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In 1948, 20 young Jewish men from Winnipeg went to Palestine to fight for the fledgling Jewish state
Ed. introduction: In 1989 my late brother Matt wrote a story about a gathering of 10 “Machalniks” in Winnipeg. Machal, as the story explains, was short for “Mitnadvei Hutz La’aretz,” volunteers from outside the country.
Machalniks were men who volunteered to make their way to Palestine and join the Haganah in Israel’s War of Independence.
By MATT BELLAN
August 2, 1989
When Al Chapnick visits Israel, he avoids Jerusalem.
The Winnipeg insurance salesman has visited the Jewish state three times in the past 40 years.
On one trip he spent a half hour in Israel’s capital and left… and that was it.
Chapnick has vivid, painful memories of fighting from house to house in Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence.
“It overhangs you for the rest of your life,” he explains, his voice trembling slightly. “The thing I remember is having to cover dead victims with lime because the smell was atrocious.”
Chapnick and seven other Winnipeg Jews are known as Mahalniks, an acronym for the Hebrew title the Israeli government assigned foreign volunteers who fought for Israel during the War of Independence.
The letters in Machal stand for “Mitnadvei Hutz La’aretz,” volunteers from outside the country.
The Jewish War Veterans of Canada, Winnipeg Post, in cooperation with the General Monash branch of the Royal Canadian Legion last month, held a dinner at the Legion’s Main Street, headquarters, partly to honour Winnipeg’s eight living Machalniks, and Eddie Kaplansky, a Machalnik from Winnipeg now living in Haifa.
It was the first time, the Machalniks claimed, that an organization in Winnipeg’s Jewish community had come forward to commemorate their sacrifices for Israel.
TOLD THEIR STORIES
The honorees took turns speaking briefly at the microphone set up at one end of the long banquet table, and in interviews later, several told their stories.
In early 1948, only a few months after the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, recruiters were fanning out around the world.
Their mission: to enlist volunteers to serve in the Haganah, Palestine’s Jewish Defence forces, when Israel came into being on May 15.
In Canada, Jewish businessmen, lawyers and war heroes spearheaded the recruitment effort.
Enlisting Canadian Jews to fight in Palestine wasn’t illegal, but the recruiters usually held their meetings quietly, to avoid attracting the Canadian government’s attention.
The British were still in charge in Palestine. Recruiters for various fighting groups in Palestine, including the Irgun, were passing through Winnipeg.
The Irgun was already famous for its attacks on British military targets. Tying to recruit Canadian Jewish boys for such efforts might force the Canadian government to clamp down, organizers of the recruitment drive feared.
Sid Winston, commander of the Jewish War Veterans’ Winnipeg Post, was the secretary for the General Monash branch in the late 1940s and witnessed the Haganah recruitment sessions in Winnipeg’s Hebrew Sick Benefit Association on Selkirk Avenue.
“These fellows came through, and we didn’t even know their names.” he recalls. “We never took minutes.”
The recruiters preferred single men with combat experience.
“A fellow named John Secter did the recruiting out west,” recalls Jack Hurtig, Winnipeg businessman, who grew up in Edmonton.
First, Secter made contact with heads of all Jewish communities across Western Canada.
“They called a meeting, but didn’t say what it was about,” Hurtig says. In Edmonton, Secter told us “what was happening in Palestine under the British. He asked us who was going to go and who wasn’t …”
Hurtig was only 17, but had studied to be an astronautical engineer, and served as a student navigator during the war.
Like many other Canadian Jews who signed up to fight for Israel, Hurtig hadn’t been an active Zionist, but “they felt they had a job to do and they went.”
Al Chapnick was 18 in 1948 and a member of Young Judaea in Winnipeg.
The British had placed a strict ban on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The British had also advised Canada, the U.S. and other countries to interrogate people at border crossings and turn them back if they were heading for Palestine,.
Chapnick, like other recruits, embarked on a long, harrowing, and complicated journey to get around the ban on immigration.
To reduce suspicion that they were heading for Palestine, Haganah agents sent recruits from eastern Canada to cross the border south of Vancouver, and western Canadians to Niagara Falls.
When Chapnick got off the train in Niagara Falls, he used his “cover story.” He informed customs officials he was going to visit relatives in New York City.
Someone contacted him at Grand Central Station and directed him to a hotel where he found 31 other young Canadian Haganah recruits sitting in a room.
The recruits headed two at a time to a boat that has served as a cargo carrier during the war.
Arriving in Le Havre, France they looked for the Haganah contact who would meet them.
“She did,” Chapnick remembers. “It was a 14-year-old girl. She had tickets for all 31 of us, took pictures of all of us, and had train tickets for Paris. Then, another contact picked us up, took us to a restaurant in the Jewish quarter and, from there, somebody took us by train to Marseilles.
“Then trucks took us to DP camps, and there, we were given false identities of people killed during the war.”
At a port outside Marseilles,, a fishing boat designed for a crew of four picked up Chapnick and 155 other recruits for the final leg of the journey.
“It took 16 days to cross the Mediterranean. We couldn’t go too far offshore. There were no lifejackets, no lifeboats.”
Two months after starting his trip in Winnipeg, Chapnick arrived in Palestine.
But as the illegal immigrants got off the boat the British authorities interned them in a camp, intending to ship them to Cyprus.
Chapnick and three others escaped the next day and one of the three, an American, escorted them to a kibbutz where he had contacts
“We stayed there till the British didn’t have any authority in the country,” Chapnick continues.
In June 1948 he joined the Haganah, signing up for the English-speaking Seventh Brigade under a commander from Toronto.
As Calgary historian David Bercuson recounts in “The Secret Army,” a book about the Machalniks, Israel’s War of Independence was a long, exhausting struggle for Jewish survival. It started in May 1948 and didn’t formally end until June 1949.
More than 5000 foreign volunteers signed up to fight for Israel alongside about 43,000 men and women in the Haganah’s commando unit, the Palmach.
Opposing Israel were about 100,000 Arab soldiers from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Palestinian Arabs.
The British equipped the Jordanians and Egyptians well, shipping them millions of dollars worth of weapons in early 1948 and the Iraqis were also well armed.
“The Egyptians came up from the south, as far as Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv,” Chapnick recalls. The Jordanians got as far west as Tulkarm, (about 10 miles from the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tel Aviv), and the Lebanese as far south as the Jezreel Valley in southern Galilee.
“We were infantry, we tried to liberate as much of the country as we could, defend kibbutzim, and so on…”
A month later Chapnick was transferred to an “antitank platoon.”
“I was on a half track,” he says.That group liberated the whole Gail, north of Haifa. “We were all over. We captured Beer Sheva on my birthday – I’ll never forget that day.”
(To be continued.)
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Musings from Dizengoff Street – by Bruce Brown (updated on a regular basis)
(August 11, 2026) Bravo Boy George. We certainly will dance again! And what better way than with his new reggae tune. Now Boy George is dealing with a hostile backlash against his just stand for Israel. Having to withdraw from London’s East End production of Jesus Christ Superstar where he was going to play – guess it. King Herod. Never a big Culture Club fan, but I am anyway -as a sign of support- going to download his greatest hits to my Spotify library. And hoping to have a chance to buy a concert ticket should Boy George perform in Israel. Kind of reminds me of Bob Dylan’s 1983 song Neighborhood Bully. Also in defense of Israel. I’m going to download that song as well. Although don’t think he was hounded the way Boy George is now. Sign of the times I guess.
+++++
Coming clean. I sometimes find myself chanting, to no one in particular, that snappy little ditty ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Now why can’t we come up with something as catchy. With such an impressive gene pool of great Jewish songwriters. George Gershwin. Irving Berlin. Burt Bacharach. Carole King. Neil Diamond. Leanard Choen. Paul Simon. Gene Simmons, Amy Winehouse. Bob Dylan. And yes, even the Buddhist Boy George. And still… gurnish! No wonder we’re losing the global PR battle
(August 8, 2026) Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem. Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black. Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat. For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos. With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café. While shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas. So the wife and I thought we would check it out. And. Yes. Buy something to support the business. Uproar. Not. Blocked entrances. Not. Storming the café. Not. Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers. The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews. Mostly teenagers. And yes. Shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem. Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” But I did enjoy my iced matcha.
(August 6, 2026) Here we go again. Another round of forever negotiations. As someone who negotiates for a living. The way things are going in the straits. If I had to recommend a book on the subject to a new hire. Between The Art of the Deal, A Presidential Edition by Donald J. Trump or The Real Art of the Deal by the Mullahs of Iran with a special forward by the IRGC. Well. I would choose the latter.
(August 3) Bravo Yoav Segalovitz, Liberal Yesh Atid MK and Monsour Abbas, United Arab Ra’am MK and party head. For breaking a glass ceiling where a Jewish lawmaker joins an Arab political party. No less a political earthquake in my little shtetl. Which can significantly impact coalition block arithmetic and posturing and strategy in the upcoming elections. Now Ra’am can be considered a legitimate ‘Zionist’ partner when forming coalition blocks and potentially pushing the ‘center left/right’ party over the 60 seat majority threshold. In our crazy parliamentary democracy defined by a multi-party (about fourteen!!), proportional representation system. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Israel’s proportional representation model of governance is the best parliamentary democracy system except for all other forms of working democracies. Stay tuned for more amateurish political musings as we move towards Israel’s 26th national election – five of them held since 2019.
(August 1) Although both sides say they are open to diplomacy. Neither really trusts the other. And American military action, or its threat, continues. I read headlines in the middle of the night -it’s a nervous habit lately– that the Dynamic Duo of Trump and Netanyahu may again strike in unison. Possibly this weekend. Yikes! Prompting me, at 2:30 AM, to dash around the house stocking my safe room. Bottled water. Canned food. Medicines. Documents. The beat goes on….
If it’s crazy here. It’s insane in Italy. With a recent online ‘Jew Hunt’ in the Milan area. Before being removed, the digital forms urged reportings of Israelis and Italian Jews staying in local hotels. The infamous Global Sumud Movement -yes, the one coordinating ‘peace and humanitarian’ flotillas to Gaza- was somehow connected. Although they deny involvement?! This deranged decree was looking to identify Zionist tourism and Zionist neo-colonization in Italy. I’ll stick with stocking the saferoom.
Then there’s New York Mayor Mamdani, a Global Sumud Movement supporter, threatening to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York. But since discovered he has no legal right for such a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic antic. Maybe Mandami should be arrested! Or at least impeached. For being a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic mayor.
Here’s a post Bruce sent us Friday, July 31:
WARTIME MUSINGS
Should credible threats against FLOTUS and ‘FSOTUS’ (first son..) not be justification to attack first.
As for yesterday’s summit. Netanyahu really can’t win. Explainer. If Trump now attacks without victory its ’cause of Netanyahu. If Trump now attacks with victory its ’cause of Trump. And, in Israel, if Trump doesn’t attack -victory or not- Netanyahu failed in his eighth meeting with Trump. And if Trump does attack -victory or not- half the country will vilify Bibi anyway. Missing a permutation?
Ya. I know. Kinda’ need a definition of victory for that musing to work.
And here in my little shtetle. We go to sleep unsure if there will be a code red in the middle of the night. And if not. We wake up thinking it will be tonight. How do you define stress?
Seemed like an appropriate way to end this musing.
Bruce Brown is a former Winnipegger who made aliyah to Israel over 35 years ago. Bruce first began writing for us – in his own inimitable style, in 2012, during what was known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” His occasional musings on aspects of life in Israel that were far from what you’d typically read in other reports from Israel were hugely popular – both in the print Jewish Post & News and on this website.
We’re now glad to report that Bruce is back writing for us – this time on a regular basis. We will post Bruce’s reports as they arrive – with the date of each post at the beginning of that post.
Here’s some information about Bruce – and awards he’s received for his writing:
Bruce Brown. Canadian born. Now living in Israel (for a long time). Bruce works in Israel’s hi-tech sector by day and, in spurts, is a somewhat inspired writer by night. He received the American Jewish Press Association’s award for writing excellence in 2019 and 2025. And wrote the 1998 satire, “An Israeli is….” Bruce’s musings are political, social, economic and personal. With lots of biting, contrarian, sardonic and irreverent insight.
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