By: Loolwa Khazzoom JTA May 7, 2003

TEL AVIV, May 7 (JTA) — “When I was a boy, I heard the story of how my
father came from Poland to Israel on a bicycle,” says Yoram Hadar, who
lives in Ness Ziona, “but I didn’t know a lot of the story because I was
only 10 when my father died.”

Last week, 50 years after his father’s death, Hadar was able to put
together the missing pieces.

On April 27, Robert Zurawin, a cycling enthusiast from Texas, began a
270-mile ride across Israel, from Neve Shalom near Latrun to the Arava
Institute near Eilat.

The ride was co-sponsored by the Arava Institute, Hazon and the People
to People project of the Jewish Agency.

As part of its coverage of the ride, the daily Ma’ariv newspaper
published an article about Zurawin’s father, who had ridden with a group
of Jewish youths from Poland to Palestine in 1932. The newspaper
included a photo of Zurawin’s father, standing next to some of the seven
other riders in the group.

When Hadar’s daughter opened Ma’ariv on Monday, she immediately
recognized her own grandfather in the photo, and called her father in
great excitement.

Meanwhile, Israel Heled of Tel Aviv got a similar call from his son, and
Shoshana Ido of Kfar Saba heard the news from her cousin.

All three called the Ma’ariv reporter, who put them in touch with the
Arava Institute.

Zurawin, staying at the Holiday Inn in Ashkelon, invited everyone for a
gathering that evening — which happened to be the evening of Holocaust
Remembrance Day.

“People came from pretty far away,” Zurawin says. “People were really
freaking out. Most of these guys” on the ride from Poland “died fairly
young. My dad was the oldest left alive.”

Zurawin was not the only person at the reunion to say it wasn’t
coincidental that the children and grandchildren of the riders found
each other on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But Zurawin had felt a similar hand of fate when he and his son — named
after Zurawin’s father Yerachmiel, or Raymond in English — signed up for
the Hazon 2002 environmental bike ride in New York. The opening day of
the ride fell on Zurawin’s father’s yahrzeit.

Zurawin and his son recited kaddish before beginning the ride, with the
ritual captured by local media.

“It was one thing when we did it in the USA,” Zurawin recalls, “because
it was just human interest. But in Israel, we didn’t anticipate that
people would look at the article and find their own fathers.”

The April 28 gathering was extraordinarily emotional for all who
participated. Family members shared photo albums, passports and other
documentation of the story of the ride to Israel 71 years before.

“It closed the circle,” Hadar explains. “My children came with us. My
son wrote down everything, and he wants to write a summary of the
meeting.”

Though the gathering closed one circle, it proved to be the beginning of
another — a long-term reunion plan.

For starters, Ido invited everyone to a second gathering at her home in
Kfar Saba last Friday. Her 87 year-old uncle, Pessah Weinberg — the last
living family member from the generation of riders from Poland — filled
in the gaps in everyone’s knowledge, as three generations of children
listened avidly.

“My dad didn’t talk about the experience,” Heled recounts. Other reunion
members had similarly silent fathers.

“They just went straight into becoming sabras,” Ido explains.

Between Weinberg’s emotional retelling of his brother’s journey and a
pile of photos and documents collected at the gathering, families pieced
together the full picture:

In 1932, a group of religious and secular Zionists, aged 17-20 and
active in the labor Zionist youth movement, decided that the future of
the Jewish people was in the Land of Israel, not in Poland. They wanted
to make aliyah, but the British were blocking Jewish entry into
Palestine.

All eight of these youth were athletic, so they created a cover story to
get around British resistance: They claimed they were going to Palestine
to participate in the Maccabi Games.

The Ludchnick bike company sponsored the youths, giving them bicycles
and clothing to promote the company. They and the Polish government,
however, insisted that the group ride around Warsaw for one week to
ensure that the boys really were cyclists.

After leaving Warsaw, the boys biked around Poland to spread the Zionist
message, stopping at Jewish communities and publicizing their ride to
Palestine.

“These guys were admired,” Zurawin emphasizes. “People looked up to them
as these great athletes. They didn’t just pick up and leave on their
own; they were part of a program to inspire Zionist immigration.”

Each Jewish community welcomed the group with parties, and community
members sent them off with flowers, cheers and enthusiastic waves of
goodbye.

The boys didn’t realize they were saying a final goodbye to the Polish
Jewish community, including their families.

“They were living in the zenith of Zionism and Jewish culture in
Europe,” Zurawin explains. “They never dreamed, in 1932, that the
Holocaust would happen.”

After leaving Poland, the youth biked around Europe and the Middle East
for two months. Ido notes that they had little food and clothing with
them. In case of emergency, they wore spare tires in a figure eight
around their bodies.

“They biked around without any escort,” Hadar says. “If we think about
the long journey they went on in two months, it’s amazing. It’s
something extraordinary. It’s not with today’s bikes and paths, which
are much more comfortable.”

The group passed through Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, Greece, Syria
and Turkey. They had hoped to follow the route of a group that had left
four years earlier, entering Palestine through Syria, but the Syrian
government denied them entry.

The boys arrived in Turkey with no money — but, luckily, there was a
broken engine on the ship sailing to Israel.

“My father said to the captain, ‘I can fix the engine,’ ” says Ido,
adding that her father was a talented mechanic.

All the labor Zionist youth had been trained in machinery, as part of
the dream to build up the Land of Israel with their hands, Zurawin says.

In exchange for fixing the boat’s engine, the youth were given a free
ride to Palestine. After a weeklong tour through the land, they
dispersed.

They never did attend the Maccabi Games.

The original riders got together from time to time, but didn’t pass on
contact information to their children. Once they died, the children lost
touch.

Now they’re determined never to let that happen again.

“After the initial excitement sank in,” Zurawin recalls, “we asked
‘Where do we go from here?’ We definitely want to meet next year, make a
bigger project — maybe re-create the entire ride itself, or parts of it,
involve different organizations, bring the government back in, bring in
Polish organizations.”

“I feel that we found family,” Ido says emotionally.

All the reunion members are eager to find the children of the remaining
four riders, to make their family even bigger.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003 and is filed under history.