קבוצות תת-אתניות יהודיות במרחבים על-לאומיים: מפגשים בין יהודים ממזרח אירופה ליהודי ביירות בין שתי מלחמות העולם, 1920-1940

The article employs a micro historical approach to the monitoring of diverse encounters that took place between Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who went to the Land of Israel and Jewish immigrants from areas formerly dominated by the Ottoman Empire that occurred in transnational spaces under British and French Mandatory control. While hundreds of young Ashkenazi students enjoyed the local Jewish community’s hospitality during their studies at Beirut’s American University, Lebanon’s tourism industry attracted many Eastern European vacationers to Lebanese resortsincluding Jewish-owned hotels. The Jewish sub-ethnic immigrant groups living in both transnational Mandatory spaces brought in a variety of individual resources (real capital, social capital and human capital, including professional and linguistic skills) that well served diverse business enterprises.The most famous of them was a match factory established atthe initiative of the Weizmann brothers in theLebanese Maronite Christian village of Dam our,near Beirut. This enterprise called “El-Bark” in Arabic meaning‘light’ or ‘fire’becameburned into the collective memoryof Lebanese Jews as the Lebanese branch of Weizmann’s “Nur” match factoryin Acre. Its loyal Jewish technical work for cewhom the Weizmann brothers recruited from their places of origin in Eastern Europewere well integrated into the Jewish environment in Beirut. These immigrants’ previous match production experience and their ability to recruit cheap local laborthrough their fellow Jewish networks made the Damourmatch factorya success.