Shref, Zev Wolf (William)

In the First World War, he responded to the call of the Zionist leaders David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Pinchas Rotenberg, who were in the United States at the time, and enlisted in the Jewish Legion – the 39th Battalion of the King’s Rifles in the framework of the British Army. He arrived with his battalion in Palestine and when the war ended he decided to stay in Israel. In the winter of 1919, there was no clear border between the French occupation zone in Lebanon and the British zone in the Land of Israel, which was exploited by the Bedouin and the Arabs in the villages for robberies and murders in their Jewish neighbors. Four isolated settlements were found in the “Upper Galilee” – Metula, Kfar Giladi, Hamra and Tel Hai. A few days after Ze’ev was released from the British army, he joined a group of reinforcements that came to defend Tel Hai and its environs. On the 11th of Adar (March 1, 1920), Tel Hai was attacked by the surrounding Arabs who came from the Arab village of Halsa and murdered eight from Magna. Among them was Ze’ev. He was buried in a mass grave on a hill between Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi. A monument was erected on their grave in the form of a roaring lion, engraved with the names of the fallen. On the ruins of the Arab village of Halsa, the city of Kiryat Shmona was established after the establishment of the State in memory of the eight fallen soldiers. His memoirs were written in the collection of Tel Hai and his memory was also immortalized in the “Tel Hai Legacy” and in the Yizkor book of the Jabotinsky Institute.