Nadene Goldfoot
Tonight we Jews celebrate Passover, which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt after serving as slaves for 400 years and our 40 years of travail in the wilderness to get to our Promised Land of Canaan with Moses and Joshua.
We can also remember another Exodus in 1947. There was a ship by that name full of Jewish emigrants from France who left port on July 11, 1947 to go to the British mandated Palestine as they intended to live, after surviving the Holocaust, in the promised Jewish Homeland. It was virtually impossible for Jews to get into any other place at this time. Even to go to the USA, one had to have a sponsor to guarantee that they would not become in need of finanaces. Many countries required baptism certificates, something Jews wouldn't have. Palestine was the one and only hope in this great time of need.
They held no legal immigration certificates to Palestine. Red tape such as this was not prevelent in the death camps that they crawled out of. The British Royal Navy seized the ship and deported all its passengers back to the hate-filled Europe. The story of this ship was made into a book by Leon Uris published in 1958 and a movie that came out in 1960 with Paul Newman playing the main role of Ari Ben Canaan, as it was such a shock to our senses, no matter who we were.
The sad state of affairs for them was that Israel was declared a state May 14, 1948, after they were deported. It behooves me that the Navy couldn't have seen that this was about to happen. To return these people to a place they could have died in is unforgivable.
By 1942, London had received a detailed account that Auschwitz concentration camp alone had killed 4,000 Jews by shooting, 2,900 by gassing and 2,000 by phenol injection, 1,200 were beaten to death and 800 committed suicide by walking into the electric fence of the camp.
They continued to allow Arab immigrants enter the Jewish Homeland illegally. They entered and some were escorted to the frontier, which was hundreds of miles long and guarded by the Arab Legion! They then were told to go home. You can imagine that this was a joke. The British police didn't deport illegals and only those who were brought to their attention amounted to only about 546 in two months in 1942, perhaps done for show only. This was at a time that the British had halted Jewish immigration to their National Home.
That they did so amounts to a time of the "Jews' greatest peril in Europe and is the most cynical and craven chapter in the tragic record of the Holocaust". Double that atrocity by the British behavior of including new Arab immigrants and misrepresenting them as "millennia settled Palestinian Arabs" in order to get them to work in place of Jews they wouldn't allow in. This amounted to sealing the fate of millions of would-be Jewish immigrants in the extermination camps of Europe.
This happened as the White Paper of 1939 was defended and rationalized by the British. They claimed that Palestine had reached the outside population limit of absorbing Jewish workers, but at the same time had special legislation that allowed the administration to import thousands of "illegal" Arab workers to meet the job needs of the government who said that there weren't enough workers. So, while Jews were digging trenches in the death camps of the Holocaust to die in, their possible jobs and salvation went to nomadic Arabs in Palestine. Those Jews who managed to get to Palestine were denied entry.
This shocking piece of history shows that anti-semitism was active in Britain as well as in Germany, a country that has prided themselves with their outstanding organization skills. I must figure that none of this was accidental but on purpose. How quickly they disregarded their promises and friends. At this very time it was Palestinian Jews who were fighting for the Allies, and these very British knew at the time that extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe was going on. Yet, these very British continued to prevent Jewish immigration into Jewish-settled areas in Western Palestine on any basis. This was not only against all sanity but was as callous and inexplicable as can be.
The 2nd World War had started in 1939. Jews were on the ship, Struma, trying to get to Palestine but were hit by a Soviet submarine off the Turkish coast, where many ships stopped to refuel. 7,000 Danish Jews and 700 of their non-Jewish relatives got out and were sent to Malmo, Sweden, where it was safer. Ironic as it is, these are the Jews who have now been forced out of Malmo by Arab immigrants. This seems to highlight the fact that the best or only place for Jews was the Jewish Homeland.
Whatever Arab migrants managed to come into Palestine therefore was not all legal or according to hoyle. There would have been many more Jews there if the British had been allowing them to enter according to the original deal. The whole idea was that the Jews needed a place of their own in the midst of all the persecution they were going through in Europe as it was from the 1800's on and especially during the Nazi years. Honesty was not Britain's policy at the time in dealing with Jews.
Reference: From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, pages 376-381.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Exodus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(novel)
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005470
Tonight we Jews celebrate Passover, which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt after serving as slaves for 400 years and our 40 years of travail in the wilderness to get to our Promised Land of Canaan with Moses and Joshua.
We can also remember another Exodus in 1947. There was a ship by that name full of Jewish emigrants from France who left port on July 11, 1947 to go to the British mandated Palestine as they intended to live, after surviving the Holocaust, in the promised Jewish Homeland. It was virtually impossible for Jews to get into any other place at this time. Even to go to the USA, one had to have a sponsor to guarantee that they would not become in need of finanaces. Many countries required baptism certificates, something Jews wouldn't have. Palestine was the one and only hope in this great time of need.
They held no legal immigration certificates to Palestine. Red tape such as this was not prevelent in the death camps that they crawled out of. The British Royal Navy seized the ship and deported all its passengers back to the hate-filled Europe. The story of this ship was made into a book by Leon Uris published in 1958 and a movie that came out in 1960 with Paul Newman playing the main role of Ari Ben Canaan, as it was such a shock to our senses, no matter who we were.
The sad state of affairs for them was that Israel was declared a state May 14, 1948, after they were deported. It behooves me that the Navy couldn't have seen that this was about to happen. To return these people to a place they could have died in is unforgivable.
By 1942, London had received a detailed account that Auschwitz concentration camp alone had killed 4,000 Jews by shooting, 2,900 by gassing and 2,000 by phenol injection, 1,200 were beaten to death and 800 committed suicide by walking into the electric fence of the camp.
They continued to allow Arab immigrants enter the Jewish Homeland illegally. They entered and some were escorted to the frontier, which was hundreds of miles long and guarded by the Arab Legion! They then were told to go home. You can imagine that this was a joke. The British police didn't deport illegals and only those who were brought to their attention amounted to only about 546 in two months in 1942, perhaps done for show only. This was at a time that the British had halted Jewish immigration to their National Home.
That they did so amounts to a time of the "Jews' greatest peril in Europe and is the most cynical and craven chapter in the tragic record of the Holocaust". Double that atrocity by the British behavior of including new Arab immigrants and misrepresenting them as "millennia settled Palestinian Arabs" in order to get them to work in place of Jews they wouldn't allow in. This amounted to sealing the fate of millions of would-be Jewish immigrants in the extermination camps of Europe.
This happened as the White Paper of 1939 was defended and rationalized by the British. They claimed that Palestine had reached the outside population limit of absorbing Jewish workers, but at the same time had special legislation that allowed the administration to import thousands of "illegal" Arab workers to meet the job needs of the government who said that there weren't enough workers. So, while Jews were digging trenches in the death camps of the Holocaust to die in, their possible jobs and salvation went to nomadic Arabs in Palestine. Those Jews who managed to get to Palestine were denied entry.
This shocking piece of history shows that anti-semitism was active in Britain as well as in Germany, a country that has prided themselves with their outstanding organization skills. I must figure that none of this was accidental but on purpose. How quickly they disregarded their promises and friends. At this very time it was Palestinian Jews who were fighting for the Allies, and these very British knew at the time that extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe was going on. Yet, these very British continued to prevent Jewish immigration into Jewish-settled areas in Western Palestine on any basis. This was not only against all sanity but was as callous and inexplicable as can be.
The 2nd World War had started in 1939. Jews were on the ship, Struma, trying to get to Palestine but were hit by a Soviet submarine off the Turkish coast, where many ships stopped to refuel. 7,000 Danish Jews and 700 of their non-Jewish relatives got out and were sent to Malmo, Sweden, where it was safer. Ironic as it is, these are the Jews who have now been forced out of Malmo by Arab immigrants. This seems to highlight the fact that the best or only place for Jews was the Jewish Homeland.
Whatever Arab migrants managed to come into Palestine therefore was not all legal or according to hoyle. There would have been many more Jews there if the British had been allowing them to enter according to the original deal. The whole idea was that the Jews needed a place of their own in the midst of all the persecution they were going through in Europe as it was from the 1800's on and especially during the Nazi years. Honesty was not Britain's policy at the time in dealing with Jews.
Reference: From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, pages 376-381.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Exodus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(novel)
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005470
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