Congregation Ohav Sholom

Travel in Israel - Machon Ayalon

Off the Beaten Track in Israel - Machon Ayalon.

by Michael Rosenbloom (spidermr@aol.com)

Prior to Israel’s War of Independence, a group of kibbutzniks from Kibbutz Maagan Michael near Haifa were sent to the Rehovot area to start up a new kibbutz, which would exist solely for the purpose of surreptitiously manufacturing ammunition. In a factory on the new kibbutz, bullets were produced for Czech-made sten automatic sub-machine guns, the weapon most widely used and most accessible to the Jews in the 1940’s in Palestine.

Fifty-odd years later, the factory is a museum tucked into a section between Nes Ziona and Rehovot, where many of Israel’s high-tech companies are located. What’s remarkable about the factory, is that it is underground. In order for the British not to notice the illegal operation, the kibbutzniks built and operated a bakery and laundromat on ground level, directly over the factory. Today, the bakery, the laundromat and the bullet factory are still intact. Also unchanged are the oven and washing machines in the bakery and laundromat, which slide out (like in a World War II POW camp movie), to uncover hidden, steep, metal stairs, which lead to and from the underground factory. Via these same stairs, you can still enter and leave the factory today. The factory would operate only when the bakery and laundromat were also working. In this way, the noise of the factory wouldn’t be noticed. When British soldiers were in the area, a guard at the gate of the kibbutz would activate a light, which would go on in the factory to warn the workers to stop the production line, until the coast was clear.

Working underground all day created a problem for the workers who should have been nicely tanned from working in the fields, but instead were pale. They could easily have been detected by other kibbutz workers who weren’t aware of the existence of the factory or by British soldiers. In order to alleviate this problem, a tanning room was built in the factory, for workers to sit under a sun lamp to tan themselves. Another interesting room is a small firing range where bullets were tested for their speed and quality.

Machon Ayalon is a convenient place to visit when you’re in the Tel Aviv area or when you’re heading south from Tel Aviv. It’s a small compact museum, which is the essence of its attraction. It doesn’t overwhelm you in size, maybe just in ingenuity. You can do justice to it in two hours with time to spare.

Particularly encouraging is the fact that a segment of Israeli society, a mere 50 years after the birth of the state, has begun to take steps toward preserving events and places, which played a role in the miracle of the birth of modern Israel. Machon Ayalon is a reminder of this miracle.

July 1999

Next article: Nachal Jalaboon, Nachal Zevitan, the Golan Heights

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