The Burnt House and Horrific Ruins

When I was ten, I came on a family trip to Israel for the first time. My family did a lot of tourist things: we went to Ein Gedi, the Kotel, the beach, and Ben Yehuda. While touring the Old City of Jerusalem we also visited the Burnt House, which is the ruins of a house destroyed in 70 CE, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem. The ruins were similar to a lot of others that we had seen, so being a curious child I wandered around reading the various signs, which contained a lot of semi-interesting information about the site. This continued until I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

On one of the signs, there was a picture of a single arm, the only human remains discovered in the structure. The sign indicated that this was the arm of a young girl, possibly a resident of the house. In my mind I pictured the girl, running from the fire and trying to climb up the stairs, grabbing for the handrail while the fire engulfed her. I wouldn't say it stir my imagination as much as it just plain terrified me, and for years after I would have nightmares. 20 years later it still freaks me out.

As a result of that one picture, I relate to the Burnt House in a completely different way than I do any other ruins I have visited. While I can study other ruins with a detached bemusement, it is much, much harder to think of the Burnt House as anything except a place of horror.














This is an important thing to acknowledge in our study of ruins. There are a great many causes of ruins, ranging from benign neglect and peaceful abandonment, to natural disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis, to man-made disasters and war. But as years pass, the potency of a ruin dies down and it becomes a peaceful place. Even if we know fully well the story behind the ruin, and even it many people died, there is still a calm about them. However, sometimes a single image is enough to prevent this from happening, to keep the wound fresh and breed horror. Like an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, designed to send chills up your spine, certain things keep some specific ruins from resting in peace.

When I consider the various ruins of Rosh Ha'ayin, there is nothing that particularly raises the shackles of fear in me, though dozens of wars have been fought and countless people have died in and around Rosh Ha'ayin over its 7,000 years of habitation. There are ruins of Aphek, Antipatris, and the British pumping station, ruins of Migdal Zedek, Mirabel, Majdal Yaba, ruins of the British army base, of Amidar houses, of buildings that have burnt to the ground, been demolished, or collapsed, but they all seem peaceful to me. I wonder whether others view them differently, just as I will never see the Burnt House as a mere tourist attraction. In particular, I wonder about former inhabitants of Majdal Yaba, still within living memory, and the nearly-invisible ruins of that village. I wonder about the British buildings that formed the skeleton of Rosh Ha'ayin and immigrants whose children went to the hospital and were never seen again. I wonder what it is that makes a site horrific. These are sites that will, almost certainly, universally rest in peace as serene ruins or redeveloped sites in the future. For now, I wonder if there are any who still think of them in horror.

Operation Magic Carpet

Along with our ruin research, we're going to be focusing on the history and development of Rosh Ha'ayin. This was bound to lead to a post about the dramatic Operation Magic Carpet, so here goes.

Between June 1949 and September 1950, nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews were brought to Israel secretly, following pogroms and looting that stemmed from the UN Partition plan of 1947. Famously, many of the Yemenite Jews knew nothing about airplanes, but boarded the DC-4 or C-46 aircrafts when they were reminded of the biblical verses about being returned to Israel "on eagles' wings." Many thousands of these refugees passed through Rosh Ha'ayin between 1949 and 1951, with about 8,000 settling there permanently. The city crest of Rosh Ha'ayin bears a pair of wings and the phrase "on eagles' wings" as a result.

The airline that took part in Magic Carpet was Alaska Airlines, and on their website they proudly tell a number of stories from the operation. One article tells of Warren and Marian Metzger, he an airline captain and she a stewardess, who served on the mission. Warren Metzger explained that:

"I had no idea what I was getting into, absolutely none. It was pretty much seat-of-the-pants flying in those days. Navigation was by dead reckoning and eyesight. Planes were getting shot at. The airport in Tel Aviv was getting bombed all the time. We had to put extra fuel tanks in the planes so we had the range to avoid landing in Arab territory."

Another posting tells of Stanley Epstein, who volunteered as a pilot, and a narrow escape by Bob Maguire, who was forced to land his plane in Egypt but managed to convince the Egyptians to refuel his plane by telling them the passengers had smallpox. Maguire's obituary appeared in the New York Times in 2005. Yet another article tells of James Wooten, then the president of Alaska Airlines, who "was the driver behind Alaska's participation in the airlift, and he played a key role in the logistics of the nearly year-long operation that made the mission successful despite many challenges."