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| Photo: Anne Taillandier
The Ayalon Institute Museum reconstructs the incredible story of the clandestine munitions factory near Rehovot where young workers manufactured more than 2 million bullets between 1945 and 1948.
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By Leslie Katz
Usually you learn about history from books or see it unfold on the big screen. Occasionally, if you're very, very lucky, you meet history in person.
That's what happened last
Thursday, when my travel companions in Israel and I met Shlomo Hillel, a
92-year-old Iraqi-born Israeli who played a remarkable and dramatic role in the
establishment of Israel.
Hillel was among the young
Hebrew scouts who worked at a clandestine underground Haganah munitions factory
from 1945-1948. To do so, they climbed through a narrow hole in the ground,
down a steep spiral staircase, to spend 10-hour days in a hot, air-choked machine
shop shaping metal into bullets to be used in the fight for Jewish independence. The 45 factory workers produced more than 2 million 9-millimeter machine gun bullets overall, ammunition considered key to the early fight for statehood.
