Everything about Berihah totally explained
» For the effort by the Yishuv to bring Jews into the Palestine (1930-1948), see Ha'apala
Berihah, or "Brichah" was the organized effort that helped
Jews escape post-
Holocaust Europe to
Palestine.
The movement of
Jewish refugees from the
DP camps in which they were held (one million persons classified as "not repatrifiable" 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 Berihah as a way of escaping the
anti-Semitism of Europe, where they were convinced that another Holocaust would occur. After the liberation of Rovno, 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 Cernauti Romania to seek out escape routes. It was only after
Abba Kovner, and his group from
Vilna joined, along with Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, who had headed the Jewish Fighters Unit 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.
Officers of the Jewish Brigade of the British army assumed control of the operation, along with operatives from the Hagana (the Jewish clandestine army in Palestine) 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 by the
Mossad Le'aliyah Bet, then the immigration arm of the
Yishuv, these refugees were then smuggled through the British cordon around Palestine. The effort came to be known as, 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.
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