Zerah Warhaftig (left) and Meir Wilner (right) nostalgicly look at the Declaration of Independence that they both signed 50 years ago. (Debbie Taylor-Zimmelman)

(April 30) -The two surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence have radically different visions of what kind of country Israel should be.

It is not surprising that when Zerah Warhaftig, representing Hapoel Mizrahi, the precursor of the National Religious Party, signed the Declaration of Independence, what came to mind was a character from the Bible.

"I felt like Joshua Bin-Nun, coming to Israel to establish the Jewish state," he says, sitting in his Jerusalem apartment. "In my mind when I signed it, I felt the Bible, the First Beit Hamikdash [Temple] the Second Beit Hamikdash. I felt all this, and I felt that I'm going to renew the Jewish state, after the 2,000 years of the Diaspora.

"I was educated from childhood to yearn for the re-establishment of the state. I dreamed of the Declaration of Independence already as a child in Poland and when I studied at the university in Warsaw. I also sort of dreamed about it, that I'd be privileged to be one of the signers; I had a vision, a dream that I would do it."

Warhaftig was 42 at the time, the fourth youngest among the 37 signers.

His had been a particularly long road to the signing. Born on February 2, 1906 in Volkovysk, Byelorussia, Warhaftig was chairman of the head office of Mizrahi Pioneers [Hehalutz Hamizrahi] in Warsaw, and vice chairman of the Palestine Committee. It was in those capacities that he attended the Zionist Congress in Geneva at the end of August 1939.

"When I heard war was going to break out, I ran back to Poland. On September 7, the last day before Warsaw was surrounded by Germans, we left, going by foot for 11 days."

He eventually reached Kovno, in Lithuania, where he found 17,000 to 18,000 Jewish Polish refugees. Warhaftig, as head of the Palestine Committee for Polish Refugees, tried every way to get them out.

He came up with a plan, which he brought to Sempo Sugihara, the Japanese consul-general in Kovno: give the Jewish refugees transit visas to go to the Dutch-controlled island of Curacao in the Caribbean, where no entry permit was necessary. Russia, in turn, would grant trans-Russia transit visas to those holding the Curacao visas. Warhaftig's scheme worked: Sugihara ignored Japan's veto, and saved at least 1,600 Jewish refugees. Sugihara was named a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1984.

Warhaftig stayed in Kovno for a year, "but when the authorities came to look for me, then I also fled... to Japan." There he helped 400 refugees get to Israel, and later helped another 1,800, including 300 from the Mir Yeshiva, to reach Shanghai.

Late summer of 1941 found him in New York, where he stayed until 1947, trying to rally the Jews there - as well as in the displaced persons' camps in Europe - to make aliya.

At the beginning of 1947, Warhaftig set sail for Palestine with his two oldest children. His wife and two youngest came a few months later, and the family set up house in Jerusalem.

He was elected to the National Council, and worked in Tel Aviv, where he helped prepare legislation for the soon-to-be born Jewish state.

AS HE looks back now on the state's 50 years, Warhaftig feels both pride and disappointment in what's taken place.

"As far as achievements I'm not disappointed, but as far as morally, spiritually, I'm disappointed. We should have been more spiritual.

"But achievements as a state? I can be only proud. To grow from 600,000 to five million in these 50 years... to have agriculture that so many countries come to learn - Jews in the Diaspora couldn't get land for agriculture, it was forbidden; then to make an industry that exports to developed countries, even to America and Europe?

"Education - so many universities and colleges; to having such a center of Torah, larger than any time in the past 200 years; these are very great achievements, these are miraculous achievements."

Warhaftig served the state well - as a member of Knesset from 1949-1981, and minister of religious affairs from 1961-1970. But he can only be disappointed over what he had worked hardest for since his youth: getting Jews to make aliya. He knew the numbers could have been much higher, but reconciled himself to the trickle of immigrants from America after the war.

"When I lived there, I knew, and I wrote about it, that [we could get] half a million Jews from America, but I knew that I would be happy if 20,000 a year would come; and from America even 10,000 didn't come. People who have it materially good are not going to leave. Only the religious came from America - only those Jews who are spiritually bound to Israel. Not rapidly, and not in masses, but only those came. When I came in 1947, in my boat were maybe 20 American Jews, young boys from Hapoel Mizrahi who came as olim."

For Warhaftig personally, the highlight of his life was the signing of the Declaration. "Yes, you can say that," he says, after a pause. "Yes, of course it was my highlight." A longer pause. "It's like a bar mitzva boy, the feeling a young boy has as a highlight of his life. But even as a grown up - of course this is the highlight of my life."

Ironically, the moment he had dreamed of was delayed: Warhaftig, like 10 others, was stuck in besieged Jerusalem on May 14, unable to rendezvous with history taking place in Tel Aviv.

Instead, Warhaftig went to that day to the National Council offices, where he worked together with Izhak Ben-Zvi, later the second president of Israel.

"We two continued our work in the Council on the day of the signing," says Warhaftig, remembering, like everyone else in the Yishuv, exactly where he was at that historic hour. "We knew every move being taken - every few minutes we were calling Tel Aviv. We held the telephone between us, and got a report of every step."

Three weeks later, Ben-Gurion sent planes from Tel Aviv to fetch the stranded delegates.

"They were propeller planes, with an open cockpit," recalls Warhaftig, still visibly amazed that he survived such a venture. "There were two seats - it was me and Moshe Kol. We were tied by ropes to the seats so as not to fall out.

"In Tel Aviv, we went from the plane immediately to the office of Ben-Gurion, still with my pekele [bag] on my back. I came in, and Ben-Gurion came out of his room and gave me the Declaration of Independence, and a special pen. And he just said, 'Sign it!' "

Warhaftig said the group of signers understood how they had bridged wide political differences to make history. He doesn't want to talk about the personality clashes within the group - "I'm not going to talk about others" - saying only that he was friendly with all 37, the secular, the kibbutznikim and even the communist, Meir Wilner.

"These 36 people felt a minimum kind of brotherhood... the Declaration of Independence was signed by all the members of the National Council - and so represents many parties, and political differences, from Left to Right - and it is the only constitutional document in Israel that was signed by all of them. The only time. And also the content of the Declaration of Independence refers to all Israel, and that it is a continuance of the whole Jewish state - and all of us signed. Even then, it was a consensus that this declaration was a very precious one, maybe the only document of Jewish unity in all the 50 years."

Warhaftig, who attributes his longevity to genes - his father was 92 when he died, and his grandfather over 100 - knows he'll best be remembered as one of the 37 signers. But that's not how he wants his 25 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren to remember him.

"I'm trying [to act] so that my children should remember me as a Jew who fulfilled his duty, as a good Jew and a good man. That's all."

One Man's Manifesto

Meir Wilner is a throwback to an earlier age, a hard-core communist who still preaches the manifesto, even though he has outlived the mother party itself. He has also outlived all but one of the signers of Israel's Declaration of Independence, and still defiantly does not call himself a Zionist.

Born Ber Kovner in Vilna in 1918, Wilner was an active member and one of the leaders of the left-wing Hashomer Hatza'ir movement, along with his second cousin, Abba Kovner, who later became famous as the leader of the underground in the Vilna Ghetto.

After attending hebrew school, Wilner's family wanted him to go to the US to study in a university.

"Many people have asked me, 'Why did you go to Palestine and not to the US, where you had family, including my aunt and uncle on my father's side?' Everyone said, 'Go to them, in Palestine you have nobody.' But a friendand I came to the same conclusion: we'll go to Palestine, for two reasons.

"First because we knew Hebrew, and didn't know English; and secondly, in Hashomer Hatza'ir they told us that in Palestine everything was different. So we went to Palestine, thinking that if things didn't work out, we could come home."

He arrived in 1938 and immediately enrolled at the Hebrew University. What he saw led him to become a communist.

"We saw life in Palestine, how the workers were treated, and how the Arabs were treated, so we said: We'll try to go back to Vilna. But then the Nazis occupied our town, and I couldn't go back to the family. So we decided that we'd stay, although what we'd wanted to escape in Vilna we found here: There, hatred was directed against Jews, here against Arabs. The class struggles were the same, with homeless sleeping in the street."

In 1940 Wilner joined the illegal Palestine Communist Party, using the pen name "Meir Wilner" for the party paper he edited.

He went to New York in 1947 to cover the UN partition vote, a decision he supported wholeheartedly then and since: two states for two peoples.

"I hoped when the UN resolution was accepted that now we'd have a new independent life, and I thought there'd be peace between the two sides. But then the Arab leaders made their historic mistake... .

The main reason for the war in '48 was Great Britain; the hTeads of the armies in Egypt and Jordan were both British generals, trained in Britain. They'd taken Arab names, but were British military men... Britain was responsible for every drop of blood shed, they tried to cancel the UN resolution and to remain in Palestine. The Palestinians themselves didn't fight, apart from a very small group, but the British fought in the name of the Palestinians, with the aim of remaining in Palestine.

"But I was very happy. Not with the situation, for there was the danger of war and the danger for the very existence of Israel. I want to stress it; it wasn't only the danger for the security of victims here and there, but Israel's very existence was in danger."

IT WAS under this war cloud that Wilner and the other 36 members of the National Council (Mo'etzet Ha'am) came to sign the Declaration of Independence. Wilner, who represented the Communist Party on the council was, at 29, was the youngest signer in the room; the oldest was over 50 years his senior.

"No, I never felt out of place, possibly because of my history in Hashomer Hatza'ir - at 17, I was one of the leaders of 23 organizational branches in Poland, with over 600 members, so it was natural for me. I didn't feel that I was young and they weren't. I felt as one of them."

With the council's composition made up of 37 representatives from so many varying factions, both religious and political, it is not surprising that members of the group were hardly best friends.

"No, not at all! But not like now... you know, relations [then] were more human, more polite, despite the big differences in ideology - at that time relations between the Mapai and the Revisionists/Herut were tense, but not like now. At that time it was quite different - they were ideologues, but they believed in something.

Now, the majority of the Knesset doesn't believe in anything except themselves, money, business, their own seats... you know it's a tragedy, when I look at these people - not all, not all..."

Despite their unity for the cause back then, there was much disagreement when it came to framing the declaration. Wilner remembers proposing changes, but they were all rejected.

"I had no interest in the preamble, except for two clauses: one, that the State of Israel [was being established] without regard to religion, race or sex; and the second, that we were establishing the Jewish state, called Israel, according to the UN resolution of November 29, 1947. That was important for me, otherwise I wouldn't have signed."

The morning of the signing, while he was waiting at home with his wife for the afternoon ceremony, "my friends advised me to wear this or that kind of clothes, to take a tie or not to take a tie... but I advised myself, that because it is an historic moment, I should be properly dressed. And in the photos that are published, you can see three or four sitting without ties, from kibbutzim, and I, a communist, am wearing a tie. I believed that if I am signing, I have to behave accordingly."

His name as it appears on the parchment was not his usual signature. "Not only I, but some of us, we wrote every letter, so that it would be clear. You have some signatures that you can't read at all...I didn't think about it before, but as I was going up [to the podium] to sign, I said to myself 'I'll write every letter.' "

WHAT HE'S proud of today is that he not only held onto his Communist ideology all these years, but that his insistence all along that Israel recognize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was eventually accepted by the country.

"Personally I feel good, even happy, over what I proposed, that we were obliged to shake hands with Arafat. I met with him already in the '70s, he and other Palestinian leaders, in the socialist capitals of Europe."

His was a lone voice all those years, as he headed the Communist Party Knesset list until he retired in 1990, but he had the respect of his colleagues. He judged them the same way - for him, ideology alone was not enough to form alliances.

"Not all, but many of them in the Knesset disagreed with me, but they said: 'He's an honest man'... I'd rather hold a good opinion about someone from an opposing party who's an honest man, than about a Communist Party member who's not an honest man."

As for Israel's future with the Palestinians, Wilner is pessimistic.

"I was afraid at that time [1948], and in a different way I'm also afraid at this juncture of the state for our future... it's not important the number of atomic bombs [we have]. This was good in previous years. Now the situation has changed - the Scuds from Iraq, the failure of the war in Lebanon in 1982, the intifada, and the change in American interests - all these have drastically changed the equation, and make necessary a change in policy.

"I say this not as a communist, but as a man who lives in Israel, who has his family and his friends in this country; the danger today is without political party distinction.

"I was, and still am, for the existence and security of the state of Israel. I consider myself an Israeli patriot - but Zionism, and being Jewish, and the Jewish religion are quite different terms."

As he celebrates the 50th anniversary of the state, Wilner is reminded of the story of the 50th anniversary of US independence, on July 4, 1826, which found three of the 56 signers of it Declaration of Independence still alive. Two of them, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died that day.

"I plan on being alive long after the 50th," Wilner says, with a smile. nMeir Wilner is a throwback to an earlier age, a hard-core communist who still preaches the manifesto, even though he has outlived the mother party itself. He has also outlived all but one of the signers of Israel's Declaration of Independence, and still defiantly does not call himself a Zionist.

Born Ber Kovner in Vilna in 1918, Wilner was an active member and one of the leaders of the left-wing Hashomer Hatza'ir movement, along with his second cousin, Abba Kovner, who later became famous as the leader of the underground in the Vilna Ghetto.

After attending hebrew school, Wilner's family wanted him to go to the US to study in a university.

"Many people have asked me, 'Why did you go to Palestine and not to the US, where you had family, including my aunt and uncle on my father's side?' Everyone said, 'Go to them, in Palestine you have nobody.' But a friendand I came to the same conclusion: we'll go to Palestine, for two reasons.

"First because we knew Hebrew, and didn't know English; and secondly, in Hashomer Hatza'ir they told us that in Palestine everything was different. So we went to Palestine, thinking that if things didn't work out, we could come home."

He arrived in 1938 and immediately enrolled at the Hebrew University. What he saw led him to become a communist.

"We saw life in Palestine, how the workers were treated, and how the Arabs were treated, so we said: We'll try to go back to Vilna. But then the Nazis occupied our town, and I couldn't go back to the family. So we decided that we'd stay, although what we'd wanted to escape in Vilna we found here: There, hatred was directed against Jews, here against Arabs. The class struggles were the same, with homeless sleeping in the street."

In 1940 Wilner joined the illegal Palestine Communist Party, using the pen name "Meir Wilner" for the party paper he edited.

He went to New York in 1947 to cover the UN partition vote, a decision he supported wholeheartedly then and since: two states for two peoples.

"I hoped when the UN resolution was accepted that now we'd have a new independent life, and I thought there'd be peace between the two sides. But then the Arab leaders made their historic mistake... .

The main reason for the war in '48 was Great Britain; the heads of the armies in Egypt and Jordan were both British generals, trained in Britain. They'd taken Arab names, but were British military men... Britain was responsible for every drop of blood shed, they tried to cancel the UN resolution and to remain in Palestine. The Palestinians themselves didn't fight, apart from a very small group, but the British fought in the name of the Palestinians, with the aim of remaining in Palestine.

"But I was very happy. Not with the situation, for there was the danger of war and the danger for the very existence of Israel. I want to stress it; it wasn't only the danger for the security of victims here and there, but Israel's very existence was in danger."

IT WAS UNDER THIS war cloud that Wilner and the other 36 members of the National Council (Mo'etzet Ha'am) came to sign the Declaration of Independence. Wilner, who represented the Communist Party on the council was, at 29, was the youngest signer in the room; the oldest was over 50 years his senior.

"No, I never felt out of place, possibly because of my history in Hashomer Hatza'ir - at 17, I was one of the leaders of 23 organizational branches in Poland, with over 600 members, so it was natural for me. I didn't feel that I was young and they weren't. I felt as one of them."

With the council's composition made up of 37 representatives from so many varying factions, both religious and political, it is not surprising that members of the group were hardly best friends.

"No, not at all! But not like now... you know, relations [then] were more human, more polite, despite the big differences in ideology - at that time relations between the Mapai and the Revisionists/Herut were tense, but not like now. At that time it was quite different - they were ideologues, but they believed in something.

Now, the majority of the Knesset doesn't believe in anything except themselves, money, business, their own seats... you know it's a tragedy, when I look at these people - not all, not all..."

Despite their unity for the cause back then, there was much disagreement when it came to framing the declaration. Wilner remembers proposing changes, but they were all rejected.

"I had no interest in the preamble, except for two clauses: one, that the State of Israel [was being established] without regard to religion, race or sex; and the second, that we were establishing the Jewish state, called Israel, according to the UN resolution of November 29, 1947. That was important for me, otherwise I wouldn't have signed."

The morning of the signing, while he was waiting at home with his wife for the afternoon ceremony, "my friends advised me to wear this or that kind of clothes, to take a tie or not to take a tie... but I advised myself, that because it is an historic moment, I should be properly dressed. And in the photos that are published, you can see three or four sitting without ties, from kibbutzim, and I, a communist, am wearing a tie. I believed that if I am signing, I have to behave accordingly."

His name as it appears on the parchment was not his usual signature. "Not only I, but some of us, we wrote every letter, so that it would be clear. You have some signatures that you can't read at all...I didn't think about it before, but as I was going up [to the podium] to sign, I said to myself 'I'll write every letter.' "

WHAT HE'S PROUD OF today is that he not only held onto his Communist ideology all these years, but that his insistence all along that Israel recognize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was eventually accepted by the country.

"Personally I feel good, even happy, over what I proposed, that we were obliged to shake hands with Arafat. I met with him already in the '70s, he and other Palestinian leaders, in the socialist capitals of Europe."

His was a lone voice all those years, as he headed the Communist Party Knesset list until he retired in 1990, but he had the respect of his colleagues. He judged them the same way - for him, ideology alone was not enough to form alliances.

"Not all, but many of them in the Knesset disagreed with me, but they said: 'He's an honest man'... I'd rather hold a good opinion about someone from an opposing party who's an honest man, than about a Communist Party member who's not an honest man."

As for Israel's future with the Palestinians, Wilner is pessimistic.

"I was afraid at that time [1948], and in a different way I'm also afraid at this juncture of the state for our future... it's not important the number of atomic bombs [we have]. This was good in previous years. Now the situation has changed - the Scuds from Iraq, the failure of the war in Lebanon in 1982, the intifada, and the change in American interests - all these have drastically changed the equation, and make necessary a change in policy.

"I say this not as a communist, but as a man who lives in Israel, who has his family and his friends in this country; the danger today is without political party distinction.

"I was, and still am, for the existence and security of the state of Israel. I consider myself an Israeli patriot - but Zionism, and being Jewish, and the Jewish religion are quite different terms."

As he celebrates the 50th anniversary of the state, Wilner is reminded of the story of the 50th anniversary of US independence, on July 4, 1826, which found three of the 56 signers of it Declaration of Independence still alive. Two of them, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died that day.

"I plan on being alive long after the 50th," Wilner says, with a smile.