Ike Aronowicz

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Ike Aronowitz
David Eldan : Aronowicz as captain of the SS Atzmaut (1949)

Ike Aronowicz , also Yitzhak Ahronovitch and other transcriptions, Hebrew יצחק (אייק) ארן-אהרונוביץ '(born August 27, 1923 in Łódź ; died December 23, 2009 in Israel ), was a Polish-Israeli shipowner and in 1947 the captain of the legendary immigrant ship Exodus .

Life

Yitzhak Aronowicz grew up in the Free State of Danzig . In 1933 his parents emigrated with him to Palestine . He began his career as a seaman on ships of the British and Norwegian merchant navy in the Mediterranean. In 1942 he was recruited for the Jewish underground organization Palmach , which also carried out operations at sea. In 1947 he took command of the President Warfield (Exodus) ship in Paulsboro , USA , which the Hagana had bought to bring displaced persons and Holocaust survivors from Europe to Palestine. Aronowicz transferred the ship to Porto Venere in Italy, where it was converted and came on board as a representative of Hagana Jossi Harel . The ship was steered to Sète , where the embarkation of 4,500 passengers took place under the eyes of the French port authority, which did not prevent the departure. The British mandate administration, which wanted to prevent illegal immigration in Palestine, deployed warships of the Royal Navy , which rammed the ship off the coast of Palestine, rammed and hijacked. During the defense of the ship by the passengers, which was organized by Aronowicz, three people were killed. The passengers were disembarked in the port of Haifa on July 18, 1947 , interned and transported back to Hamburg in the British Zone in Germany by other ships . Aronowicz and Harel escaped arrest in Haifa. The passage and landing in Haifa was staged by the Hagana to the public and increased the pressure on British foreign policy to withdraw from the mandate of Palestine. Aronowicz was then given command of the Pan York ship , which also brought illegal immigrants to Palestine.

In the 1958 novel Exodus, Leon Uris condensed the actions of the two ship commanders into a person who is more like Harel than Aronowicz, Paul Newman played this role in the 1959 film Exodus .

After 1949, Aronowicz trained as a ship master in Great Britain and made the patents third, second and first officer. In 1951 he was involved in a sailors' strike that was suppressed by the Israeli government. Aronowicz worked as a freelance ship broker . In 1958 he studied politics at Georgetown University (BA) and economics at Columbia University (MBA) in the USA . He married an American and they had two children. He moved back to Israel, where he ran a shipping company that served ports in East Asia with merchant ships.

Fonts

  • with Elsa Guillot: J'étais le capitaine de l'Exodus . Neuilly-sur-Seine: M. Lafon, 2008 ISBN 978-2-7499-0843-4

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Aronowicz, Ike
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Aronowicz, Yitzhak
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Israeli captain
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 2009
Place of death Israel