(Canadian Press-Halifax Star) Aly Thomson - Before he became Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion slept on the ground in bell tents in Windsor, Nova Scotia, during the training of the Jewish Legion, whose 100th anniversary was commemorated on Sunday. Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, both joined a Jewish battalion of the British Army in 1918 for the fight for Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. They trained at Windsor's Fort Edward, which served as a point of departure for all North American recruits of the Jewish Legion. Ben-Gurion wrote to Windsor's mayor, Robert Dimock, in 1966, saying, "In Windsor, one of the great dreams of my life, to serve as a soldier in a Jewish unit to fight for the liberation of Israel, became a reality. I will never forget Windsor where I received my first training as a soldier."
2018-09-28 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive