Murray Greenfield

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Murray S. Greenfield (born September 11, 1926 in New York City , United States ) is an Israeli businessman, publisher, and writer .

Youth and Aliyah Bet

Murray S. Greenfield grew up in Far Rockaway in New York district of Queens mt four brothers in an immigrant from Poland Jewish middle-class family on. English and Yiddish were spoken at home, and Murray attended high school at Far Rockaway. During World War II , he served in the United States Merchant Marine for three years . When Greenfield found out in late 1946 about Aliyah Bet , illegal Jewish immigration to the area of ​​the League of Nations for Palestine from a British point of view , he was one of around 250 US volunteers who took ten ships to Europe for a total of 35,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine to accomplish. On May 17, 1947, his ship, the Hatikva , with 1,414 Holocaust survivors from Italy and southern France, was rammed and seized by the British destroyers HMS Venus and HMS Brissenden . The refugees and the crew that had mingled with the refugees were towed by ship into the port of Haifa and from there to a British internment camp in Cyprus . After three months, Greenfield was released from camp detention and initially settled in Haifa.

Entrepreneurs in Israel

In Israel, which had just gained independence, Greenfield worked as an investment advisor for the branch of the Palestinian Economic Corporation (today's Israel Economic Corporation ) and won foreign investors. This was necessary because in the early days of the state Israel was only the recipient of donations for poor immigrants in the consciousness of potential investors.

Greenfield moved from Haifa to Tel Aviv with his future wife Hana Lustigová . There he was one of the founding members and later managing director of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) in 1951. Under his leadership, bond funds, a real estate company and a number of housing projects were launched in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and several kibbutzim . As a representative of the AACI, Greenfield made repeated trips to the United States to motivate American Jews to emigrate to Israel and to promote investments in Israel and the import of Israeli products.

Together with his wife Hana, Greenfield founded a duty-free shop with branches in New York, London , Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya and Beersheba .

The Greenfields ran an art gallery in Tel Aviv from the mid-1950s to 1973. They made efforts to export works by contemporary Israeli artists to the United States. In 1981, the couple Greenfield founded in Jerusalem the Gefen Publishing House , publishes a publisher of English-language books. The management of the publishing house was later taken over by the sons Dror and Ilan, since Dror's death in 2003 Ilan Greenfield has been the sole managing director.

voluntary work

Murray Greenfield was honorary executive director of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) for seven years in the 1980s . This organization tried to help Ethiopian Jews emigrate to Israel even before Operation Moses and the subsequent evacuations .

Murray and Hana Greenfield were co-founders of a project, the Czech Torah Network , with which the story of the 1,564 saved Torah scrolls in the Jewish communities in the Czech Republic that perished in the Holocaust should be used in education and information about the Holocaust. The German occupiers could not do anything with the Torah scrolls, which in their eyes had no value. They collected them in Prague in a storeroom of the Central Jewish Museum of the SS , later the Jewish Museum in Prague , where the Second World War survived. In 1964 they came to London for a purchase price of 30,000 US dollars and have since been gradually given to Jewish communities in more than 20 states for renewed ritual use and in memory of the destroyed communities from which they came.

writer

Greenfield's first book was published in 1973 under the title How to be an Oleh, or Things the Jewish Agency Never Told You . He later was the founder and editor of FrontPage , the first English language magazine in Israel, and the Russian language magazine Rossvet , which was aimed at Russian immigrants. In 1987, after more than ten years of research, Greenfield published under the title The Jews' Secret Fleet. The Untold Story of North American Volunteers Who Smashed the British Blockade of Palestine is a book about helping American sailors, mostly former marines, with the Alija Bet. The book was the basis for the 2008 documentary Waves of Freedom . In 2010 a revised edition of the book was published.

family

Murray Greenfield married in September 1954 in Israel Hana Lustigova , a survivor of the Holocaust , in the Theresienstadt concentration camp , Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen was imprisoned and lost her mother and other relatives in concentration camps. Murray and Hana Greenfield had three children, Meira, Dror (deceased in 2003) and Ilan, and ten grandchildren, all of whom live in Israel. Hana Greenfield died in January 2014.

In recent years, Murray Greenfield has repeatedly appeared publicly as a witness to Aliyah Bet and the establishment of the State of Israel. He is a staunch Zionist and strongly opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. He uses his own acronym for it: BIG for Buy Israeli Goods .

Publications (selection)

Books

  • Murray S. Greenfield: How to be an oleh, or, Things the Jewish Agency never told you. Israel Press, Tel Aviv 1973, OCLC 234129906 ;
  • Murray S. Greenfield and Joseph M. Hochstein: The Jews' Secret Fleet. The Untold Story of North American Volunteers Who Smashed the British Blockade of Palestine. Revised Edition. Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem 2010, ISBN 978-965-229-517-0 .

documentary

In 2008, the documentary Waves of Freedom , based on Greenfield's book The Jews' Secret Fleet , was released and directed by Alan Rosenthal.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Murray S. Greenfield , Author Information on the Gefen Publishing House website , accessed October 26, 2018.
  2. ^ Hatikva , Paul Silverstone website (via Alija Bet ), accessed October 26, 2018.
  3. ↑ Hillel Halkin: Remember Aliyah Bet , The New York Sun , July 31, 2007, accessed October 26, 2018.
  4. ↑ Menelaos Hadjicostis: Jewish-American ex-sailor recalls Cyprus internment with Holocaust survivors , The Times of Israel, October 1, 2016, accessed October 26, 2018.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g Ilana Kraus: Gefen Publishing. A Life of Pride , Haaretz, September 2016, accessed October 26, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Steve Linde: Murray Greenfield - a humble Israeli hero. The New York-born octogenarian who helped create the Jewish state still thinks BIG! , The Jerusalem Post, April 23, 2015, accessed October 26, 2018.
  7. ^ A b Mordechai I. Twersky: Hana Greenfield, 1926-2014. Holocaust Survivor Who Safeguarded Lessons and Legacy , Haaretz, January 29, 2014, accessed October 26, 2018.
  8. ^ The Czech Torah Network. A Holocaust Education Project , Czech Torah Network website, accessed October 26, 2018.
  9. ^ Waves of Freedom. The Movie , website of Gefen Publishing House, accessed October 26, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Greenfield, Murray
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Greenfield, Murray S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli writer and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , United States