Athena (ship, 1893)
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The Athena or Athina ( Greek Αθήνα ) was a Greek cargo ship that was used as a refugee ship for the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine in 1946 and sank in a storm while crossing.
Early years
The Athena was commissioned by John McDowall & Barbour from the Syros shipyard in 1893 and equipped with a steam engine by the Scottish engineer John McDowall, who founded the “Ifaistos” machine factory in Piraeus . The ship was the first steamship built in Greece with an iron hull. It served as a ferry until mid-1930. Between 1935 and 1939 it was laid up in Piraeus and was scheduled for scrapping . In 1939 she partially sank outside the port. Eventually the ship was bought for 40 million drachmas, restored and fitted with a Deutz diesel engine.
prehistory
After the end of the Second World War , the Mossad le Alija Bet , an organization of the Hagana , and the Palyam organized the immigration of Jewish Holocaust survivors and displaced persons to Palestine. After the British Mandate Government, under pressure from Arab uprisings, continued to reduce the entry quota for Jews in the 1930s, immigration called Aliyah Bet took place illegally. To counter the pressure of immigration, the British set up a sea blockade and deported captured immigrants to the internment camp in Atlit .
Refugee ship Rafah
The Athena was prepared by Palyamniks in the port of Piraeus for the upcoming transport task. In November, the ship sailed with a Greek crew under a Greek captain to Bakar near Rijeka in what was then Yugoslavia (now Croatia ) to take 785 immigrants on board. For the crossing to Palestine, the Athena was given the Hagana code name Rafah (רפיח), based on the British internment camp in the city of the same name . Several thousand Jews were interned there after Operation Agatha on June 29, 1946.
When the Rafah left Bakar on November 26, 1946, there were storms common for the season over the Adriatic . The captain therefore avoided the course across the open sea and drove along the channels between the coast and the Croatian islands. In the Aegean Sea , he steered from one island to the next. On December 7th, the Rafah reached the Greek Aegean island of Syrna . Here the captain steered the ship into a poorly protected bay in order to anchor there and wait for the end of the storm, which had intensified in the last few days. During the anchorage, the Rafah ran into a reef and hit a leak. Despite the storm, the immigrants and crew jumped into the water and rescued themselves on the rocky shore. 45 minutes later the Rafah sank . Eight immigrants were killed in the tragedy and eleven others were injured, some seriously.
Rescue and deportation
The Mossad le Alija Bet and the British Air Force were informed of the accident via the radio that the Palyam radio operator Avraham Lichovsky was able to rescue from aboard the Rafah . A British search plane spotted the castaways on December 8 , and food, medicine and equipment were dropped from the plane the next day. In the meantime, the castaways had made contact with the Greek population of the island, who offered them first protection after spending a night in the open air.
On December 11th, the Greek destroyer Themistoklis reached the bay and picked up the Greek ship's crew as well as the eleven injured immigrants and ten companions who were brought to Rhodes . The following day the British destroyer HMS Chevron , the British anti-mine vehicle HMS Providence and the Greek destroyer Aigaio Syrna and took the rest of the shipwrecked on board. The team accompanying the Palyam mingled inconspicuously with the immigrants, so that they could not be recognized and separated by the British. The Jews were brought to Cyprus on the ship HMS Chevron as part of Operation Igloo and were to be interned in the Karaolos camp. When the ship arrived off Cyprus, the Jews vehemently opposed disembarkation. The British soldiers were only able to get them off board after using smoke and tear gas grenades.
On November 20, 1972, the eight victims of the disaster buried on Syrna were transferred to the cemetery in Haifa .
Rediscovery
In 2000, the wreck was rediscovered in Agios Georgios Bay on Syrna. The Athena lies at a depth of 22 to 38 meters. The hull has three small holes below the waterline. These were sufficient to bring the ship to sink, since it had no bulkheads .
Web links
- Palyam.org
- Palmach.org.il
- Haapalah / Aliyah Bet: MS Athinai
- Haapalah / Aliyah Bet: Yankowitz, Tsili
- Maritime Monday for June 10th, 2013: Movement of Jah People
- Δέκατη Έβδομη Ιστορία: Το ναυάγιο του πλοίου ATHINA στην νησίδα Σύρνα των Δωδεκανήσων τον Δεκέμβριο του 19.
- HMS Providence (doc)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Labros Skartsis: Greek vehicle and machine manufacturers 1800 to present. A pictorial history , pp. 282–283 and p. 290 ( online )
- ↑ Pierre Kosmidis: Athina: The wreck of the first iron steamboat built in Greece. ( ww2wrecks.com )
Coordinates: 36 ° 20 ′ 25 ″ N , 26 ° 40 ′ 0 ″ E