Writer Gives Eyewitness Story of How Herbert Shapiro Died

This country has given its sacrifices for the great Jewish cause: the shomrim, the colony watchmen, of a generation and two generations ago, died as Trojans when the need arose to defend their people with their lives, and others have fallen in the same cause. To these must now be added the name of Herbert Shapiro, 19-year old Brooklyn, New York, student at the Hebrew University, who has typified the saying, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he gave his life for a friend.”

Shapiro was one of many University and high school students in Palestine who volunteered to go to one of the Jewish settlements to fill the dearth caused by labor restriction. He was drafted to Herzlia, American Jewish settlers’ paradise, whose deep-green foliage of grove and field offers a glorious background with the winking blue of the Mediterranean.

It was during a lull in the work that Shapiro and three others, sporting on the beach but not going into the water owing to the heavy swell, saw a foolhardy Yemenite boy venturing beyond his depth. In a trice the dark-skinned Jew was in difficulty. The four of them raced into the sea to save the child.

STORY OF EYE-WITNESS

I tell the story as it was given by an eye-witness: Herbert and his young friend and tentmate, “Doc,” together with Reznick and Lanzet, both of Tel Aviv, rushed into the turbulent surf and struggled against the mighty breakers. They succeeded somehow in pushing the Yemenite boy to safety and then began their own desperate fight against the sea.

“For almost an hour they battled those waves, which were taking them out as they were valiantly swimming in,” writes my friend, “until finally one of them, the golden-haired strapping youth ‘Doc,’ managed to get on his feet, and in a flash he extended his hand to Herbert, still struggling near him.

“Had Shapiro taken his hand, it would have meant a hard and perhaps vain struggle for both of them; but he heroically refused, and let his comrade be carried in alone, as he was carried out with Reznick and Lanzet. There was no lifeline on shore to throw to them and a motor-boat that started out from Tel Aviv to the rescue had to turn back because of the heavy sea.”

BODY FOUND TWO DAYS LATER

They watched for Shapiro’s body to be thrown up for two days and nights. Finally it came to rest, corroded by the sea water and defaced, near Nathania up the coast.

His 16-year old brother, friends and others, American boys who were at school with him, started to dig his grave in the early hours of the morning. Overhead the full moon was shining down upon them at their labors, some of them weeping as they turned up the loose soil. At three o’clock in the morning they buried him, while his young brother said “Kaddish.”

Though not a full student at the Hebrew University, Shapiro had become in a few months a well-known figure on its campus. His friends are considering the possibility of erecting for him a memorial at the place where he was wont to stroll with the Jewish youth drawn from the four corners of the globe. No more fitting tribute to his memory could be paid.