An Unlikely Heroine
Subtitle: Esther Cailingold's Fight for Jerusalem
Publisher: Mitchell Vallentine & Company
Published: March 2000
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780853034087
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: from c 1900 -; Biography: historical; Essays, journals, letters & other prose works; War & defence operations; History; History - General History; Biography/Autobiography; Israel; Middle East - General; Historical - General; Jewish - General; Women; 1925-1948; Biography; Cailingold, Esther,; England; Israel-Arab War, 1948-1949; Jerusalem; Jews; Jews, British; London; Palestine
Description: "Esther Cailingold, the daughter of an enlightened Orthodox family, was born in the East End of London, brought up in Stamford Hill and educated at North London Collegiate and at Nottingham and London Universities." "When she was sent to live with a non-Jewish family in Luton at the beginning of the war, she remained intensely involved in her Judaism and religious Zionism." "She volunteered at 20 to work with child survivors of the concentration camps who had been brought to Britain for rehabilitation and it was a natural step for her, with her first-class teaching credentials, to apply for and be appointed to a teaching post in a girls school in Jerusalem one year later."

"She arrived there in November 1946 and her subsequent letters to her family, every one of them kept by her mother, are used in the book to trace her progress from raw newcomer, unfamiliar with the language and customs of the country, to a fighter in the Haganah underground army and a soldier in the Israel Defence Forces, in which she lost her life in the siege of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem."--Jacket.