By: Yehuda Avner – The Jerusalem Post

As the Sabbath noon of May 15, 1948 turned to afternoon, and afternoon into evening, the mood in downtown Jerusalem grew from excitement to tumult. Despite the siege and the threat of shelling, people roamed the streets rejoicing. Revelers from an inglorious bucket brigade of trench diggers and hackers, I among them, frolicked down Jaffa Road to Ben Yehuda Street, whose upper section had been blasted by truck bombs.

A bonfire was ablaze in a giant crater, and youngsters were spinning around it in a feisty hora folk dance. One young man in red shorts, overwhelmed by the thrill of the hour, cartwheeled over to where some of us were standing, and hugged each in turn.

In Zion Square an old man with a trombone and a girl with a guitar were playing a spirited “Hava Nagilla” and, spying the violin case of one of our crowd called Leopold Mahler – a professional violinist and Holocaust survivor who never ever wanted to play again – persuaded him to unpack his instrument and join in. Picking up the rhythm, Mahler began reworking it into wildly spiraling variations, his notes fluttering this way and that, improvisation upon improvisation, as if man and instrument were rediscovering each other in shared delight after a long separation.

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