SS Exodus - Background

Background

After World War II, millions of Europeans were living under guard and behind barbed wire fences and without adequate medical care and other services in "displaced persons" camps within Germany and Austria. European Jews then began organizing an underground network known as the Brichah ("flight," in Hebrew), which moved thousands of Jews from the camps to ports on the Mediterranean Sea, so they could then be sent to Palestine by ship. This was part of what was known as Aliyah Bet or the "illegal immigration fleet," which were a series of attempts by European Jews to immigrate illegally to Palestine before and after World War II. Originally the European Jews arranged transport to Palestine themselves. Later, they requested and received financial and other support from sympathizers elsewhere in the world. The boats were largely staffed by volunteers from the United States, Canada and Latin America. Over 100,000 people tried to illegally immigrate to Palestine, as part of Aliyah Bet.

The British, who were then responsible for administering Palestine, vehemently opposed this kind of large-scale immigration. Displaced person camps run by American, French and Italian officials often turned a blind eye to the situation, with only British officials restricting movement in and out of their camps. In 1945, the British reaffirmed the pre-war policy restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine which had been put in place following the influx of a quarter of a million Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and had been a major cause of the Arab revolt of 1936–1939. The British then prepared a massive naval and military force to turn back the refugees. Over half of 142 voyages were stopped by British patrols, and most intercepted immigrants were sent to internment camps in Cyprus, the Atlit detention camp in Palestine, and to Mauritius. About 50,000 people ended up in camps, more than 1,600 drowned at sea, and only a few thousand actually entered Palestine.

The Exodus 1947 was the largest Aliyah Bet ship carrying the largest-ever number of illegal immigrants to Palestine and its name and story received a lot of international attention. The incident took place near the end of Aliyah Bet and towards the end of the British mandate, after which Britain withdrew its forces and the state of Israel was established. Historians say Exodus 1947 helped unify the Jewish community of Palestine and the Holocaust-survivor refugees in Europe as well as significantly deepening international sympathy for the plight of Holocaust survivors and rallying support for the idea of a Jewish state. One called the story of the Exodus 1947 a "spectacular publicity coup for the Zionists."