31.01.2012                      07.Schwat. 5772

Geschichte:

Tracing refugees from Europe to Palestine

Australian researcher searches for passengers of a 1941 shipment of 384 Jews from Cyprus to Palestine.

A virtually unknown episode in prestate Israel grabbed Peter Keeda last year and won’t let go: the British government’s June 1941 shipment of 384 European Jews from Cyprus to Palestine. They and 39 others were transported six months later to what are now Malawi and Tanzania in East Africa.
The travelers were refugees who had fled the Nazis for Cyprus, which like their next two stops were ruled by the British. The transfers occurred two years after London issued its notorious MacDonald White Paper, an edict severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine and dooming incalculable numbers of people to death in the Holocaust. The 1941 episode drips with irony because during and after World War II, the British captured Jewish refugees aboard ships attempting to reach Palestine and often dispatched them to internment camps in Cyprus….