The Martyr Shlomo Ben-Yosef of Blessed Memory

The Jewish community of the Land of Israel, the whole Jewish and Zionist world, are under the heavy impression of the execution just carried out on Shlomo Ben-Yosef of blessed memory. The mass protests of the Jewish communities throughout the world, the appeals and petitions of the leading bodies of the whole Yishuv and of the whole Zionist movement did not help. The English administration and the highest military command in the country showed their "firmness" precisely in this case and would not take into account any mitigating circumstances: the young age of the condemned, the fact that no disaster occurred, that his deed caused no victims, that the deed of a young Jew — who could not bear the innocent blood of his brothers shed day after day, and therefore set out on the path of armed demonstration — cannot be compared to the Arab terrorist murderers, who over 2 years have already killed tens of victims, innocent men, women and children. Coldly and cruelly was the execution carried out here. The young Shlomo Ben-Yosef was brought to the gallows against the protest, grief and anger of the Jewish Yishuv and of the whole Jewish people.

Shlomo Ben-Yosef (Tabachnik) was born in Lutsk in 1913. At the age of 15 he became a member of the Lutsk "Betar". At 18 he went to hachshara, where he was confirmed and received an aliyah permit to the Land of Israel. The difficult situation of his family, however, did not allow him to go at once, and he stayed at home. Only in 1937 did his mother sell a small plot that remained to them, and young Shlomo left for his dreamed-of land. Arriving in the Land of Israel he joined the Betar company in Rosh Pina, where he worked hard and bitterly to earn his bread. Rosh Pina is often attacked by Arab terrorists; innocent Jews are wounded and murdered. The young hot-blooded Ben-Yosef, together with 2 younger comrades, fired at a taxi, neither wounding nor killing anyone. The English "justice" sentenced Ben-Yosef to death by hanging. On the 29th of June the dreadful execution was carried out — as the newspapers report, Ben-Yosef went to the execution calm and dignified, and with the cry "Long live the people of Israel — long live the kingdom of Israel!" he breathed out his holy soul...

Surely every Jewish heart seethes with grief and anger, with a feeling of protest against the execution carried out, which can be described as a glaring judicial murder. But together with the deep mourning over the innocently shed blood of the young Ben-Yosef, one must not entirely conceal the indignation also against those who incite the youth and call it to terror and attacks against the innocent, to take revenge on unknown people, not attackers but ordinary people, for the guilt of hooligans and terrorists of their people. Who more than we Jews has felt on our backs the injustice of collective responsibility, of making a whole people responsible for the deeds of its bad individuals? And therefore, as we stand deeply bowed at the young holy graves of our noblest and dearest, who fall day in, day out from the murderous knives and bullets at their work posts in village and town — we categorically dissociate ourselves from those who only exploit the bloodied coat of many colours of the holy Ben-Yosef to incite the youth, to attack the entire Zionist movement and to bring tumult and chaos into the Yishuv in the country in the present difficult decisive period. Not through acts of revenge, not through killing innocent women and children will we free our land, but through liberating deeds, through fighting the desert and the wasteland in the country. "In one hand the plough and in the other the rifle" — thus did our forefathers once free themselves — thus will our generation too redeem our land!

A. Tseder.