Blockade: The Story of Jewish Immigration to Palestine

By Gerald Ziedenberg M.A. history

Blockade is the heroic story of Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine from 1933 to 1948.It is a saga of blockades, shipwrecks, rescues, exiles, and imprisonment. The many ships and boats that participated in this struggle are detailed from the tiny sailboats to the ill fated Struma to the legendary Exodus 1947. The tale of Jewish Immigration to the British Mandate, from the rise of Adolf Hitler to the eventual declaration of independence of the state of Israel is told through numerous personal interviews, memoirs, testimonies, and archives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467044042

Gerald Ziedenberg M.A. history

Gerald Ziedenberg is a retired pharmacist who became a historian later in life. Following his retirement from retail pharmacy, he embarked on a fifteen-year journey that eventually led him to a master's degree in modern history. Along the way he earned a scholarship as the best part-time graduate history student. Gerald always had a strong connection with Israel, travelling and consulting there many times.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Maps and Photos

Chronology

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate

Chapter 2 Floating Coffins Part I: Jewish Immigration to Palestine

Chapter 3 The Floating Coffins Part II: The Voyages at Sea

Chapter 4 The Patria

Chapter 5 Journey to Mauritius

Chapter 6 Mauritius

Chapter 7 The Tehran Children

Chapter 8 The Struma

Chapter 9 The Sailboats

Chapter 10 Imprisonment—Atlit and Cyprus

Chapter 11 Legal Immigration

Chapter 12 The Jews Who Served in the British Army and Police of Palestine

Chapter 13 Liberation from Nazi Occupied Europe

Chapter 14 Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation

Conclusion

Epilogue

Bibliography

Glossary

COMMENTS

Blockade by Gerald Ziedenberg

Finally! Mr. Ziedenberg has compiled a comprehensive historic expose of British duplicity, anti-Semitism and brutality. At a time when Nazi Germany tried to expel its Jews, Britain closed off their escape to Palestine. The British BLOCKADE unwittingly contributed to the murder of millions. The tragedy does not end there, after the end of the war the BLOCKADE prevented hundreds of thousands of Holocaust Survivors, through horrendous means, and by brutal force from reaching the Promised Land. A must read.

Nathan Leipciger, Co-president, Canadian Holocaust Survivors and Descendents.

"Many of us have visited Israel at one time or another. Yet, few of us - in particular the young ones - are aware of the heroic sacrifices many of the early immigrants had to endure, in order to enter the Holy Land, during the period of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Gerald Ziedenberg, a pharmacist turned to a historian, very vividly and eloquently describes a collage of personal experiences of the early and dedicated Zionists, who dared to challenge the British soldiers and the murderous Arab tribes, who tried to stop the courageous immigrants to enter the Land of the Bible.

Yet, the large number of dedicated Zionists prevailed and eventually established the modern State of Israel.

Once one starts reading this fascinating and informative book, it is difficult to put it down. One becomes immersed in the many amazing personal stories and unbelievable challenges the early immigrants had to cope with to succeed. This book should be read by everyone, Jews and Christians alike."

Leslie Dan, a survivor of the Holocaust

I thought your book was excellent. It’s a wonderful tribute to the men and women who suffered through this terrible ordeal, and it’s so fortunate that they are still around to tell their stories. I learned so much while reading it. Books like this—labours of love that tell important stories that might otherwise be lost—are the reason I took up this profession. Despite the numerous works I’ve read about WWII, I never got the chance to read about the British blockade in such detail. It was truly eye opening, and a sobering reminder that the atrocities of the war were not as cut-and-dried as the winners would like us to imagine. I think it’s going to be a fantastic addition to the genre of Jewish history. I think the Jewish community and the Jewish community of Toronto (my town, as well, incidentally) will eagerly embrace it.

Editor

To my grandchildren Madison, Aaron, Gabriel, and Sari, so they will know the story of how brave people were able to found the State of Israel.

To those heroic people who participated in

this epic struggle.

Acknowledgements

To the typist, Annmarie Uleryk.

To my wife, Sheila, without whom nothing is possible.

To the numerous professors of history at the University of Toronto for their support, encouragement, and advice.

To the many interviewees listed at the end.

To the archivists at Leo Baeck Institute, Ontario Jewish Archives, the United States Holocaust Museum, and YIVO.

List of Maps and Photos

Maps

Photos

Chronology

Introduction

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. Hitler had a weltsthung, or worldview, that encompassed three salient points: the extermination of the Jewish people, the destruction of what he termed Judeo-Bolshevism, and the creation of lebensraum, or living room, to the east. These three ideas were intertwined and led to the eventual murder of millions of Jewish people.

On December 1917, General Edmund Allenby led the British army into Jerusalem. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in what was then Palestine by the British and the issuance of the Balfour declaration of November 2, 1917, led many Jews to aspire to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. There had been a continuous Jewish presence for two thousand years in Palestine, even after the defeat at the hands of the Romans in the Bar Kochba revolt of 135 CE. To many, Theodore Herzl, who had convened the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, seemed to be the spark of modern Zionism. Yet in modern Zionism there had been many precursors to Herzl, people like Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker. Fierce anti-Semitism had pervaded the Tsar’s Russian Empire and drove many Jews to seek refuge in Palestine. Following World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Balfour Declaration there seemed to be a coalescing of a desire by many Jews, but certainly not a majority, to establish a Jewish homeland in the territory known as Palestine.

In 1922 at San Remo, Italy, the British administration of Palestine was formalised as an official mandate by the League of Nations. During the remaining years of the 1920s, the British maintained their presence in Palestine. Justification for the continued presence of the British in Palestine was connected by many to the Balfour Declaration. The Jewish population in Palestine slowly rose during this period as intermittent immigration continued to Palestine, mainly from Eastern Europe.

In 1928, Adolf Hitler had received only 2.8 percent of the popular vote, but by the early 1930s Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party had become a political force in Germany. Jewish unease grew not only in Germany but in many surrounding European countries as well. By the 1930s, immigration to North America, Australia, and other places of refuge was severely restricted. In December 1932, just before the Nazis came to power, Albert Einstein, the world famous Nobel Laureate, left Germany to immigrate to America. In 1933, Otto Frank left Germany to seek a new life in Amsterdam, Holland. The ascension to power of Adolf Hitler motivated more than twenty-five past and future Nobel Prize winners to leave Nazi Germany, most of them of Jewish origins. For the lucky few the opportunity to immigrate to the new world was a godsend. But for most there was no such opportunity. There was only one place that was still open to immigration: Palestine. In particular for the Jews of Germany in the early 1930s, Palestine was still an attainable destination. Those Jews who came from Eastern Europe for the most part had no such opportunity. Many had neither the money nor the connections required to immigrate to Palestine. The Jews of Soviet Russia were locked in a vast prison camp.

The Intentionalist-Functionalist Debate

The intentionalist-functionalist debate is a long-standing and perplexing argument between two opposite camps of Holocaust scholars. It is not about Holocaust denial but rather whether Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts sought to destroy the Jewish race from the beginning of their rise to power or whether the Nazi extermination policies evolved as a matter of course. This debate is a key element in appreciating the failure of British Mandate authorities to allow Jews into Palestine. If, as many scholars believe, the Nazi policies evolved over time and in reaction to the policies of the Western Allies, then perhaps the admission of Jews to Palestine might have saved millions of lives.

In his 1923 book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler wrote about gassing Jews and made several comments about Jews as vermin. From this many conclude that the Nazi extermination policies were ordained from the beginning. The evidence for the Intentionalist side tends to be based on Nazi rhetoric. Warnings and speeches are not firm foundations for the facts.

In contrast, Nazi behaviour seems to indicate the opposite. Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, every policy seemed to focus on simply getting rid of the Jews, not murdering them. The eliminationist Jewish policies appear to have started only after the Nazi conquest of Poland in September 1939.

On August 7, 1933, barely six months after Chancellor Hitler had assumed power, leaders of the Zionist movement concluded a controversial pact with the Third Reich. The so-called transfer agreement sent some 60,000 German Jews and $100 million to the Yishuv in British Mandate Palestine in return for the cessation of the worldwide Jewish boycott against Nazi Germany. The willingness of the Nazi authorities to allow German Jews to escape death seems to endorse the functionalist aspect of the Nazi aims. While it is hard to get a firm estimate, more than 100,000 Jews of German, Austrian, and Czech descent were able to escape to British Mandate Palestine. These people were able to immigrate to Palestine because the British authorities allowed their entry and the Nazis in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia allowed them out. Once the Arab revolt started in 1936, the restrictions on legal immigration to the Mandate began and Jewish immigration became illegal and clandestine. Until September 1, 1939, and the beginning of the war, it is quite clear that Jews were allowed by the Nazi authorities to freely immigrate if there was somewhere for them to go.

Once Poland was conquered and the Germans had control of over 3,000,000 additional Jews, Nazi policies began to evolve. The Nazis began to cast a wide search for a place to put the millions of Jews. When France fell in 1940, thoughts were advanced about Madagascar (a French colonial possession) as a site for Jews. Other similar ideas were cancelled as the Germans did not have the shipping resources or the ability to transfer the millions of Jews under their control. It now became evident that the only way to deal with the Jews was simply to kill them. After all, no one wanted them or would let them into their countries. Beginning on June 22, 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, mass killings of Jews began for the first time. It was only because the Jews were denied entry and access to other places that the Germans decided on their genocidal policies that became known as the Holocaust.

This is the story of Jewish immigration to Palestine—from the rise of Adolf Hitler to the creation of the State of Israel. Using numerous personal interviews, memoirs, testimonies, and archival material, a heroic saga of the mostly illegal immigration to British Mandate Palestine will be told.

Chapter 1

The Balfour Declaration and

the British Mandate

Foreign Office,

November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur James Balfour

CHP1-Lord Balfour.jpg

Lord Balfour

On November 2, 1917, a cold drizzly day in London, England, a front-page advertisement appeared in The Times of London. This document, which became known as the Balfour Declaration, was an appeal to the Jewish people made by the British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour and other members of His Majesty’s Government. It was in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild, the preeminent leader of the British Jewish community. This was the height of World War I. Millions of British and French soldiers had already been killed, and The Times of London was filled with casualty lists and terrible accounts of the war. The Western allies were very hard pressed and in addition anxious about their Eastern ally, the Russian Empire.

In March 1917, moderate Russian socialists led by Alexander Kerensky had overthrown the court of the Romanovs. Kerensky made a fatal error in deciding to continue prosecution of the war and refused to make any meaningful land reforms. The mammoth Russian army slowly began to fall apart, as mass desertions and mutinies took place. Then the Germans sent Vladimir Ilyich Lenin via a sealed train from Switzerland to Finland to further agitate the situation. The Germans hoped that a further insurrection would topple the moderate Russian government and force it out of the war. Above all, the Germans wanted to avoid continuing to fight a two-front war, the French and British on the western front and Russia on the eastern front.

Britain knew that Russia in the fall of 1917 was in deep trouble. The Balfour Declaration was issued for several reasons, many of them connected to the war on the eastern front. Firstly, it was felt that the Jews had a profound influence on Russian affairs. After all some 25 percent of the upper Bolshevik leadership at that time was Jewish. British theorists reasoned that the Balfour Declaration would induce Russian Jewry to help the western allied cause. Secondly, there was a strong belief by Christian fundamentalists, including David Lloyd George, that the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine would herald the second coming of Christ. Thirdly, many sympathized with the Jewish people on purely humanitarian grounds and felt that a Jewish Homeland