Post 10: A Highlight We Nearly Missed

One of the immigration ships you can board at the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum in Haifa, Israel.

We almost passed it.

Driving along the Mediterranean coast in Haifa, we spotted submarines and ships behind a fence. Mike loves history so we decided to check it out.

We discovered the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum which tells the story of Aliyah Bet, the immigration of Jews, desperate to escape persecution and the Holocaust who tried to reach Palestine aboard overcrowded, unsafe ships.

I knew this history. My father has told me how he and his family fled oppression in Romania, heading to Palestine by ship in 1947. When they arrived, British soldiers forced them off the ship, took what little they owned, put them on a British ship and sailed them to the island of Cyprus where they were imprisoned behind barbed wire in internment camps. My dad was 11 years old.

He describes the year in that camp as miserable. Families lived in flimsy tents with nothing to do, no school, not even a change of clothes because the British had taken whatever they had. Summer brought unbearable heat; winter brought cold, rain, and mud.

Many refugees never made it to Palestine or Cyprus. The Struma, a decrepit barge carrying nearly 770 Jewish refugees from Romania was turned away by Turkey and left adrift without power for two months. It was mistakenly torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine, leaving only one survivor. The Mefkure, a small motor schooner carrying 300+ Jewish refugees from Romania was fired upon and sunk in the Black Sea by a German or Russian submarine in 1944. More than 300 passengers drowned. Only five survived.

We boarded a ship from that era and saw the cramped spaces where refugees were packed together. I tried to imagine what it was like for my dad, a child, being on such a ship, not knowing his fate. He was one of the lucky ones.

Inside one of the Jewish immigration ships at the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum in Israel.

A piece of the ship, Geulah, my father and family were on as refugees fleeing persecution in Romania.