My father, my country

REUVEN FLESCHER was one of the first Jewish children born in the State of Israel. His son ITTAY FLESCHER reflects on what his father would have thought of the State whose life mirrored his own.

My father Reuven Flescher was born on May 16, 1948, two days after the creation of the state.

Throughout his life, family celebrations for Yom Ha’atzmaut and his birthday were often indistinguishable. If he were still alive, he would be celebrating his 75^th birthday this week, together with Israel, a country he fought to defend in three wars and the place where he found love and brought two children into this world.

Reuven Flescher was born in Petach Tikva after his mother, Chava Albeck, left Berlin for Palestine to realise her socialist, Zionist dream.

She was one of five children born into the Gur Hasidic sect in Poland. At a young age, her parents wanted to move to Palestine but were forbidden to do so by her grandfather, who was anti-Zionist. Instead, the family moved to Germany for a better life in the Weimar Republic. One of her brothers, a communist, joined the Russian Revolution. Another brother was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Chava and her two other teenage siblings joined a hachshara (practical training program) and in 1931 she boarded a boat to Palestine. She had sensed the winds of change that would afflict Germany.

Chava was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hamadia in 1939. There she met my grandfather, Menachem Mendel Flescher, married and gave birth to two children, my uncle Meir and my father Reuven, the younger child in the photo above.

I often imagine what advice my father would give the people of this country today.

Reuven father was well-liked by almost all who knew him. Like me, he would always try to avoid confrontations and sought to find the middle path.