home to the museum in Cathlamet.

He stayed with his pen pal for a week and a half and was allowed to observe his work. His friend, who lives in a little town outside Beer-Sheva in the Negev desert called Kfar-Dan, is a Border Cop on the Gaza Strip.

“It’s nothing like our border control.These guys are soldiers. I never heard the word ‘investigation’ while I was there. Literally, you are driving along this fence and there are these kids waving AK-47s.”

The first day they gave him a 28 pound vest and put him in a Land Cruiser with no roof. “It was 91 out,” he said, “no breeze, blue sky, observer written in big block white letters across the back.”

By the third day, he wondered if he should be armed.

“What are the rules of engagement? What’s your protocol? They all looked at me. They wave rifles, they told him, watch them. They wave an RPG, kill ‘em. We saw Rocket Propelled Grenades. From my day in the early 60’s RPGs were a 100 to 200 meter weapon. They are 700 meters now. They go farther than your rifle goes.”

Mostly, they tried to drive fast.

His new friends liked to have fun with him too. One time they took him around a detour and he found himself face to face with a scud launcher.

“Cops are awful about throwing trash on their floor, Israeli cops are no different. My nose was down in the trash, my fanny was up in the air. The other three guys were all laughing at me. Once you got up even to it you could see it had been fired, it had been shot up, it was no longer functional, but from the back it was just perfect. Jerks!” he laughed. “After I left, three rockets were fired into Beer-sheva, which is the major city in the Negev desert, about 100,000 people, right over the 13 mile stretch we’d been driving back and forth on. It was pretty scary. But I really like the Negev, better than I thought I would.“

York went to Jerusalem for three days, where the streets were very narrow and slick from all the foot traffic. “There wasn’t anything there for me. There wasn’t anyone that I wanted to say, ‘I’m with them.’ So I visited all the holy places. I prayed at the wall each time I went and at David’s tomb and then I left.”

He went on a paid tour that allowed him access to several churches, mosques and synagogues. He marveled at the beauty of those places and marveled even more at the ugliness just outside. He saw kids playing near sparking wires and near sewage run off.

“Everywhere you look you see battle damage, whether it’s from 3000 years ago or from ’67. It was so hard for me to focus on anything but the conflict. I found it disturbing. I wanted to go there, I wanted to be there, I’m glad I went there, but it wasn’t where I wanted to stay.”

York went to Yad Vashem, hoping to find some family records.

“Yad Vashem has 17 million records, collected from everywhere in 11 different languages. They are micro-fiched. They are not digitized, they are not cross-referenced.”

He went to the German section, hoping to find out about his mother’s family. “I found nothing. My mother apparently went door to door in her old neighborhood to find out what happened to her family. People closed their doors on her.”

He is already thinking about his return trip.