Norman Lurie is most remembered as the founder of the Habonim Movement in South Africa.
While studying at university in the UK in the late twenties, Norman heard a young man like himself, Wellesley Aron, speak about starting a Jewish youth movement in the poor East End of London. So inspired, Norman returned to South Africa and what emerged was to become the largest Jewish youth movement in Southern Africa. Over the ensuing decades since 1930, thousands of the movement’s graduates have made Aliyah contributing to nearly every facet of life in Israel.
But Norman had another dream, which few today remember. Habonim means ‘the builders’ and it was about building in Israel, that Norman’s next dream physically took shape.
The seed of that dream germinated during World War II, when Norman, as a War Correspondent attached to a South African Engineer Unit tasked for maintaining the stretch of rail from Haifa to Beirut, found himself on a train that stopped at a sandy station “in the middle of nowhere.” Norman alighted.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Shavei Zion,” someone told him. He quickly leant it was a moshav on the coast started by German immigrants who fled Nazi Germany in 1938. He instantly fell in love with the place and pledged to return.
After the war, he returned and negotiated with two sisters for the purchase of their small hotel that in their advertisement, boasted “running water in each room.”
Norman had a dream to transform it into a luxury hotel. He formed a syndicate of South African investors and over the next few years built a 5-star hotel, called Dolphin House.
It became the summer home of Israel’s state presidents and a favourite resort for visiting dignitaries and celebrities.
Israel’s presidents of the fifties – Chaim Weizmann and Yitzhak Ben Zvi – mixed socially with the likes of Danny Kaye, Sophia Loren, Ralph Richardson, Israeli actress, singer and model Daliah Lavi who was born on Shavei Zion, and many others of the movie industry’s celebrities – most notably, the entire cast of the movie blockbuster – Exodus.
Eat with the Stars
This was when another South African fell in love with Shavei Zion and experienced a brush with stardom. In 1960, during the filming of Exodus, Ivor Wolf of Ra’anana was in Israel, a volunteer in Nachal. The movie’s director, Otto Preminger, had negotiated with the IDF, to hire some Israeli soldiers to play the part of British soldiers stationed in Acre during the famed breakout scene of Acre prison, where on May 4, 1947, 28 Irgun and Lehi prisoners were freed. “I was one of those British soldiers and was happy to let the Jews escape,” laughs Ivor. During shooting, Ivor would frequently share meal tables at Dolphin House with the likes of Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Peter Lawford, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, Hugh Griffith and Ralph Richardson.
American actor, singer, dancer and comedian, Danny Kaye at Dolphin House in the 1960s.
Shavei Zion had also a more direct connection to the plot. Following the breakout, all the prisoners killed in the action, were carried and buried on the moshav, the first refuge en route following the escape. Well into the 1960s, Dolphin House was riding a crest of a wave, “actually a metaphor,” says Ivor, “because it still stands next to one of Israel’s finest beaches.” On Sundays, an orchestra used play on a band-stand and people from all over the north came to enjoy open-air music “in this piece of paradise.”
The movies and the music however did not last. The ‘final curtain call’ on this era came when the property was acquired by Kupat Holim Klalit and turned a 5-star resort into a medical facility. Even this use of ‘Norman’s Dream’ had its time as the property fell into disuse. This was until Ivor again stepped into ‘the picture’, this time not as a ‘walk-on-part’, but as a major actor in the on-going saga of Shavei Zion and Dolphin House.
Representing a group of investors, like Norman had done before, “we bought the premises comprising the old, desolate hotel and adjacent buildings and built 22 fully-equipped holiday bungalows called Dolphi Village.. “They are all on the ground floor and 100 metres from the path to the beach,” explains says Ivor, “and we are looking for Southern Africans to come swim in the best beach in Israel and bathe in some history.”
Ivor, who had been a leader in the Betar movement in South Africa before making aliyah, is proud to be promoting a project that was the brainchild of the founder of Habonim. “After all,” says Ivor, “the bottom line is that our youth movements at the time were all about promoting and building a strong Jewish state. This is what we did, and this is what I feel I am still doing today.”
There is a poem by Norman Lurie inscribed in stone at Dolphin House, “and I know he would be very happy to see his dream once again come to fruition. While we have the bungalows up and running, we look forward one day to rebuilding the hotel to its former glory. We are working on it.”
At present, the Dolphin Village “offers relaxing facilities to provide guests with the ideal family vacation,” says Ivor. “Norman saw a potential which is precisely what attracts people today. The beach offers excellent diving, and swimming, a marina where one can go boating, and a beautiful promenade, where one can walk all the way to Nahariya.”
Shavei Zion is a far cry from when its founders took in the illegal immigrants of the ships evading the British blockade, or when Norman Lurie alighted from a train at a stretch of dirt and saw a property that prided itself on offering running water.
“We are back again,” says Ivor, and maybe Norman from his celestial perch, is beaming with pride.
