With words, not weapons

On April 18, 1912, a group of people posed for a formal photograph on an unremarkable patch of stony ground on Haifa's Mount Carmel.

The group is formally dressed, and the mood is serious. The men wear somber three-piece morning suits, topped by bowler hats or the straw fedoras and pith helmets favored by European gentlemen traveling in the East. Slightly more festive, the women are clad in white. Each clutches a large posy of flowers.

The photograph was taken to commemorate an important occasion: the cornerstone laying ceremony for the first Jewish technical college to be built in Ottoman Palestine - the Technion.

The picture is on display as part of "War of the Languages," an exhibition at the Haifa City Museum to commemorate the centenary of the cornerstone laying ceremony.

"For me, this is one of the most beautiful photographs in the whole exhibition," says Prof. Peretz Lavie, the Technion's current president.

"This sepia photograph is such an important piece of history."

Among those pictured are some of Eretz Yisrael's most influential figures, whom Chaim Weizmann dubbed "the Pilgrim Fathers of the New Palestine": Zionist activist and land purchaser Yehoshua Hankin, Russian Zionist leader Yehiel Chlenov, renowned physician Dr. Hillel Yaffe, Russian architect Joseph Barsky, Samuel Pewsner, the architect responsible for Haifa's new Jewish neighborhood of Hadar, engineer Tuvia Dunia.

Present also are several rather less illustrious personages who are noted merely by their professions and countries of origin: Kurdish well-digger, Yemenite stonecutter.

Their names might be lost to history, but the presence of these Jewish skilled laborers is of great significance in the Technion's story.

Also significant is the presence of Julius Loytved-Hardegg, the German vice-consul to Haifa and Damascus (and the only non-Jew in the photograph).

Days after the photograph was taken, all these people would become key players in a battle that engulfed Eretz Yisrael's Jewish community and reached as far as Europe and the US.

Dubbed the "War of the Languages," that battle helped decide the future course of the Jewish nation in Eretz Yisrael.

"It wasn't a war with bloodshed, with weapons and shooting," says Svetlana Reingold, the exhibition's curator.

"It was really an ideological battle. And its roots started in something very peaceful - a charitable organization."...