It All Started in Nazareth

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS p82
This must be one of the most unusual experiences I ever had. One evening in 1956, Dr. Abdul-Karim Gharaybeh, the director of the Department of Antiquities in Jordan and a friend from university days in Beirut, came to our home in Amman carrying two large sacks of smelly, rolled parchments. He said that the Bedouin who had brought the sacks to him told him that he found them in jars in a cave in the hills east of the Dead Sea. The Bedouin gave his find to Abdul-Karim, who paid him one Jordan dinar for his effort, which was worth one pound sterling. It was a Thursday, the start of the weekend, and government offices were closed. Abdul-Karim asked if he could leave the sacks with us for safekeeping until Saturday, when the museum opened for the week. He told Grace that he didn’t have anywhere else to store them and asked her to take care of them for a few days, when he would return and pick them up, and she accepted.

Abdul-Karim predicted that the parchments from the caves in Qumran might have some historical value, and that is why he wanted to keep them in our custody. The two sacks spent the weekend in our house waiting to be picked up and taken to the museum, but Abdul-Karim did not come for them. Their nasty smell permeated our small apartment. Grace decided to call Abdul-Karim and remind him to collect the parchments; otherwise, she told him, she would dispose of them, as they smelled bad.

It took more than one call for Abdul-Karim to come, but he did. He took these sacks to the museum in Amman, where they were kept in an underground storage area. When the specialists finally inspected the content, they knew that these were Dead Sea Scrolls!

The Jordanian antiquities department moved the scrolls to the museum in Jerusalem, where they waited for future study. Then, in 1967, the Israeli army occupied Jerusalem, museum, and all, and took whatever it contained. The news of the scrolls went public when they were cleaned and their value established.

THOUGHTS ON JORDAN p121
The end of my employment in Jordan was the end of my career, involving working for others. Though exciting jobs came up, I decided I would try my hand at something else, something I would establish and operate. I would live my successes and suffer my failures—and there were many of both. This was the beginning of my life as an independent businessman, with challenges, opportunities, and dreams galore.

I am lucky to have had an upbringing in an atmosphere of love and care. I virtually forgot the difficult times in Haifa and Nazareth, and the education I was fortunate to have was outstanding. All this gave me the foundation to face the world under conditions that were never normal. My success in Jordan was due to a lot of luck and the courage to undertake risks and jobs that appeared at the time to be impossible tasks. I always had the full support and love of my wife, Grace.

I suppose I have said so much about our life in Jordan because the country played a significant role in our lives. It shaped within its borders my character, our young family, and my early career. I learned the value of adherence to local customs. The Bedouin culture is straightforward, honest, reliable, and down to earth. It left its marks on our personalities, of course, on our way of life, and on the principles we adhere to. It chiseled my personality in the process, which started in Haifa on February 22, 1931, and ended in Amman in October 1958. Whatever I am, I am the product of the events of those twenty-seven years.

I knew many Jordanians in government and business, prime ministers, high officials, and influential individuals. Some affected my performance positively and lent me unlimited support. Each one of them was good in what he did; most, if not all of them, passed away some years back. When they come to my mind, and they often do, and whenever I think of them, I feel that I was lucky to have known every one of them.

My education and preparation for life were completed, I was twenty-seven, and Grace was twenty-six. We stood on firm foundations and set ourselves to start a life whose focus and scope were subject to no outside influence. We expected to face challenges, but we were determined, and we started our life with a full understanding of the difficulties we might encounter pursuing the options of our choice. The excellent reputation I enjoyed as an independent consultant enhanced the demand for my services in many countries and on many levels. I like to believe that my personality was a deciding factor in my success.

Before I close this chapter, I must say that I still have a soft spot for Amman and Jordan. Grace and I had friends and acquaintances who afforded us the luxury of opening their homes and their lives to us and allowing us to move into the inner circles of the respected Jordanian's homes.
Grace and I and a few friends visited some of the landmarks of Jordan before their names became familiar to the wider world. We visited Petra in 1956 with Hamad el-Farhan and Mohammad Touqan. They spent the night in a tent while Grace and I rested in one of the tombs carved out of the rock, and we were, after that, jokingly called “tomb mates.” The route to Petra was a desert road, and it took some twelve hours to get there by car from Amman. Petra then was pristine, with no tourists and no government policy to encourage or enhance tourism. Though we visited Petra many times later, that first visit was always vivid in our minds, and we probably saw it every time we visited as we had seen it that first time.