Additional story about Ein Hod

Moshe Machover sent the story below with the Ein Hod piece we (JPN) sent out.
I asked him if it would be ok for me to send it to JPN readers and he replied: "Judit Druks, the companion of the late Shimon Tzabar, gave her willingconsent to circulating that excerpt in conjunction with your piece on thesame subject. I am sure she would be delighted if you use it, as would I."

ATB, Moshé

So, here it is:

Dear Friend,

Earlier today you may have received the message below, forwarded from Jewish Peace News.

I now re-transmit, adding a relevant passage from the unpublished autobiography of my late friend, the artist and satirist Shimon Tzabar.

Excerpt from Shimon Tzabar's autobiography

...In the mid fifties, I received a letter from the Painters and Sculptors Association, of which I was a member, saying that the government had allocated a village at the foothills of Mount Carmel, to be a village for artists. It was called Ein Hod. All I had to do to get a house there was to pay fifty Israeli pounds as a registration fee and choose myself where I wanted to live. I didn't have that amount of money, so I borrowed it from a friend, Chana Shofman, the daughter of a Likud MP. I paid the money and rushed to Ein Hod to choose a house in the country. I found a very nice Arab house, because this village had been an Arab village before. I kept this house as a weekend retreat. A few weeks later when I came to my house in Ein Hod, I walked around the village and strolled uphill along the main road. After a while, I met a Palestinian shepherd boy with two mongrel dogs. The dogs started barking at me while the boy tried to keep them away. By and by we started a conversation. The boy spoke Hebrew quite well. I asked him where he was from. He said that he was from Ein Hood. It was the same Ein Hod where I have just acquired a house. The boy told me that a few years ago, the Israeli army had come to the village and asked its people to move for a week to the next Arab village, that was a few kilometres uphill, because they were going to do some live ammunition manoeuvres around the area and did not want anyone to get hurt. Since then they were not been allowed back. That is how the village was deserted and been given to us, the artists.

I relinquished the house and asked back my I£50 registration fee, which I promptly returned to Ms Shofman.

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