Moshe Menachem Pickholz

Deventer v. 1.2

Family page

Moshe Menachem Pickholz, birth 1890, died 1957 Bene Berak, Hazon Ish St.,Israel to:
Devorah Rachel Brandes, birth 1889, died 1968 Kiryat Shaul, Israel
http://www.pikholz.org/Families/RavJG.shtml

1) Gustav Pickholz, alias: Gershon Etzioni, birth 19 Aug 1919 Wenen, Oostenrijk, died 2011 Nahariya, Israel
http://info.palmach.org.il/show_item.asp?levelId=42863&itemId=8586&itemType=0&fighter=72206

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/cursed-soil-1.403199
Shlomit Etzioni lives within walking distance of the project's headquarters in Nahariya. Her father, Gershon, scattered the asbestos across Western Galilee with his own hands. He died two years ago, at the ripe old age of 92. "People fought to ge t the material," Etzioni recalls, "like it was diamonds.

Gershon Etzioni immigrated to Palestine from Germany in 1935 [1939] and settled in Moshav Nahalal, in the Galilee. Ten years later, he bought a farmstead in Nahariya. He made a living raising chickens and cattle. In the 1950s, he started to wor k as a subcontractor for Eitanit. "Dad had a big tractor with a cart," his daughter recalls. "He was the one who came up with the idea of what to do with the powder that accumulated in large piles at the factory. He took a sample of the powder an d tried to make a footpath here, in the house. He saw that it worked fantastically. The factory made a deal with him: they paid him to remove the powder and he sold it to moshavim, to farmers, to whoever wanted to buy."

At the beginning of the 1960s, Etzioni continues, her father placed ads in the local Nahariya newspaper in which he praised the qualities of the material for building roads. "He even put in ads in German," she says. "He would take the heaps of pow der to our farm. We children played in it as though it was sand. Then, either trucks arrived to take it, or he would transport it with the tractor and cart. At one point, my brother attached a pipe that sprayed water to another tractor. My fathe r would scatter the asbestos and my brother would spray it, to make it harden. Dad did that for 25 years."

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