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Judith and the other uninjured settlers helped carry the wounded through the Egyptian  lines under  the cover  of darkness. Yad Mordechai lay  abandoned,  and  in the  morning  the  Egyptians occupied the place and burned it to the ground. But during those five days of resistance Tel Aviv was saved  from being overrun. The stubborn defense  at Yad  Mordechai gave  Tel Aviv  time to bring in  reinforcements and firm  up the defensive line  on the road between the city and Gaza.

On June 11,  a truce  called by  the United  Nations went  into effect and lasted  until July  9. In nearly one  month of  war Israel had lost  900 soldiers  and 300  civilians. Between the first truce and a second one was ten days of fighting.

The IDF captured Nazareth, the  home town of Yeshua,  which had grown much bigger  than the  original five  hundred souls. The second truce lasted until October 15, and was followed with one solid week of fighting against Egypt. On the first day of that week Israeli warplanes bombed the Egyptian air base at El Arish on the Mediterranean coastline  of Sinai,  and cut  the railway from El Arish to Rafa.

After the third cease-fire took effect on October 22, Judith and the Polish settlers who had  taken her  in moved back  into the ruins of Yad  Mordechai and  began to  rebuild the  town. There would be  a sharp  bout  of  renewed  fighting in  the  winter, followed by a fourth and final cease fire, but Judith judged the continued existence of her new nation was no longer in doubt.

On her collective  farm after  the War  of Independence  Judith Margolies immersed herself in honest toil cultivating the fields and garden crops and poultry. At least once a month she helped defend the  settlement from  gunmen  who  infiltrated from  the nearby Gaza Strip to kill Jews simply for being Jews.

Several times  a  year  these attacks  on  Yad  Mordechai  were followed up by fierce IDF reprisal raids. Throughout 1950 Judith was frequently mobilized as a  sergeant in the IDF  reserves to help carry out these counterattacks. The military pay was small but so were her wants. She turned half of it over to the kibbutz out of gratitude for taking her in.

The children of the settlement  ate and slept apart  from their parents. Judith helped to educate them, even  while she herself was learning from a Polish tutor to speak and read Hebrew.

One day during the following year someone who appeared  to be a very tall boy of indeterminate race arrived at Yad Mordechai.