I came to Israel in 1941 and within three days I had a job. In the same place as I am now. At first, of course, I was just an assistant technician, but the thought of social welfare never entered my head! All those parishioners of his, though, were helpless and hopeless. My brother became a social worker. He filled out forms for them. He got them into schools, and their children too.
Then there were the tourist groups. At first there were Church delegations, Italian Catholics, German. He took them everywhere. Then it was non-Catholic groups which came, just plain tourists, and they wanted him to show them the Holy places. He knew Israel better than I do. I haven’t traveled around the country much. Where would I find the time? I had my work, my children, but he knew every bush here, every byway. Especially in Galilee. He made money that way. Part of it he gave to the monastery and part he spent on his parishioners. My elder daughter always said, “Our uncle is a real manager. He can organize anything.” He set up a school for newly arrived children, and a children’s home, and an almshouse. He bought a community center for the parish.
EWA. Why didn’t he leave the monastery?
AVIGDOR. I think because he was a soldier! He was like a soldier doing his duty. There was a strict discipline there. He always went back to stay overnight in the monastery. In the morning he would leave, but he was always back before midnight. I don’t know what use the monastery was to him. I told him long ago he should come and stay with us, especially later after the children had left. We already had this house, a big house. There were just Milka and I here. He could at least have enjoyed a bowl of homemade soup! But he wouldn’t hear of it.
People wrote denunciations against him. I had one sad little paper here for a long time which Daniel brought. He was summoned one time by the abbot and given a notice to attend the Office of the Prime Minister. Daniel came and showed it to us, wondering what it was all about. This was after his court case. All that fuss in the press seemed to have died down. I looked at the paper and the address there was not the Prime Minister’s Office at all but the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet. Something along the lines of your CIA. I told him not to go. He sat there, said nothing, scratching behind his ear. He did that when he was thinking.
“No,” he said. “I shall go. I’ve been dealing with these services the whole of my life. I worked in the police, and I was in the partisans. By the way, I have two medals, one with Lenin on it and one with Stalin. I even worked for the NKVD for a couple of months before I ran away.”
I was amazed. He had never told me about the NKVD before. He told me that when the Russians entered Belorussia, they first awarded him a medal but then he was summoned to the NKVD. One officer interrogated him while another took notes and a third just sat there listening. When and where was he born, who were his father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, who had he sat next to at school, who was his neighbor to the right, to the left. He gave them the answers and then they repeated the questions for a second time, then for a third: when, where, mother, father. Then they said, “Help us and we will help you.” “I told them, ‘I don’t need your help, but what can I do for you?’” “Help us to make sense of the secretariat where you worked in Emsk. Everything is in German. We need to trawl through it and find their agents.”
Daniel wanted only to get away from the lot of them. He had already decided to become a monk but knew they wouldn’t just release him, so he agreed to translate everything they needed, all those Gestapo documents. They took him to Emsk, to the very house he had escaped from, back to that very table, except that now he was working under a Russian captain instead of a German, and now there were two lieutenants, one Russian, one Belorussian. They provided him with a uniform and gave him the right to eat in the same canteen he had sat in with the Belorussian police. The work was exactly the same only everything he had previously translated from Belorussian into German he now translated into Russian. He had not the slightest doubt that as soon as it had all been translated, they would arrest him. A couple of months passed until a day came when the captain was called to Minsk and the Russian lieutenant went with him, leaving the Belorussian in charge.
My brother was a highly intelligent man. He thought carefully and went to the lieutenant to ask for leave. He told him, “I have done all the work as agreed. I have family in Grodno and want to visit them. Give me a few days’ leave.” The Belorussian lieutenant felt very competitive toward Daniel. He was afraid Daniel might get his job because of his knowledge of foreign languages, so he thought it over and said, “I don’t have the necessary authority to grant you leave, but if you go to visit your relatives I can personally know nothing about it.” He didn’t say straight out, “You can go absent without leave,” but that was more or less what he implied. At that, Daniel escaped, for the last time as far as I know, from the secret services.
Now he was being called in by his own, Israeli, secret service. What should he do? I told him not to go. I said, “You have a perfect right not to, and moreover you are a monk. You shouldn’t go. That’s it.” Daniel finished scratching his ear and said, “No, I shall go. This is my country. I am a citizen here,” so he went.
He came back three days later. I asked him how he had got on and he laughed. “In the first place,” he said, “All these captains are as alike as peas in a pod. They asked exactly the same questions: when and where were you born, who were your father and mother, your grandfather and grandmother, who did you go to school with, who was on the right, who was on the left? I told him and he asked all the same questions again. And for a third time. It seems they all go to the same academy!”
He told it so amusingly, Ewa, although there didn’t seem much to laugh about. Then he was asked whether he wanted to help his country. Daniel said he was always glad to help his country. The captain got excited and asked him to pass on information about his parishioners. He said that there were bound to be one or two agents sent by Russia among them.
EWA. What are you saying, Avigdor! I can’t believe it!
AVIGDOR. What is so impossible, Ewa? All sorts of things go on! You think there were no agents? There were dozens. Here from Russia, there from us. All over the place. Everybody knows how many British intelligence services there were here. After all, this is the Middle East. Do you think that, living here in a village, I don’t know anything about politics? I know no less than Daniel, even though he read all the foreign newspapers.
Anyway, what happened then was that he refused. He told the captain, “I have a professional duty and a professional duty of secrecy. If I detect a threat to the state, I will think what to do about it, but so far I haven’t encountered that situation.”
Then the captain said, “Perhaps we can do something to help you? We respect you, know about what you did in the war, and your medals. Perhaps you have some problems we can help you to resolve?” “Yes,” Daniel said, “I have left my car in a paid parking place. It will cost three lirot. Perhaps you could reimburse me.”
That is how the story ended.
EWA. What year was that?
AVIGDOR. I don’t remember exactly. I remember he said lirot, so it must have been before 1980.