David Ben-Gurion standing on a museum balcony in Tel Aviv reading the new state’s Declaration of Independence, the U.N. vote tally broadcast by loud speakers over a square in Jerusalem filled with thousands of people, shouts of joy, tears of happiness, dancing the hora and singing of Hatikva — these are images many have of the birth of Israel almost 60 years ago.

For Esther Dorbian, who was 6 years old in Herzliya at the time, Nov. 29, 1947 was a brief evening of elation following the U.N. vote for partition. It was a respite between desperate poverty and constant fear and terror with years of suffering, pain, and loss — a far cry from what she sees on her trips back to the thriving tourist resort built from the village where she was born.

In a recent interview at her Fair Lawn boutique Esther’s Fashions, Dorbian recalled, often tearfully, what it was like to live in Israel during those first years.

The second oldest of three sisters — the youngest, Miriam, was an infant at the time — Dorbian remembers her father, Eliaho Yoselewiz, waking her and her older sister, Hannah, in the middle of the night, saying, "‘Kids, you’ve got to come down.’ With our pajamas we went downstairs. Everyone was dancing in the street until early morning, and we had a country."

That country had been built stone by stone and brick by brick out of desert wasteland by pioneers seeking a place to live where they would not be cursed for being Jews. One of those was Yoselewiz.

"My father," Dorbian said, "was a big-shot Zionist. He and my mother were the first settlers in Herzliya. My father came from Dvinsk, Latvia, in 1928. He went straight to Kibbutz Shefayim, and they were working day and night.

Four years later, in 1932, Esther’s mother, Mina, an orphan whose parents died when she was an infant, came there from Liepaja, Latvia. "As a matter of fate, my husband’s grandmother took care of my mother," Dorbian said, adding, "My mother, trained as a seamstress, used to tell me when she came [to the kibbutz], there was nothing there but stones and dirt. If you worked overtime, like 20 hours, you got the end of a herring." She told Dorbian that there was so little food that they’d give the little extra to a hard worker or a pregnant woman.

Expecting their first child and thinking life would be easier in town, the couple moved to Herzliya, to two rooms in a 12-family house. But life wasn’t so easy there either, though it was relatively peaceful.

An Arab couple would deliver grocery orders for Shabbat every Wednesday. The man brought chicken and eggs and the woman brought dairy products.

Dorbian’s mother worked as a dressmaker, was a supervisor of the Magen David Adom, and did whatever else she could to make ends meet including helping her husband, a builder, construct what turned into the main street in Herzliya.

Because of their mother’s skills and ingenuity using remnants, the three girls were always dressed in the "latest fashions," Dorbian recalled.

"She always used to say, ‘You don’t bring the poorness into the house.’ The house was always beautiful. There were plenty of fruit trees in the back yard and my mother would use the fruit to bake. There was always cake in the house."

When the sun set there were almost nightly political meetings in their home. "My father was president of the Workman’s Circle. My father used to tell my mother, ‘Make the cake, the pie, we have a meeting today, we have a meeting tomorrow.’ The house was always filled with people and with politics."

But crowded and busy as it was, this was preferable to when Dorbian’s parents were out, when the British troops decided to "patrol" the streets of Herzliya, looking for a good time.

"We called them red poppies for the red hats they wore," she said. The girls were warned by their parents not to leave the apartment, but huddling together, scared stiff, they could see from the balcony what happened to any young girl who got caught by the roaming soldiers.

Israel declared its Independence on May 14, 1948. On May 15 it was invaded, and what Dorbian remembered as a hard but relatively peaceful life abruptly ended. The Arab couple disappeared and food became so scare that that someone in her family would have to stand on line 24 hours just to get five eggs for the five people in the household.

"My father took the night shift, he’d stand for hours, come home at 5 a.m., take a shower, and go to work. My mother used to leave us something to eat and then go stand in line from 6 a.m. My older sister took care of the baby until my mother came home. Then my older sister would stand in line and after school I would stand in line."

Dorbian had the sweet tooth in the family, and one day her father heard that there was some halvah available. He stood in line for 12 hours to get a 100-gram stick of the confection for her. "He was the nicest man," she said. "He never asked for anything."

But then came the nights when her father was not at home or on line waiting for food. Those were the nights when he joined with the other men, members of the Haganah, to fight the invading Arab armies.

Dorbian’s mother would be working to help with the wounded with the Magen David Adom and Esther and the three girls would huddle in the bunkers in fear as the city was shelled and bombs were falling.

"The men would come and ask for my father to help," she said. "They didn’t have any war materials and so he’d search through the kitchen. He took my mother’s kitchen broom to use as a weapon, and that’s how they went to war to fight the Arabs."

Dorbian’s father and several of his friends would go to Sydney Alley on the shore and signaled ships from Cyprus clandestinely bringing refugees to Israel.

This went on for a while until the British found out, Dorbian said. "They caught three of the men and they hanged them."

It was then that her father and a few other people ran from Herzliya to Haifa, hiding during the day from the British troops. Once they got to Haifa, her father and another man decided to hide in a water tower.

"As they climbed down, my father fell and broke his leg and hip." He was trapped by his injuries in several feet of water.

For several days no one knew where he was, and her mother started to believe that he had been killed. Then some other members of the Haganah found him. They could do little for him because if any of them were caught they’d be hanged but they were able to get food and some blankets to him as they waited for the British to stop searching, which took two weeks.

Then they took him to Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva. "He spent many months in the hospital," Dorbian said, "and when he was brought home he was still wearing a cast from his waist down to his leg." He was never able to fully recover.

After the war, in gratitude to Dorbian’s father for all he had done, the people of Herzliya gave the family a plot of land on which to build a house and her father was given a job providing kerosene.

But the scars of war remained. Dorbian’s father died in 1954, at the age of 49, just seven years after sustaining his injuries.

Even when she was a teenage bride, when she and her husband, Hershel, came to the United States, hearing an engine backfire would set her on edge, and she would look for the nearest shelter.

"It was many, many years till my nerves calmed down."

Things are different now, said Dorbian. She owns her own business. She and her husband have two children and two grandchildren. And yet, every chance they get, they go back to Israel, to Herzliya, to visit the little house that was given to her family for her father’s part in birthing a nation.