Our Club History - from the Rotarian Magazine October 1944

"Jerusalem has a Rotary Club "

ROTARIAN MAGAZINE OCTOBER 1944

by Fred B. Barton, War Correspondent

pages 20-23

Every Wednesday a group of Jewish and British and Arabs and men of other nationalities breaks bread across the comfortable board of the YMCA hostel in Jerusalem. They assemble at 13:30 - 1:30 to me - and after 80 minutes they get up and go back to their shops and offices. They are the Rotary Club of Jerusalem. Luncheons are not spectacular - no more then Rotary meetings back home in Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

I had heard about the Rotary in Jerusalem, but it was a minor, albeit pleasant, shock to find it here. Jerusalem, even for a newspaper correspondent, is a very foreign place. Here inside the Old City, the walled city, you find camels loaded with fire wood performing that marvel of cantilever action represented by kneeling - every move a grunt as if once down he'll never get up - then rising with his burden ready to be lifted off to someone's very door. You see the very photogenic Wailing Wall, the cuddly little donkeys, native women carrying crocks of water on their heads. You see workers toiling with primitive tools, carving souvenir camels from that ironlike wood of the olive trees.

Foreign but not strange...British, yet in the Palestine they drive on the right...telephone kiosks at the street corners...controlled food prices: meals are high but pretty good. As for the climate, the new irrigated orange groves around Tel-Aviv enjoy a weather so lyric that young men learning the business are, with fine logic, sent to California to serve their apprenticeships.

Jerusalem's 60 Rotarians cross-section the city's business and professional life. Here is an American heading an oil company, an Arab architect with an international reputation, a Jew merchant whose family has been active in Palestine for 400 years...They come from modern homes, these men, for the American Colony and other new sections are as impressive as the magnificent King David Hotel and the hardly less stupendous YMCA across the street.

Since it was started in 1929, the Rotary Club of Jerusalem has been meeting with amazing regularity. When street rioting between Arab and Jew was serious, a few years back, it met as usual. During recent disturbances, presumably inspired by paid Nazi troublemakers rather then caused by spontaneous outbursts of ill will, meetings likewise went on.

They start simply. There is no invocation, no God Save the King, no waving of the flag. The men just sit down and chat as they eat. Conversation quickly slips into the middle ground that Arab, Christian and Jew have in common. It is a time for comradeship.

Discussions are friendly rather than controversial. There is, really, so little to argue about, so many things held in common! For example, the fellowship with Rotarians at other Palestinian Rotary Clubs (Haifa and Jaffa-Tel-Aviv) or over at Damascus, Beirut, Cairo or Zagazig or any of the other dozen clubs in District 83. Well worth talking about is Jerusalem's magnificent water supply or the growing economic importance of this region.
Consider that Tel-Aviv, the modern Jewish city, is the diamond center of the world and a big producer of plastics, chemicals, metal parts, enamalled bathtubs, paints and canned goods. There is a dream being dreamed that the River Jordan's waters will some postwar day will baptize into fruitfulness 600,000 acres of now near-useless land. When it is done, the Dead Sea won't dry up; a 95 mile chain of canals and tunnels is planned to bring Mediterranean water down the 1,300 foot drop and in so doing annually create more then a billion kilowatt-hours of electric power!

Here's a month's sample of Jerusalem Rotary Club programs, which usually are in English: a Palestinian government official speaking on current problems; a Moslem Arab speaking on Suliman the Magnificent; a Jewish book-seller discussing rare books; an Arab architect discussing new trends in houses; an English food controller discussing Palestinian and British relations.

The makeup of Committees is beautifully international. At the time of my visit, the Membership Committee was headed by a Jew with two Arabs and one Britisher as colleagues. The Committee that invites speakers has an Englishman for Chairman two Arabs, one Pole, one Jew, three British as members. On the Community Service Committee were an Arab as Chairman, and four Jews, two British, one Swede and one American. An American Chairmanned the International Services Committee and on it were one English Jew and one Arab.

Secretary of the Club is enthusiastic W.H.L. Martin, the minister of Christ's Church and an energetic person. He chafes a bit at being restricted, for all but a few hours a day, to his couch because of phlebitis caused by wearing to-tight leggings in the last year.

I got a picture of what Rotary in Jerusalem is doing and what it is trying to do by climbing the stairs at the Palestinian Board of Education and talking with the Club's genial and forward-mined president W.H. Chinn, since succeeded by Malmond (sp?) Dajani. Rotarian Chinn is referred to almost to easily as the probation officer. He is the advisor on social welfare for the Palestinian Government. That takes in probation, reformatory schools as well as any necessary welfare work. Included also is the new feeding of destitute school children - a wartime development.

President Chinn told how Jerusalem Rotarians with earnestness yet without cant are working out implications of the Rotary ideal of service. Occasionally fellowship flowers into social affairs including ladies nights. It was all simple and natural, as he told it; men of different races and creeds willed that they would get along together, and they did.

It seemed to me as I listened, poetically fitting that in Jerusalem, where streets have been blooded so many times, practical men of affairs of the 20th Century should heed those words first heralded near here" "Peace on earth, good will to men!" Never has it been so important that thinking people realize how earning of their daily bread and the sitting down together with friends and business competitors and neighbors, they can help create a new world of understanding - the basis of any lasting livable peace.

If Jerusalem points the way through its Rotary Club, let us have more of it!

"Here is how it got started" - by Richard H. Wells

Whenever I say it is not hard to organize a Rotary Club, I think of the story that Clare Martin tells of his experience of organizing the Rotary Club of Jerusalem. Racial prejudices were so intense in the community that it was said that no Rotary Club could exist there. But Clare Martin did't believe that.

He went to Jerusalem and visited 15 men deliberating choosing men of different races, color and religion. He told each of them about Rotary, and each expressed the opinion that it would be highly desirable but equally impossible to have a club in Jerusalem. He then invited each of them individually to be his guests at dinner.

Each came thinking himself to be the only guest but found to his surprise that there were 15 assembled. They glared at each other and each wondered how the others happened to be there. Clare then excused himself telling them that he would be back shortly. His guests were more uncomfortable then ever. Finally there natural courtesy began to assert itself. An Arab crossed the room and shook hands with a Jew. Then each of them, feeling he could not be out-done in courtesy, tried to surpass the others in politeness.

At just the right moment, Clare Martin stepped back into the room and raising his hand announcing "gentlemen the Rotary Club of Jerusalem is now in session."

This happened in 1928 and the Rotary Club of Jerusalem exists. meeting regularly, and enjoys the same kind of fellowship Rotarians everywhere enjoy.