Underground organized migration 1944-48
Bricha
(
Hebrew
:
?????
,
romanized
:
bri?a
,
lit.
'escape, flight'), also called the
Bericha Movement
,
[1]
was the underground organized effort that helped
Jewish
Holocaust survivors
escape
Europe
post-
World War II
to the
British Mandate for Palestine
in violation of the
White Paper of 1939
. It ended when Israel declared independence and annulled the White Paper.
After
American
, British and Soviet armed forces liberated the camps, survivors suffered from disease, severe
malnutrition
and
depression
. Many were
displaced persons
who were unable to return to their homes from before the war. In some areas, the survivors continued to face antisemitic violence; during the 1946
Kielce pogrom
in Poland 42 survivors were killed when their communal home was attacked by a mob. For many of the survivors, Europe had become "a vast cemetery of the Jewish people" and "they wanted to start life over and build a new national Jewish homeland in
Eretz Yisrael
".
[1]
[2]
The movement of
Jewish refugees
from the
Displaced Persons camp
in which they were held (one million persons classified as "not repatriable" remained in
Germany
and
Austria
) to Palestine was illegal on both sides, as Jews were not officially allowed to leave the countries of Central and Eastern Europe by the
Soviet Union
and its allies, nor were they permitted to settle in Palestine by the British.
In late 1944 and early 1945, Jewish members of the Polish resistance met up with
Warsaw ghetto
fighters in
Lubin
to form Bricha as a way of escaping the
antisemitism
of Europe, where they were convinced that another Holocaust would occur. After the liberation of
Rivne
, Eliezer and Abraham Lidovsky, and Pasha (Isaac) Rajchmann, concluded that there was no future for Jews in
Poland
. They formed an artisan guild to cover their covert activities, and they sent a group to
Cern?u?i
,
Romania
to seek out escape routes. It was only after
Abba Kovner
, and his group from
Vilna
joined, along with
Yitzhak Zuckerman
, who had headed the
Jewish Combat Organization
of the Polish uprising of August 1944, in January 1945, that the organization took shape. They soon joined up with a similar effort led by the
Jewish Brigade
and eventually the
Haganah
(the Jewish clandestine army in Palestine).
Officers of the Jewish Brigade of the British army assumed control of the operation, along with operatives from the Haganah who hoped to smuggle as many displaced persons as possible into Palestine through Italy. The
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
funded the operation.
Almost immediately, the explicitly
Zionist
Berihah became the main conduit for Jews coming to Palestine, especially from the displaced person camps, and it initially had to turn people away due to too much demand.
After the
Kielce pogrom
of 1946, the flight of Jews accelerated, with 100,000 Jews leaving Eastern Europe in three months. Operating in
Poland
,
Romania
,
Hungary
,
Czechoslovakia
, and
Yugoslavia
through 1948, Berihah transferred approximately 250,000 survivors into Austria, Germany, and
Italy
through elaborate smuggling networks. Using ships supplied at great cost
[
citation needed
]
by the
Mossad Le'aliyah Bet
, then the immigration arm of the
Yishuv
, these refugees were then smuggled through the British cordon around Palestine. Bricha was part of the larger operation known as
Aliyah Bet
, and ended with the establishment of
Israel
, after which
immigration
to the Jewish state was legal, although
emigration
was still sometimes prohibited, as happened in both the
Eastern Bloc
and Arab countries (see for example
refusenik
).
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
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By territory
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Overview
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Response
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- Early elements
- Aftermath
- Remembrance
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