Tag #127755 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

In Palestine, once the European war had ended, the problem of receiving the refugees – especially the Holocaust survivors – was becoming more and more acute. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who were refugees or had been liberated from camps or discharged from the allied armies were in search of a shelter. ‘Jidanii to Palestine!’ Generations of children had been born and raised with this slogan in many corners of Europe. This was not typical for Bucharest only, as I had imagined in my childhood. But the English wouldn’t have them in Palestine. The way they saw it in 1945, nothing had happened since 1939, when they had issued the famous ‘white book’ with the ‘numerus clausus,’ limiting the number of the Jews in Palestine to 500,000 and not one single more! The Jewish dissatisfaction with the ‘closed borders’ began to be expressed in ways that were more radical ways than verbal or written protests. An anti-English campaign was born. In a short while, there were overt acts of violence – more or less organized. Of course, the police didn’t just wait. There were house searches, arrests, and ‘emergency statuses.’

Like any other rational being, I was horrified by the atrocities that kept being revealed about the systematic extermination of six million Jews whose only fault had been their ethnic origin. I understood the urgent need of the refugees to find a home in Palestine.