Aliyah Bet

Aliyah Bet (Hebrew: עלייה ב׳, "Aliyah 'B'" – bet being the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet) was the code name given to illegal immigration to Mandatory Palestine from 1920 to 1948 by Jews, mostly from Europe. In the 1930s and 1940s, many were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany or other Nazi-controlled countries.^[1][2] In the postwar years, they included Holocaust survivors.^[1][3][4] The later immigration to Palestine^[1] violated restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, but nonetheless the numbers dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948.^[3] With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new state in the midst of the 1948 Palestine war.^[3]

In modern-day Israel, it has also been called by the Hebrew term Ha'apala (Hebrew: הַעְפָּלָה, "Ascension"). Those who underwent Ha'apala are known as Ma'apilim. The Aliyah Bet is distinguished from the Aliyah Aleph ("Aliyah 'A'", Aleph being the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), which refers to the limited Jewish immigration permitted by British authorities during the same period. The name Aliya B is also shortened for Aliya Bilti Legalit (Hebrew: עלייה בלתי־לגאלית,lit. 'illegal immigration').

The Palmach, Immigration to Israel

History

Over 100,000 people attempted to illegally enter Mandatory Palestine. There were 142 voyages by 120 ships. Over half were stopped by the British patrols. The Royal Navy had eight ships on station in Palestine, and additional ships were tasked with tracking suspicious vessels heading for Palestine. Most of the intercepted immigrants were sent to internment camps in Cyprus: (Karaolos near Famagusta, Nicosia, Dhekelia, and Xylotymbou. Some were sent to the Atlit detention camp in Palestine, and some to Mauritius. The British held as many as 50,000 people in these camps (see Jews in British camps on Cyprus). Over 1,600 drowned at sea. Only a few thousand actually entered Palestine.

The pivotal event in Ha'apala program was the Exodus incident in 1947. Exodus was intercepted and boarded by a Royal Navy patrol. Despite significant resistance, passengers from Exodus were forcibly returned to Europe, and eventually put in camps in Germany. This was publicized, to the great embarrassment of the British government.

One account of Aliyah Bet is given by journalist I. F. Stone in his 1946 book Underground to Palestine, a first-person account of traveling from Europe with displaced persons attempting to reach the Jewish homeland.^[7]

More than 300 volunteers, most of them American World War II veterans, including Murray Greenfield (of the ship HaTikva), volunteered to sail ten ships ("The Jews' Secret Fleet") from the United States to Europe to load 35,000 survivors of the Holocaust (half of the illegal immigrants to Palestine), only to be deported to detention camps on Cyprus.

Before World War II

• n 1934, the first attempt to bring in a large number of illegal immigrants by sea happened when some 350 Jews sailed on the Vallos, a chartered ship, without the permission of the Jewish Agency, who feared illegal immigration would cause the British to restrict legal immigration. She arrived off the coast of Palestine on 25 August, and the passengers disembarked with the help of the Haganah, which received special permission to assist them.
• On 29 July 1939, the Colorado, flying under the Panamanian flag and carrying 378 Jewish refugees from Europe was intercepted by the British; the illegal immigrants were arrested and taken into Haifa.^[8]
• On 19 August, the Aghios Nicolaus, a Greek owned ship, transferred 840 immigrants to smaller vessels off the coast and sent them to shore.^[8]
• On 23 August, the Parita, carrying some 700 refugees on board, was deliberately beached at Tel Aviv by the passengers, the captain and crew having fled in a small boat.^[8]

SS Parita aground off Tel Aviv, August 1939

SS Patria sinking in Haifa port

During World War II

• On 2 September, the Tiger Hill, a 1,499-ton ship built in 1887, was intercepted and fired on by Royal Navy gunboats off Tel Aviv, killing two passengers (Dr Robert Schneider and Zvi Binder); the ship HMCS Belleville beached on the shore with 1,205 immigrants on board; the Tiger Hill had sailed from Constanţa, Romania, on 3 August 1939, with about 750 immigrants on board and had taken on board the passengers from the Frossoula, another illegal immigrant ship that was marooned in Lebanon.^{[8][9][10][11]}
• On 16 September, the Rudnitchan transferred 364 Jewish refugees into five lifeboats outside the territorial waters of the Mandate and sent them ashore as illegal immigrants.^[8]
• On 19 September, the Noemi Julia, sailing from Sulina in Romania with 1,130 Jewish refugees from Europe on board was intercepted in the Mediterranean by a British warship and forced to Haifa port; fearing that they would be sent back, the illegal immigrants engaged in passive resistance; the British authorities brought them ashore and held them in a detention camp; they were released a month later.^[8][11]
• On 24–25 November 1939, a large group of immigrants traveled by train from Vienna to Bratislava and about 2 weeks later sailed from there on the riverboat Uranus down the Danube. At the Romanian border, the three smaller riverboats to which they had been transferred on December 14 on entering Yugoslavia were intercepted and the immigrants were forced to disembark at the old fortress town of Kladovo.^[12] About 1,100 refugees were stranded there and came to be known as the Kladovo-Sabac Group. In May 1941, they were still in Yugoslavia, where 915 of them were caught and eventually killed by the invading Nazis. The 800 men were shot by Nazi soldiers in a farmer's field at Zasavica; after the war, the remains of the men were re-interred in a mass grave in the Belgrade Sephardi Cemetery. The women and children were imprisoned in the Sajmiste concentration camp where they perished from hunger, disease, exposure to the bitter cold winter weather, or gassed to death in a mobile gas truck.
• On 18 May 1940 the old Italian paddle steamer Pencho sailed from Bratislava, with 514 passengers, mostly Betar members. The Pencho sailed down the Danube to the Black Sea and into the Aegean Sea. On 9 October, her engines failed and she was wrecked off Mytilene, in the Italian-ruled Dodecanese Islands. The Italians rescued the passengers and took them to Rhodes. All but two were then placed in an internment camp at Ferramonti di Tarsia in southern Italy. They were held there until Allied forces liberated the area in September 1943.^[13]
• In October 1940, a large group of refugees were allowed to leave Vienna. The exodus was organized by Berthold Storfer, a Jewish businessman who worked under Adolf Eichmann. They took four river boats, Uranus, Schönbrunn, Helios, and Melk, down the Danube to Romania, where the Uranus passengers, about 1,000, boarded the Pacific, and sailed on 11 October 1940. They arrived at Haifa on 1 November, followed by the Milos a few days later. The British transferred all the immigrants to the French liner SS Patria to take them for internment to Mauritius. To stop the Patria from sailing, the Haganah smuggled a bomb aboard. The explosion holed her side, capsizing her and killing around 260 people. The British, by order of Winston Churchill, allowed the survivors to remain in Palestine.^[14]
• In December 1940 the Salvador, a small Bulgarian schooner formerly named Tsar Krum, left Burgas with 327 refugees. On December 12 the Salvador was wrecked in a violent storm in the Sea of Marmara, near Istanbul. 223 persons, including 66 children, lost their lives. The survivors were taken to Istanbul. 125 survivors were deported back to Bulgaria, and the remaining 70 left on the Darien (No. 66).^[15]
• On 11 December 1941, the Struma sailed from Constanţa carrying between 760 and 790 refugees. Three days later she reached Istanbul, where Turkey detained her and her passengers for 10 weeks. On 23 February 1942, Turkish authorities towed her back into the Black Sea and cast her adrift. Early the next day the Shch-213 torpedoed and sank her. Between 767 and 791 people were killed, and there was only one survivor.^[16]
• On 20 September 1942, the Europa sailed from Romania with 21 passengers. She was wrecked in the Bosphorus.
• On 21 April 1944, the Belasitza sailed from Romania with 273 passengers including 120 children, who went from Istanbul to Palestine by sealed train.
• On 5 August 1944, Bulbul, Mefküre and Morino sailed from Constanţa carrying about 1,000 refugees between them. In the night the Soviet submarine Shch-215 sank Mefküre by torpedo and shellfire, and then machine-gunned survivors in the water.^[17] Between 289 and 394 refugees plus seven crew were aboard Mefküre; only the crew and five refugees survived. Bulbul rescued the few survivors and took them to Turkey.^[1

SS Tiger Hill aground off Haifa, September 1, 1939