Last update - 00:00 23/04/2007
My Independence Day - 1956: Photograph of a sabra
The girl in the photograph is Ophira Erez, whom readers of the now-defunct Haolam Hazeh newspaper selected as the sabra of 1956. The smiling face of the Tel Avivian, born in 1936, sparkles with charm; she is a good girl who excels in her studies at the Levinsky College of Education; a teacher, a soldier and a military correspondent for the Israel Defense Forces magazine Bamahane. She later studied education and rehabilitation psychology at Columbia University in New York.
Nothing in Erez's resume was connected to my life, but she, like the photograph, wasn't forgotten. In 1956, when I was in first grade, I thought she was the perfect symbol of everything people dreamed about here. The daughter of prisoners of Zion from Russia, a soldier and educator, her blouse decorated with Yemenite embroidery and she herself looking like a member of all ethnicities at once - and, as another great Israeli woman would one day write, "her braid lying upon her shoulder."
I miss the picture, no less than the woman in it, whose life turned into a larger symbol than she had wanted. At a young age, she married a man 15 years her senior - Yitzhak Navon, who became the fifth president of Israel. She spent her life working with disabled children. Children were the center of her life, but she herself had difficulty bringing children into the world. Now dozens of schools, kindergartens and community centers are named after her.
Ophira broke the rules twice in her life. The first time was when she and her husband asked the Social Welfare Ministry to let them adopt a child and didn't hide anything from the public, revealing her difficulties and pain. The second time was when she contracted breast cancer and spoke, with human yet practical simplicity, about her refusal to part from the wholeness of her body.
It is difficult to describe the courage this took at the time. Many people disapproved of and were alarmed by her intimate revelations, just as they were ashamed of the serene and lively atmosphere at the President's Residence, which was full of the tumult of children for the first time. Ophira's private life stirred up the gossip-mongers, and the poison poured forth enthusiastically. Haolam Hazeh, which she had graced in her youth, didn't leave her alone when she grew up.
Thus Ophira, through her personality and her biography, infused the innocent picture with a much deeper significance than the photo required. The pretty sabra became an intelligent, educated, complicated, passionate and brave innovator.
When she was overcome by cancer at the age of 57, I thought she wasn't so young anymore. This Independence Day, when I am 57, I think, "If only she were alive. If only she were the president." I would have liked to see her marching, a wonderful young woman of 71, with ceremonial trumpets sounding in her honor.