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.

If you ask Rutherford resident Nathan Nadler what he has accomplished in his 81 years, he will tell you, proudly, that he "raised two sons and helped found the State of Israel."

As a crew member on the Exodus — the ill-fated ship that brought some 4,500 Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1947 only to have the British navy seize the passengers and send them back to Germany — Nadler, then 20, participated in what today is considered an almost legendary piece of Jewish history.

Being in Israel in the 21st century, one often wonders what Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, would think of this modern-day state if he could see it.

The malarial swamps of prestate Palestine have been replaced by rapidly growing cities with glitzy shopping districts, carefully landscaped parks, and six-lane highways that run between high-rise office buildings and limestone apartment complexes.

The agricultural pioneers, the halutzim who struggled to sow the seeds of the new nation-state armed with triangular hats and simples hoes, have been succeeded by sunglasses-wearing settlers in the west bank’s Jordan Valley who have installed high-tech drip-irrigation devices to hydrate hybrid tomatoes for export to markets in London, Paris, and New York.

Through the eyes of a U.S. Jewish student in 1948

SAN FRANCISCO – It’s about 6 p.m. on May 14, 1948, and a friend and I are leaving a UNESCO conference here to catch the train back to Berkeley.

From the corner of our eyes we catch the newspaper headlines: "U.S. RECOGNIZES ISRAEL" screams the Examiner, in type usually reserved for the latest axe murder or Hollywood divorce.

Israel. We slowly formulate the name on our tongue, roll it around, test its flavor for the first time.

We buy up every paper on the newsstand — the San Francisco Chronicle, the News, the Examiner, and the Oakland Tribune — an expenditure that would become a daily habit.