Bricha

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Bricha (also: Beriha, Brichah etc .; Hebrew בריחה = "escape") was the name for an organized underground movement that between 1944 and 1948 Jews from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union flee and die made illegal immigration to Palestine possible immediately before the establishment of the State of Israel .

The Hagana ship Jewish State in the port of Haifa, 1947
The Exodus upon arrival in the port of Haifa, July 20, 1947
The United States steamer breaks the blockade of Palestine by Jewish immigrants and lands near Nahariya , 1948
Memorial plaque on the Krimmler Tauern

history

As early as 1939, Zionist , Bundist and Orthodox organizations tried to bring some order to the mass refugee movement of the Jews who fled to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland after the German invasion of Poland and from there to Lithuania and south to Romania. The refugee movements continued during the war years, when Jews from Slovakia fled to Hungary in 1942, and from Hungary back to Slovakia and Romania in 1944.

When the Red Army retook Rovno in Volhynia in February 1944 and Vilna in April, illegal groups of former Jewish partisans, independent of each other, formed there with the aim of bringing the Jewish population who had survived the Holocaust to the British Mandate of Palestine . Together with Zionists returning from the Asian part of the Soviet Union, these groups met in Lublin in December 1944 under the leadership of Abba Kovner . In January 1945 the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising under Jitzhak Zuckerman joined them and founded the Bricha organization under the leadership of Abba Kovner. In mid-January 1945 the first groups were sent to Romania. With the rescue train, under the supervision of the ICRC, 5,000 Jews, including many children who had been deported by the Germans , were able to get from Poland to Romania and wanted to reach Palestine from there. But the European borders became more and more impermeable and this route had to be abandoned. Instead, Kovner organized border crossings in Hungary and Yugoslavia and transferred his employees to Italy, where he himself arrived in July 1945. Polish Jews now drove via Slovakia to Budapest and from there to Graz , in the hope of being able to cross the border to Italy from there. But in August the border was closed by the British occupying forces stationed there . 12,000 people were forced to stay in the Graz area and were only able to cross the Austrian-Italian border in small groups in the winter of 1945/46. The refugee camp in Saalfelden in Salzburg also played a special role , as the American occupation forces tolerated the escape of the Jews, while both the British and the French occupation forces wanted to prevent the Jews from fleeing any further. The short stretch of common border between the American occupation zone in Austria and Italy was used , where around 5,000 refugees were able to cross the border over the Krimmler Tauern Pass .

Jewish soldiers stationed in Europe, both from the Jewish Brigade and from other army units, set up a diaspora center (Hebrew "Merkas laGola") to smuggle Jews to Italy from the liberated concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Funding was initially provided by the Jewish Agency ; Since the winter of 1945/46, funds have also been received from the American Joint Distribution Committee .

From March 1946 on, Levi Kopelewitsch (Argov), a "Schaliach" (envoy) from Palestine, directed the transit of Jews who fled via DP camps in Czechoslovakia to the US occupation zone in Austria and Bavaria. From October 1946 there was an alternative escape route via Stettin to Berlin and from there via the British and American zones to southern Germany. At that point, control of the Bricha was transferred to the Center for Illegal Immigration , whose director, Schaul Avigur , moved his office to Paris in 1946.

The organization of the Bricha was mainly in the hands of Zionist youth groups, the majority of whom were influenced by the kibbutz idea and therefore called themselves kibbutzim . The refugee groups were led to places near the border, where they were temporarily housed and received papers with a code (“Parole”) from the Bricha groups. Then they got to the actual border crossing ("Point"), where the local Bricha team smuggled them across the border. Until 1946 the refugees were identified as Greek refugees with the help of forged Red Cross documents. An informal agreement was reached in Czechoslovakia not to put any obstacles in the way of the fleeing Jews, and UNRRA and the Czech government paid for the train journeys from the Polish border to Bratislava or Asch on the Czech-German border. On the Szczecin-Berlin route, Soviet or Polish truck drivers were bribed to continue smuggling refugees, and the transition from Berlin to the British zone was made either with the help of UNRRA officials or with forged documents. From October 1945 the operations in Austria were headed by Asher Ben-Natan and in Germany by Ephraim Frank, both of whom were "Schlichim" (envoy) from Palestine. In Vienna, the refugees traveled from Bratislava via the Austrian US zone to transit camps that were set up near the Rothschild Hospital , and from there to Italy (until around May 1946) or the German US zone.

The Kielce pogrom , in which 41 Jews were killed on July 4, 1946, led to mass panic among Polish Jews. The Polish government was unable to prevent the outbreaks of violence against the Jews and, in negotiations with Itzhak Cukierman, allowed Jews to flee from Poland across the Silesian border into Czechoslovakia in July 1946. From July to September 1946, 70,000 Jews fled this route to Czechoslovakia, which opened its borders mainly through the mediation of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk . The refugee movement from Poland slowly came to a standstill from the winter of 1946/47. In the course of 1947 fewer than 10,000 Jews were able to leave Poland via the Bricha routes; the route via Stettin was hardly used from November 1946.

After some hesitation and on the intervention of the American rabbi Philip Bernstein, the American army allowed numerous refugees to enter the American zones in Germany and Austria in the summer of 1946. In the second half of 1946, however, the onward journey from Germany to Italy was hindered until the beginning of 1947 the route via the Ahrntal was reopened.

At the end of 1946, a meeting of Bricha commanders took place on the occasion of the 22nd Zionist Congress in Basel , at which Ephraim Dekel, former head of the Hagana intelligence service in Palestine, was appointed head of Bricha for Europe. At this time tensions between the Hagana and the dissident underground organizations Etzel and Lechi increased . In September 1947, a Bricha man was murdered by Etzel members at a border crossing near Innsbruck .

In 1948, Meir Sapir took over the management of the Bricha from Ephraim Dekel, and the movement slowly came to a close, although at some border crossings in Eastern Europe the Bricha continued to operate until 1949. It is estimated that around 250,000 people left Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1948, at least 80% of whom were able to continue their escape with the organized help of Bricha. The Bricha was used as a powerful argument by the American President Truman when he demanded the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees in Palestine in August 1945 and submitted these demands to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in May 1946 . From 1945 to 1948, the Jewish refugee movement from Europe proved to be a major factor in the struggle to establish the State of Israel.

literature

  • Encyclopedia Judaica , Volume 4, pp. 622-632.
  • Thomas Albrich (Ed.): Escape to Eretz Israel. The Bricha and the Jewish exodus through Austria after 1945 (= Austria-Israel Studies, Vol. 1). Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck 1998, ISBN 3-7065-1289-0 (contains the lectures of the conference “Salzburg - the hub of the Jewish exodus 1945–1948”, Salzburg 1997).
  • Asher Ben-Natan , Susanne Urban: The Bricha - From Terror to Eretz Israel. An escape helper remembers . Droste, Düsseldorf 2005, ISBN 3-7700-1214-3 .

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