By Cindy Mindell

WATERFORD – Marcia Silpert was just an “idealistic and headstrong kid” when Jews took up arms to carve out a homeland in Palestine. The story of the South African native reads like a post-World War II suspense novel, replete with all the illegal activity deemed necessary to escape the ruins of the Holocaust to the fledgling Jewish state.

Silpert would take the surname of her husband, Nathan Wolman. She was among those interviewed for “Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force” before the producers decided to focus the film on the stories of four U.S. pilots. Wolman will tell her story as part of the Reel Talk following the Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival closing-night screening of the film on Sunday, March 22.

Marcia Wolman (kneeling) as an IIsraeli soldier stationed at Ramat David. circa 1949. To her left is Edna, an Israeli soldier who married Joe Ber, a South African. The couple’s son, Dr. Doron Ber, who has a medical practice in East Lyme, provided this photo.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1928, Wolman was not even 20 when she inadvertently got caught up in Israel’s War of Independence. Taking a job at the United Zionist Revisionist Party in Johannesburg, Wolman soon joined Betar, the party’s associated youth movement “and then got very passionate,” she says. “Their philosophy was that you had to fight for what you wanted, as opposed to Labor Zionists like Chaim Weizman and others, who were going cap-in-hand to the British government.”

Wolman and her fellow Betarim were taken to rural farms to train in target shooting and Morse Code. She was passed over several times for the long voyage to Palestine but just before the UN vote on a Jewish homeland in November 1947, her turn finally came.

The Betarim would make their way to a former displaced persons camp in northern Italy, where the young Zionists were issued new names, family histories, and identification papers, and registered with the UN’s International Refugee Organisation (IRO). The young Jewish woman Wolman was to “play” had been born in Poland in October 1927.

Finally authorized to set sail, the group arrived in Naples, where they boarded a repurposed American pleasure cruiser meant for 250 passengers but carrying closer to 800, mostly concentration camp survivors. After 10 days, the ship anchored in Haifa Bay, a month after war had erupted between the fledgling Jewish state and a military coalition of surrounding Arab states and Palestinian Arab forces. Wolman and three other girls were sent to join the Air Force, where she trained as a weather observer. She was stationed in Jaffa before being transferred to the Ramat David Airbase in the north of the country.

Wolman served in the Air Force for just over a year, until truce agreements were signed in the first seven months of 1949. She then joined Moshav HaBonim in northern Israel, established that year by English and South African members of the HaBonim Labour Zionist movement. She spent seven months in South Africa until a group of moshavniks had formed, then returned to Israel in April 1950. A series of deaths in the family brought her back to South Africa, where she met and married her husband, Nathan Wolman, “and that was that,” she says, for her planned life in Israel. The couple would raise four children and run several businesses in Johannesburg until Nathan’s death in 1979.

A decade later, Wolman moved to Waterford, Conn., where her oldest son, Len, had immigrated in 1976. On her annual trips to Connecticut, she had become acquainted with the local Jewish community, and with Jewish Federation of Eastern Connecticut executive director Jerry Fischer, who hired her upon her arrival in 1989. Decades after retiring, she still serves on the Federation board.

“Over the years, I met up with friends I served with but we never reminisced,” she says. “We only talked about our lives since the war and the present, and now many of them are gone. It was a very exciting and interesting time of my life and I’m very grateful that I was part of it.”

Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force will be screened on Sunday, March 22, 7:30 p.m., at Beth El Temple in West Hartford, followed by Reel Talk featuring Marcia Wolman, director Roberta Grossman and producer Nancy Spielberg. For information: hjff.org, (860) 231-6316.