Israel: the Land of Milk and Honey and the Technion

By Aaron Peer Pipano

I am a Technion graduate, where I received my PhD in theoretical chemistry over 40 years ago. My beginnings started in the same way as most of the Jews in Israel, by sheer luck and pain and lots of wanderings and loss.

My family and their ancestors were all born in Salonika, Greece, but when my parents married, they moved from Salonika, Greece to a suburb of Athens, named Pireus (which is the main sea port of Greece). There my father owned a sugar factory (his partner was his sister's husband). Since he was educated in Germany he spoke German fluently and became friendly with many German Officers. At that time the Rabbis of Salonika and Athens kept saying that there is nothing to worry about and everybody should continue his day to day life. However, one of the German officers was my father's friend from college and he told him not to listen to the Rabbi and take his family and leave Greece before it is too late. My father listened to him despite the fact that everyone else did not believe it. We flew to a small Greek farm (whose owner used to do business with my father) and from there we rented a boat that took us illegally to Turkey.

At the peak, there were more than 150,000 Jews in Salonika and most of them immigrated to Palestine before World War II. Actually, there is a big community in Jerusalem of Jews whose origin is Salonika, Greece. The majority of Salonika Jews immigrated to Palestine with the help of Haifa's Mayor then (Tedy Kolek). He visited Salonika and saw that the majority of Jews there were sea port workers. He wanted to develop Haifa as a major sea port and he offered them jobs and dwellings in Palestine.

We immigrated illegally to Turkey and they put us in a prison. I remember because as a little child I was shocked by all this. I even remember that the Turkish police transported us to prison on donkeys (since we landed in a place that was unpopulated) and my grandmother's donkey carried the food and my donkey was after hers and nibbled at the food and that scared my grandmother. It was not a real prison as one would think of a prison, since I recall my father played poker and shesh besh with the guards in the interrogation room most of the time. While he was playing with the guards, my mom, my grandmother and I were in the police station’s waiting room listening to the radio and reading books. My father was allowed as many phone calls as he wished, which he used to contact the Greek and British embassies. This is how my father volunteered for the British army from prison, in order to get out of prison.

Once we were out of prison, we got on a train to Egypt, and on the train we met members of the Hagana. The Hagana kidnapped us because we were Jewish and they wanted to increase the Jewish population of Palestine and save as many Jews as possible from the Nazis. That is how we ended up in a kibbutz in Palestine which then became Israel in 1948.

I married a woman named Aliza who came from Sophia, Bulgaria and we had two daughters and a son (my son died in 1978). My older daughter is now 42, married and living in the United States. Her love for Israel, as she was born and grew up in Tel Aviv till she was 12, was so binding and relentless, that she always spoke of the country and the Technion to her American husband and his family. One of the family members, was her husband’s great uncle, and after she had told him of her unceasing respect and admiration for the Technion over the years, he was inspired and just donated $0.5 million to the school and in addition set up a $2.0 million trust to go to the Technion upon his death.

The legacy that Israel and the Technion left on me, and my family, will go on for generations and I was fortunate to be a part of that history despite the high cost it entailed to get to where we are today. Much work remains to be done, but our stories, memories and histories will propel us to get the Technion and Israel to new heights.