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The big Yudkovsky By Ari Shavit Tags: Dov Yudkovsky Why Yudkovsy? And why now? Because this is a watershed period for the Israeli media. Because two of the men who shaped the Israeli press, Yosef (Tommy) Lapid and Adam Baruch, died in the past month. Because Yudkovsky is considered the last of the titans. Because Yudkovsky has never before told his story in full. Dov Yudkovsky, a former chief editor who observes the media from a certain distance, is worried. He sees a society that has lost its equilibrium. He sees media and society that kowtow to big capital. And always, he comes back to the place he came from. To the number 160663 that is tattooed on his arm. He was born in Warsaw, grew up in Antwerp and came out of Auschwitz alive. For almost 40 years, from 1952 until 1989, he was the editor of the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth. He was also a shareholder in the paper and a member of its executive board. Together with his business partner, Noah Mozes, Yudkovsky turned Yedioth into a paper the likes of which exists nowhere else in the free world: a monopoly, with more than 50 percent of the market. A mass publication that is also read by the elites. A newspaper that is a major local center of power. Advertisement In a sense, Yudkovsky did in the press what prime minister Menachem Begin did in politics. He was the educated, fastidious European who was attentive to people living in what Israelis call the periphery and who found a way to conquer them. He was the man in the suit and tie who was sensitive to the man in the street and found the way to his heart. He was the Polish-born elitist who decoded the Israeli experience, served it and orchestrated it. He was the underdog who labored resourcefully, diligently and patiently until he fomented a historic upheaval. Unlike Begin's upheaval, though, Yudkovsky's still dominates our lives. Begin's Likud has shrunk, Yedioth Ahronoth is king. Yudkovsky is still with us: lucid and sarcastic, well-informed and opinionated. At age 85 he reads five papers every day: Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, The New York Times, Le Monde and a little of Globes, the Israeli financial daily. This lean man, who lives in a modest villa in Ramat Gan, with his wife, Leah, has an opinion about every Israeli paper and is familiar with their inner workings. After leaving Yedioth, Yudkovsky partnered with Adam Baruch and Robert Maxwell and was chief editor of Yedioth's archrival, Maariv, for two years. He then founded the Koteret journalism school. In 2002 he was awarded the state's highest honor, the Israel Prize. Yudkovsky did not talk down to his readers; he seduced them. His formula for Yedioth succeeded because it struck a chord with the new "Israeliness," with the genetic code of an immigrant society. The same humanity Yudkovsky showed toward his readers and employees led him to treat with kid gloves some of the highly influential people who were part of his inner circle. It was clear to various writers at Yedioth Ahronoth that Shimon Peres, Gad Yaacobi, Chaim Herzog and others were off-limits. Some say that Yudkovsky's Yedioth carved its path to influence by assiduously avoiding confrontations with the country's power brokers. Yudkovsky, his critics will say, managed and edited a newspaper that did not differentiate between the business and the editorial sides and was marred by serious ethical problems. On the other hand, it was Yudkovsky who cultivated the investigative press of the late 1970s and the 1980s. He did not block investigative reports, even when they were hard on his friends and confidants. He gave prominent space to the "night meeting" affair (in which attorney Ram Caspi was convicted of suborning a witness), even though one of its main players was Yigal Arnon, the paper's in-house lawyer. According to senior journalists at Yedioth, Yudkovsky was perhaps no saint, but he still makes them nostalgic for a different journalistic culture. The Holocaust Why do you have a photograph of the Israel Air Force flyover at Auschwitz on your bedroom wall? "I see victory in that photograph. To see the air force over the platform at Auschwitz is, in my eyes, a victory. It is an extraordinary feeling. That photograph is the first thing I see every morning." You once found it difficult to talk about the Holocaust. You were unwilling to recount what you underwent from 1942 to 1945. "That is true, and when I did say something it was laced with cynicism. I remember that on one Holocaust Remembrance Day, [journalist] Sylvie Keshet asked me how I react when I see films of the Holocaust. I told her that the original was better. Ten years ago, when I visited Auschwitz, I was asked how I felt; I said that it makes a big difference whether you come by car or train. I was incapable of talking, because I assumed that anyone who was not there cannot understand. But about a year ago something changed." If that is the case, may I now ask you where you come from? What was the Jewish-European experience that shaped you? "I was born in Warsaw but grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. Father was a very gentle man, with very delicate facial features. Even though he was no longer religious there was still something of the 'yeshiva boy' about him. Mother had a very strong personality. She was an educated woman who wrote and was also an idealist. She was very left-wing in her views. An armchair communist. At first I attended a Jewish school, then a prestigious and very good Belgian school. I learned six languages: Flemish, French, German, English, Latin and Greek. I also belonged to the Gordonia [Zionist] youth movement." Where were you when World War II began? "When the war broke out we fled from Belgium to France and then from northern France to southern France. Our life was hard, but tolerable. From my perspective the Holocaust did not begin until August 26, 1942 at 3 A.M., when French gendarmes knocked at the door and arrested me, based on a list composed by the French police. The French transfered me from the French zone to the German zone. The Germans placed me in the well-known Drancy transit camp, near Paris. And then, five days after my arrest, I was in a boxcar on a train bound for Auschwitz. "It was a boxcar for horses, and about 100 people were crammed inside. Without food, without anything to drink, without sanitary conditions. People died of thirst. People fought to get to the window so they would not suffocate. Within days, people underwent a metamorphosis in that boxcar. They stopped being what they were before. Me, too. To this day, when I board a train in Europe I remember that train - the reactions, which are no longer those of normal people. The thirst, the hunger, the battle to be as far as possible from the barrel that served as a toilet. Some people become apathetic and do nothing; they die. Others fight to get close to the air. Between Paris and Auschwitz people descended to the most basic level of a war for survival. That journey is embedded within me. The rhythm of the wheels on the rails." Without going into everything that happened to you in the next 33 months, what was your Holocaust experience? "I worked in forced-labor camps around Auschwitz. For a short period I was in the Auschwitz extermination camp. Toward the end I walked for months in the death march." What was the greatest hardship? "The hunger. The dominant feeling was hunger. And when you are hungry permanently, desperately, month after month, you do not think about anything else. Hunger is stronger than anything else. It is stronger than any human feeling, stronger than any emotion. Stronger even than concern for your family. It is totally bestial; it makes people bestial. No one who has not actually experienced it can understand it. You lack the most basic thing - like air. You think about food and dream about food, and the need for food completely overwhelms you." Besides the hunger? "There are certain moments, certain sights. In the winter, when it was very cold, when they literally exterminated people by means of hard labor, I remember doing backbreaking work, the foreman sitting above us with a truncheon he used to beat us, shouting: 'Dirty Jews, for 2,000 years you calculated and calculated, but you still miscalculated.' And I remember the sense of indifference. You are in Birkenau, and you see bodies all the time. There is a cart on which bodies are loaded and you see them going back and forth. You become indifferent to that, completely indifferent. "And I remember the smoke. Not the crematorium, but the smoke. A cloud of smoke hovering above us. And the selection. Not on the ramp, in the hut: 300 people are ordered to undress. And you pass by that man - I don't know if it was Mengele or one of his assistants - and he looks mainly at your back. Whether you still have flesh on your bottom, because if you do you can still be used for work. If not, someone grabs your arm and your number is recorded and you are sent. "But I think the most powerful memory is of the moment the train arrived in Auschwitz. People had begun talking about Auschwitz but it was not clear, not concrete. And suddenly, when the doors open, there was something grandiose about it. SS officers with dogs and high leather boots. And Jews. Hundreds and thousands of Jews. And the Germans are shouting and the Jews are shouting, and the dogs. A melee, curses, whippings. 'Raus, raus, get out of the cars.' Activity, tremendous activity. At that moment I knew I had arrived in hell. I understood that I was truly in Dante's Inferno. The platform at Auschwitz: sheer hell." And when the hell ended - when you found yourself free, at the end of the war? "We already heard the guns of the Red Army in January 1945. But then the march started. We were given a blanket and a slice of bread and ordered to march west in the snow. Thousands walked in the snow. Whoever stopped was shot. Whoever fell was shot from behind, in the back of the neck. One night in some deserted cinema, another night in a pigpen. Until one night I slipped away from the convoy. I remember the first American tank, a liberating tank. "I returned to Belgium through Paris. I understood that Mother and Father would not return. Or my brother. I was alone and I had no future in Europe. But I knew that Mother had family in Palestine, the Mozes family. So in September 1945 I boarded a ship in Toulon and disembarked in Haifa. After a week in an immigrant detention camp at Atlit I arrived alone in Tel Aviv one Friday afternoon. In Beit Ha'aliyah, on Ha'aliyah Street, I met Mother's cousin Yehuda Mozes. He picked me up in a taxi and took me to the family's home at 76 Rothschild Boulevard. Yehuda Mozes told me I was home. 'You are home,' he said." What did you feel? "You cannot understand. For 33 months I had been in hell. I lived among human beings but I did not live in human society. No warmth, no human contact. More of a jungle than the jungle itself. And suddenly, human contact. Yehuda Mozes collects me and adopts me. Tells me that his home is my home." War against Maariv Three months before Israel's establishment, with the country already in a state of semi-war, the biggest drama in the history of the local press takes place. Overnight, most of Yedioth's journalists leave the paper and, under Azriel Carlebach, establish Maariv. "I remember that Saturday night as though it were yesterday. Yehuda Mozes calls, distraught, and says he has received a contemptible letter. I remember the words exactly: 'a contemptible letter.' He read it out to me. It was signed by Carlebach and stated that on the following day a new paper would appear, called Yedioth Maariv. 'You have one last chance. We'll give you money. Not much. But you have no chance, because the entire paper, from the editor to the last of the vendors, is moving over with me. So it is best for you to submit and save your honor. If not, you and your family will sink into the abyss.' Something like that. "Nevertheless, Mozes courageously refused to give in. That very night he managed to recruit staff to put out a paper. But the feeling of betrayal was very strong. It was a plot, it was a cruel and contemptible act. I know of no precedent for it in the annals of the world's major press. As a result, hatred developed on our part, hatred that lasted for many years. The hatred added motivation to what we did in the years that followed. Underlying everything we did was the intense feeling that a terrible wrong had been done and that every effort must be made to rectify it. We had to recover what had been plundered." In 1950 you sold 20,000 copies a day; Maariv sold 80,000. Forty years later, when you concluded your term as editor-in-chief of Yedioth Ahronoth, your circulation was three times that of Maariv. What was the Yudkovsky formula for success? "If there was a formula, it was to publish a paper of which neither a cabinet minister nor his driver would be ashamed of. But I don't know that we actually articulated a formula. We had two problems: too few readers, and readers who were not proud of the paper. So we had two missions: to increase readership as much as possible while at the same time making the paper respectable. To raise it from the bottom of the barrel to the top of the heap. So we set out to create a paper that would have both popular appeal and also be high-quality, both readable and cultured. "I see no contradiction between those poles. I always remembered something I learned from my philosophy teacher: Everything that Kant formulated in boring and ponderous terms, Plato said 2,000 years earlier in a style that is riveting and concrete. Writing well does not mean adopting a complicated, overblown style. On the contrary: A good newspaper, like good literature, should attract the eye and the heart. If it is written well and tells a good story, it is accessible to everyone. Very cogently phrased, but how do you do it in practice? "First of all, there was a spirit of combat. The desire to recover created a powerful psychological motivation. And there was a team spirit, too, a true esprit de corps. Beyond that, there were three practical points. There was the editorial conception, which I have just described: to write in a riveting, concrete style. And there was our decision to fight to be first on the street, to hit the stands at least a few minutes before Maariv. And there was the format: We remained a tabloid, whereas Maariv, because of Carlebach's arrogance, chose a format that was unsuitable for a mass-circulation paper." It's said that you were an excellent marketing man who found readerships that Maariv neglected. "One day in the 1950s there was an important soccer game between Israel and Russia. I had no interest in sports. We ran one sports column a week. I was taken to the game because of its political significance. I come to Ramat Gan Stadium and see 40,000 people going wild. Immediately I said that it makes no sense: If 40,000 people are going wild, why do we give them only one column a week? So we introduced a daily sports column, then a daily sports page, then a weekly sports supplement, then a daily sports supplement. "There is no greater folly than an editor who publishes a paper for himself. An editor must be attentive to the public. He must understand what is important to the reader in Tiberias or in Kiryat Gat. That is why we introduced local pages and supplements. We built ourselves up from what is today called the periphery to the center. But at the same time, as I mentioned, it was important for us to be accepted by the elites. To that end we made every effort to obtain exclusive documents: Dayan's memoirs, then Rabin's, then Kissinger's. When people saw that the most prestigious names appeared in the paper, respectability was gradually achieved. We were no longer a paper people were ashamed of. And to reach the kibbutzim and North Tel Aviv I created 'Fatah Land' - a concentration of witty, razor-sharp writers who produced a double spread on Friday." The writers there included Amos Kenan and Boaz Evron - leftists, some from the radical left, who espoused bold ideas and wrote in a challenging style. In short, writers who might seem to be out of place in a mass-circulation newspaper. "That is exactly the point. I did not accept the attitude you describe. To begin with, 'Fatah Land' helped us penetrate areas that were under the total control of Maariv. But it also stirred an interest in other readers. True, there were a great many complaints. But in the end, I believed that if there are two circuses in town, one with cats and dogs, the other with lions and tigers, the public will prefer the lions and tigers. Yes, it's more dangerous, but it attracts a bigger audience." In the best families In 1983, [Haaretz publisher] Amos Schocken started a new paper, Hadashot. For a moment, your hegemony seemed to be at risk but within a few years you did to Hadashot what you had previously done to Maariv. What was your feeling this time? "The model for Hadashot was Germany's Bild Zeitung, a paper for subway riders. But Israel has no subway, and there is not enough room on the bus to read a paper. Also, Hadashot had too many raisins and not enough cake. They had some achievements, like the Bus 300 affair [of 1984, in which a photograph by Alex Levac of a hijacker being led away exposed as a lie the claim by the Shin Bet security service that the terrorists were already dead], but there were also biased items that hurt the paper's credibility. The people at Hadashot were a little full of themselves, but their success was within the industry, not among the public. It didn't take long before we realized that Hadashot was not really a threat. It did make us turn Yedioth into a morning paper and polish it up, but the competition was much easier than against Maariv. Hadashot recruited talented people. We hired away some of them, and within a few years Hadashot shut down." But then, when you were at the peak of your power and Yedioth was at the peak of its success, your partner in the paper, Noah Mozes, died in a traffic accident. Do you remember that day in 1985? "Of course. Noah stepped out of the car of his son-in-law, Amiram Nir, onto the road across from the newspaper and was hit by a bus. I went to the hospital when I heard about it. The doctors told me not to, but I went in to see him anyway and afterward regretted doing so. He was badly injured. We had worked together for 40 years. We had led the paper together since Yehuda's death in 1956. "There was something diabolic about it - all those accidents in the Mozes family. First the death of the eldest son, Gilad, who was hit by a bus when he was nine. I remember that Noah and I were returning from Jerusalem when we heard about it. For a week we sat by the bed of the dying boy. And then the terrible event with Noni [Noah's younger son, Arnon, now publisher of Yedioth], I think he was 14 at the time. Noah let him drive the car and a girl was killed. Noah took it very hard. He also spent a few months in jail. For him it was a great tragedy. And then, 15 years later, Noah himself is killed in an accident. It's as though there was a curse on the Mozes family." When Noah was killed, did everything change? Did a new era began at Yedioth? "What happened was what you see in all kinds of families in different places in the world when a new generation arrives." What happened was an all-out war between the heir, Noni Mozes, and the major shareholder and chief editor, Dov Yudkovsky. "It was a very rough time." In a court affidavit you submitted years later, you said Noni conspired behind your back to force you out of the paper. "Noni made the situation intolerable. I don't know if he wanted me to remain an editor with no power and no managerial authority, or if he did not want me as editor at all. But I could not live with the blow to my powers and the loss of prestige. I saw that as unfair." Here is the irony of the story. What was done to Yehuda Mozes in 1948 was done by Yehuda Mozes' grandchildren 40 years later. "I don't know if it was a putsch. But they knew. It's hard for me to say what I did, what I built. But they knew. When I took over at the paper we were printing 20,000 copies, and when I left it was 530,000." Did some of Yehuda Mozes' grandchildren treat you with ingratitude? "I felt I was being wronged. I didn't whine, but inside I felt that a terrible wrong was done." And at a certain point you left. "Toward the end it became utterly unbearable. I felt it might even affect my health. It was awful. No one disputed my contribution - and after all that to force me out?" Do you remember your last day? "Of course. I collected my books from my office and took my briefcase and stood in the doorway and looked back. I remember telling myself that I had to engrave the sight in my memory because I probably would never return to that room. And I never have. To this day I have not crossed the threshold of the Yedioth building, which I built. A building in which I know every stone." The golden calf Don't you sometimes have the feeling that you created a golem? "I never felt that one had to fear the paper's power because I never asked myself what I was doing with that power. I believed in our ethics and our method of work." These ethics included a list of protected people whom you never attacked or criticized, such as Gad Yaacobi and Yehoshua Rabinovich. "Gad Yaacobi [senior Labor Party figure, 1935-2007] was a personal friend, I do not hide that fact. But I don't think there were people whom we deliberately attacked or others whom we systematically protected. As for Rabinovich [senior Labor Party figure, 1911-1979], I remember a case in which one of our photographers happened to be on the beach at Tel Baruch on the morning when Avraham Ofer committed suicide, and took his picture. [Ofer, a ranking Labor Party figure and the housing minister at the time, took his life in 1977 after being accused of improprieties.] Rabinovich found out about it and called me to say he knew we had the photograph. I am not asking anything, he said, but just think whether you really want Ofer's children to remember his face like that, distorted, with a bullet in the head. The photograph was not published. It is hard for me to say whether I would have published it had Rabinovich not phoned. In general, I can tell you that there was no case when we hid anything of significance or anything criminal." The partnership between Yedioth Ahronoth and Mapai [forerunner of Labor] was problematic. Yedioth's franchise to distribute the Sport Toto gambling forms made the paper very careful not to offend the ministers of education, who were also the ministers of sport at the time. "Mapai exerted no influence on the editorial board, just the opposite. When it realized it would gain nothing from the partnership, it gave in and sold its shares. The Toto franchise was very helpful to us in the lean years. I do not recall us giving anyone immunity because of the Toto." You censored harsh reports about Gigi Peres, Shimon's brother. "I do not remember that we ever blue-penciled a substantiated report about criminal actions. Sometimes someone got on someone's case for no reason. In cases like that, I tried to soften things or to persuade the reporter." You censored a series of reports about how the income tax authorities turned a blind eye to senior figures. "The content of the investigative report was so extreme that I found it hard to believe it was accurate." In some cases you censored writers in whom you take pride, even Amos Keinan. "I had stormy arguments with Amos Keinan, but he would get tired and say, I will accept whatever you and my wife decide. And so it was." When Hadashot broke censorship in the Bus 300 affair, you supported the paper's closure. Don't you think this was a violation of professional solidarity and of freedom of the press? "That never happened. How could we have done that? That is a baseless allegation." For decades, you and your colleagues in the other papers practiced considerable self-censorship. How does this square with your commitment to a free press? "There were some things I regret. When Rabin was defense minister, he asked the Editors Committee [of Israel's newspapers] not to report the 'Jibril deal' [prisoner exchange of May 1985]. There were arguments and in the end we were persuaded not to publish the story. Some time later I met Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Moshe Levy - in Rabin's home, of all places - and he told me it was a pity we had given in because the deal was a mistake and early publication might have prevented it. So, in retrospect, it was clear to me that we should have reported the story. "But there were cases in which self-restraint was justified. If the prime minister tells you that reporting the fact that Israel is getting oil from Iran will lead to a cessation of oil from Iran, you cannot ignore his request. You have to act reasonably." The press today When you look at the press in 2008, what bothers you? "The way it bows to the golden calf. Different periods have different culture heroes. Once the heroes were the generals. Afterward there was a period of writers and intellectuals. Now the heroes are people of means. I find that grating. It is legitimate to write about economic success, but today there is a whole industry within the press that glorifies money for its own sake. They came up with this term alpionim [referring to the very rich]. And you flip through the magazines and see the same people at one event and then at another. It's not that they created something that should be reported. They are just there. "A woman once asked me whether it was possible that a certain paper had an agreement with [Bank Hapoalim owner] Shari Arison to publish her picture every day. She was asking in all innocence. Her question shows that the public is being driven crazy with pictures and parties and salaries of rich people. I am not against rich people, of course, but it is unconscionable to report day after day on salaries in the millions and profits in the millions and on the next page to whine about poverty and declare that our heart is with Sderot. That ruins the entire social fabric. And regrettably, the press is lending a hand to that; it is dancing around the golden calf." Does anything else upset you about the press today? "There are many good things. Communication is faster, the print quality is better, the color is sharper. The whole technical side has improved greatly. But apart from the golden calf, there is also 'Ninet-ization.' Ninet [Tayeb, winner of Israel's first "American Idol"-style program] is a heartwarming phenomenon, a young girl from the periphery, a talented singer who becomes a success. But when you open the paper and see whole columns about how she was seen here or there - it's too much." What is the underlying problem? "The lack of proportion between the amount of words and the amount of facts. Maybe it is because there are many pages to fill. In my time, if someone had nothing to say, he would say it on one page. Now he says nothing on three pages." Has the press become too loud? "A newspaper should attract the eye and the heart. It must generate interest. But there is too much stridency now in the first pages. Every trivial thing appears in huge letters. If you do that every day, what will you do when something truly dramatic happens? I know it is unfair to judge one period by the criteria of a different period. I understand that now there are different constraints and pressures. But I still think it is possible to produce a newspaper, even a popular one, more elegantly, more current, less deafening. Without the crassness, the hype and the stridency." You raise several claims against contemporary journalism. But at the same time, under you Yedioth lacked an agenda. The complaint was that you had no worldview or ideological commitment. "On a personal level I do have a worldview. I am sensitive to social justice and solidarity; I lean toward a policy of moderation. But I believe in an open press. And once I am committed to an open press, my opinions are of no importance. There are right-wing journalists and left-wing journalists. What matters is the free competition between them; not which one is better." 'Materialist madness' What do you think about the 'coddling' of certain public figures? "The attitude that if a certain politician has a peace plan that we like we'll forgive him everything is unprofessional, and I am concerned by the moral aspects." Some say that in the past two years Yedioth has been very protective of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "I think the disagreements are not among the various newspapers but inside each one. There were associates of his - in television, too - and detractors. What is your opinion of the prime minister? "I knew Ehud Olmert well. At the personal level he is very likable, very intelligent, pleasant. But this last affair has saddened me very much and made me uncomfortable. It creates a terrible feeling when a prime minister is in a situation like this. It is so pathetic. The fact that it was not a one-time mistake, but a method. The picture of my prime minister, who was the mayor of Jerusalem, asking for an upgrade here and an upgrade there, asking for the credit card. It is embarrassing. It does not look good and it is immoral in the extreme. "Of course, we must wait for the cross-examination, for the evidence and the counter-evidence. Olmert has not been convicted or even indicted. But I ask myself about his motivation. Is it so important to travel first class? To have the suite upgraded? To own one more fountain pen or watch? Those are fine things, but they are not the stuff of life. There is an element here of extreme vanity." What about the press - are you optimistic or pessimistic? Is the press important in the 21st century? "It is important for the shareholders. But moreover, I think the press has an important function for every human society. Even though it is not officially defined as such, it is almost one of the branches of government. There is the legislative branch, the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the press is the reporting branch. As such, it bears responsibility. It must be creative. It must be vital. It must give pleasure to the reader. But it also writes the first draft of history. It is an important part of our civilization. So I do not believe it will disappear. It will constantly change form; it will undergo great changes. But I do not see a world without a press. For me, a world without a press would be a terrible place." W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Terror in the capital A Palestinian rammed his bulldozer into a bus in Jerusalem, killing three. Poetic injustice Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish blends sarcasm and hope in his latest work.   1.   Haaretz and Hadashot.. 19:42  |  Buzaglow 28/06/08

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