Years before he was a respected Houston dentist, Jack Liss was a teenage soldier in the British Army’s Jewish Legion in Palestine during World War I.
Liss kept a diary in Yiddish of his experiences in Jerusalem, Cairo and other parts of the Middle East during 1918-19. The diary was largely forgotten in an Israeli archive until Liss’s children in Houston tracked it down and had it translated into English several years ago.
Now, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies has made a copy of the original diary available online to read, as well as a translation that may be read or downloaded.
The writings are a valuable resource for historians interested in this time period 30 years before the creation of Israel, when Britain ruled Palestine and young Jewish soldiers arrived with hopes of building a Jewish state.
