Hebron enters the narrative through the proposed redemption of Alkalai House, a Jewish property in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City that had been seized during the 1929 Palestine riots. The planned purchase makes the city more than a destination for a family’s appeal: it becomes the point at which private money, religious duty, and competing visions of territorial change meet. The effort is framed as restitution through a market transaction, even as the language around it gives that transaction sacred and political weight.

Alkalai House and the Claim of Restitution

A letter to Alexander A. Gideon describes the Sommo family’s financial needs and adds a separate request for $95,000 toward buying and renovating Alkalai House. The property is identified as Jewish property seized by force during the 1929 Palestine riots. The proposed response is explicitly nonviolent: the family says it is attempting to repossess the house by paying its full market price. In this account, the location’s history of dispossession is the reason for the purchase, while a negotiated sale is presented as the means of redress.

The letter places the Hebron project alongside immediate domestic needs, including mortgage payments, an additional room, and provision for the children. Its inclusion makes the appeal larger than a request for household support: money for Alkalai House is presented as a distinct contribution to recovering property. The different purposes are joined in one request to Gideon, linking family dependence on his wealth to a territorial cause.

Funding, Repentance, and Family Stakes

After Gideon sent $107,000 in Israeli pounds in three unequal installments, Michel Sommo inferred that the proposed contribution to Alkalai House had been abandoned. He then renewed the appeal, requesting $120,000 for what he called a sacred cause. He connected Gideon’s possible repentance and donation to the hope that Boaz would return safely, presenting the family’s crisis and the Hebron project within a religious account of wrongdoing, punishment, and divine compassion. He also imagined that Gideon’s son might one day live in the house the family hoped to redeem, making the proposed property both a hoped-for future home and a means of balancing past wrongs.

The appeal does not establish that Alkalai House was bought or renovated. Instead, it shows how the project remained an active claim on Gideon’s resources even after a substantial payment had arrived. Hebron’s significance in these letters therefore rests partly on what the requested contribution is meant to accomplish and partly on the uncertainty of whether the money will be given.

Hebron Within a Wider Political Program

Michel Sommo’s interest in recovering property in Hebron appears alongside a broader political record. A dossier describes his right-leaning views, his intermittent membership in the Herut Bloc and the National Religious Party, and his later activity in the Greater Israel Movement and the Jewish Fellowship Movement. The same account says that the latter group became involved in attempts to buy land illegally from Arabs around Bethlehem after the Yom Kippur War. It also reports that Sommo had publicly urged the Arab population to leave the country and occupied territories peacefully, with financial inducements. These activities place the Hebron appeal within a political setting in which land purchase and population movement were debated as connected means of changing control of territory.

In a letter to Manfred Zakheim, Sommo presents the Jewish Fellowship Movement’s proposal as paying Arabs in full for their land and property and providing a one-way ticket at the movement’s expense. Zakheim responds by questioning the financial feasibility of paying two million people and argues that the projected cost could exceed the value of the state. His reply distinguishes the movement’s stated method of payment from the scale of its proposed population transfer. The exchange makes clear that financial compensation does not resolve the deeper political question of who should remain on, or leave, the land.

Property Deals and Territorial Exchange

Zakheim’s correspondence also connects Sommo’s political activity to negotiations beyond Hebron. He alleges that a Paris trip financed by a supporter involved discussions with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse about land west of Bethlehem. According to Zakheim, the order would consider exchanging those fields for a building and substantial grounds inside the pre-1967 borders. He further claims that the supporter helped arrange the restoration of Sommo’s French nationality to provide a legal basis for a transaction in which the supporter did not wish to appear formally involved. These statements are allegations made in correspondence, not confirmation that an exchange took place.

Hebron is not described as part of that proposed Bethlehem transaction, but the comparison illuminates the wider logic applied to land in the letters: property may be recovered through purchase, shifted through exchange, or connected to financial and legal arrangements. In a later account of Sommo’s business life, Ilana observes that he is being taught about building plots, grants, Jordanian property laws, loans, and infrastructure costs, while he anticipates that Gideon’s money or property may become available to the family. The Hebron project thus belongs to a narrative in which territorial claims are pursued through both sacred language and practical dealings in property and finance.

Narrative Significance

The account of Hebron holds two registers together without making them identical. Alkalai House is described as a particular property with a specific history of seizure, and its proposed recovery is expressly tied to paying market price. At the same time, the appeal makes a donation toward the house part of repentance and religious duty, while the surrounding political correspondence links land transactions to larger projects of territorial expansion and population movement. Hebron consequently concentrates the tension between restitution as a claim about one dispossessed property and redemption as a political program extending across a much wider landscape.