An Unlikely Heroine

"Esther Cailingold, the daughter of an enlightened Orthodox family, was born in the East End of London, brought up in Stamford Hill and educated at North London Collegiate and at Nottingham and London Universities." "When she was sent to live with a non-Jewish family in Luton at the beginning of the war, she remained intensely involved in her Judaism and religious Zionism." "She volunteered at 20 to work with child survivors of the concentration camps who had been brought to Britain for rehabilitation and it was a natural step for her, with her first-class teaching credentials, to apply for and be appointed to a teaching post in a girls school in Jerusalem one year later." "She arrived there in November 1946 and her subsequent letters to her family, every one of them kept by her mother, are used in the book to trace her progress from raw newcomer, unfamiliar with the language and customs of the country, to a fighter in the Haganah underground army and a soldier in the Israel Defence Forces, in which she lost her life in the siege of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem."--Jacket.