Son of Goodness

One day last summer Meyer Tobiansky went from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to visit his brother. When he did not come back, his wife Lena went to the headquarters of the Haganah, in which her husband held a high post. "I asked everyone where Mischa was," she recalls. "Most of them wouldn't talk to me. They shut their doors in my face."

Then Lena heard a report that Meyer had been executed as a spy by his own Haganah, the well-disciplined Jewish army; she could not believe that. Meyer was a Zionist pioneer who had come to Palestine from his native Lithuania when he was 19, was imprisoned by the British for his underground work. During World

War II, like many Zionists, he fought in the British army against the Axis, rose to be a major. When the war with the Arabs broke out, Tobiansky, with the full approval of Haganah, kept his civilian job in the British electric light company in Jerusalem. He also commanded a secret Haganah airbase outside the city. He was a quiet man with a slight paunch, who liked to sit in Jerusalem's Cafe Vienna with his wife and some friends, sipping beer.

About a month after Meyer Tobiansky's disappearance, the Jewish government issued a curt announcement: Tobiansky had been convicted of treason by a Haganah court-martial and shot.

A Mound of Stones. The announcement gave no details. What actually happened was this:

Two Haganah soldiers walked up to Tobiansky in a Tel Aviv grocery store and asked him to come along for an important conference. They drove him to a schoolhouse in an abandoned Arab village. There, three Haganah officers charged him with furnishing his British superiors in the electric company with a list of important users of current in Jerusalem; that list, passed on to the Arabs, supposedly guided the Arab Legion's artillery fire to the city's most important targets.

Tobiansky admitted that at his superiors' request he had drawn up the list, which included hospitals, the newspaper Palestine Post, military establishments with radio installations. But Tobiansky pleaded that the list had merely been intended to show which electric current users were to have priority in case the city's power had to be curtailed. His Haganah superiors approved of the list.

In less than four hours the court-martial reached its decision. Tobiansky was stood against a sunbaked mud wall of an old Arab building. He refused a blindfold as he stood at attention facing half a dozen Haganah riflemen. His last words were: "Take care of my boy."

Meyer Tobiansky was buried at once, in a rocky hillside near the Arab village, a small stone mound marking his grave.

His wife did not know the story; all she knew was that her husband could not be a traitor. But old friends shunned her. Her 13-year-old son Yaakov was expelled from his Boy Scout troop; she tried to keep the news from him, worked out stratagems to keep him indoors. "There were stories that we had a radio transmitter hidden in the refrigerator," she recalled, "that we signaled the Arabs from the window, that we hid the money the British paid us under the floor. But," she added bitterly, "no one ever came to investigate."

People passing the Tobiansky apartment shook their fists and cursed it. Mothers blamed the Tobianskys for the death of their sons in battle.

A Question of Sincerity. Lena Tobiansky sent her son to a children's camp, after changing their name to Bentov (son of goodness); but his identity leaked out and the other children called his father a traitor. Lena herself removed the shiny brass nameplate from her apartment door and moved to another part of the city.

For months, she wrote petitions to the authorities asking for an investigation--or at least for some word about where her husband was buried. Finally, she wrote a long letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. "No one will answer me," wrote Lena Tobiansky, "therefore I have turned to you . . . My husband and I were married 15 years . . . We Jived happily and closely together . . . There could have been no secrets between us . . . I am suffering, despised and ignored . . ."

A month later Ben-Gurion replied: "I believe in your sincerity." Ben-Gurion ordered an investigation.

Last week, the Israeli government did what governments rarely do: it admitted a grave miscarriage of justice. Tobiansky was fully exonerated of treasonable intent. Former Lieut. Colonel Isar Beari, who had acted as Tobiansky's prosecutor, was formally charged with manslaughter. The Prime Minister wrote to Lena Tobiansky that her husband's execution had been "a tragic mistake."

Lena and her son Yaakov last week walked behind Meyer's coffin in solemn procession through Jerusalem, for Meyer Tobiansky was being reburied with military honors. His widow's hair had turned grey since last spring; her friends suddenly returned to her side, but she greeted them with unforgiving silence. She was bitter about the army and the press which had convicted and condemned her husband, but of Ben-Gurion she said: "He is a good man."

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