

Though he was six years old when the British left and Israel was established, he paid the price of being his father’s son.ĭuring the War of Independence, an Israeli army unit drove past his house on its way to battle. He was always the youngest “veteran” in the room. They were joined every year by Stern’s son, Yair, now 70. The veterans held their Chanukah gatherings in this hideout, now an Israeli museum. Stern was captured by British police in a rooftop apartment in south Tel Aviv and shot to death. The day is coming soon when we will use this flame to light the candles of our Chanukah, the Chanukah of the Hebrew kingdom, in a free Zion.” Like the Hasmoneans’ oil, the fire of zealousness and heroism burns in the temple of our hearts, a divine flame. The little strength is much greater than it appears. Stern wrote, “We are a handful of freedom fighters, possessed with a crazy desire for sovereignty, and according to our detractors of little strength. His imprisoned troops crafted an olivewood Chanukah lamp and smuggled it to him with a note: “To our day’s Hasmonean, from his soldiers in captivity.”Ĭhanukah was a special time for the fighters. By then Stern was on the run and many of his men were in jail. By 1941 his followers were killing officials of the British regime that had promised to make the holy land a Jewish home but more or less reneged, and bombing the British offices that were preventing Jewish immigration. Audience: General/trade.Since 1932 Abraham Stern, their future leader, had been writing songs about “anonymous soldiers” who would “live underground” while fighting to liberate the homeland. Stern: The Man and His Gang also provides a comprehensive history of the gang s operations in the years 1940-48, when it fought what it called British imperialism in the Mideast.

Stern: The Man and His Gang by Zev Golan is the first English-language account of the life of Abraham Stern, the charismatic poet who founded the underground that called itself the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.

In the 1940s, before there was an Israel, the Holy Land was rocked by warfare and violence, and no militia was fiercer than the band of Jewish revolutionaries known as the Stern Gang. Stern: The Man and His Gang traces Abraham Stern s evolution from hated gangster to folk hero and chronicles the military and political deeds of the thousand Jews who joined his war against England.
