Jewish Girls Take up Arms

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23333, 29 April 1939, Page 13 (Supplement)

Jewish Girls Take up Arms

Guards at Orphan Village In Unsettled Palestine EXPERTS WITH RIFLES AND BOMBS

By K. STONE —(Copyright)

A RMED with rifles, revolvers and f\ bombs, clad in khaki blouses and khaki shorts, and wearing Palestinian supernumerary conBtable's grey hats, young women have been trained for the defence of the orphan children's settlement of Meir Shfeya, at the southern end of Mount Carmel, in Central Palestine. Just after the war, an association of young Jewish women in America decided to support an orphans' village in Palestine, and the children were taken to Meir Shfeya from Bessarabia. These young girls grew up under male and female instructors. They have since developed their own farms and main-

tained an entirely female administration. When the disturbances broke out in Palestine two and a-half years ago, male guards were placed in the village. The women, however, rebelled at the idea that thev were unfit for military service, and insisted upon taking up arms in their own defence. On Parade After a period of training, they have now been permitted to do so, though only within the confines of the village. Many of them are expert shots, and can fire a service rifle standing, kneeling or lying down with an 80 per cent target, average. It is a stirring sight when these girls line up on parade for drill. They present arms with a military swagger and go through the full parade exercises of the British Army drill book. Officers and "Tommies" visiting the

village are amazed at the girls' proficiency. In addition to using rifles, they can throv grenades with perfect aim. Each girl possesses a rifle, fifty rounds of ammunition, and a hand grenade, and stands guard, in six hour shifts each day at the sentinel posts around the barbed-wire fences of the village. AH military terms and paswords are given in modern Hebrew. v

First-aid Taught Girls who are too young to darry riflies and bombs are given various tvpes of revolvers which they are taught to use for close-range defence. Others have become signallers with flags or lamps, and are rapidly learning the various military codes. The younger girls, below the age of 14, make efficient first-aid nurses, and have learned to apply bandages or splints as deftly as grown-ups. Dolls play 110 part in the lives of these girls. Throughout the day they attend classes or are engaged in managing their village, milking cows, hoeing and cultivating their allotments, tending the poultry and doing the thousand-and-one other small jobs around a collective farm. In their leisilre hours, they read solely Hebrew literature. Some of these land-girls have been orphans from early childhood, their parents having been killed in anti-Jowish massacres in Eastern Europe.