Berihah

Berihah, or "Brichah" (Hebrewterm|בריחה|Brikhah|escape or flight) was the organized effort that helped Jews escape post-Holocaust Europe to Palestine.

The movement of Jewish refugees from the DP camps in which they were held (one million persons classified as "not repatrifiable" remained in Germany and Austria) to Palestine was illegal on both sides, as Jews were not officially allowed to leave the countries of Central and Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union and its allies, nor were they permitted to settle in Palestine by the British.

In late 1944 and early 1945, Jewish members of the Polish resistance met up with Warsaw ghetto fighters in Lubin to form Berihah as a way of escaping the anti-Semitism of Europe, where they were convinced that another Holocaust would occur. After the liberation of Rovno, Eliezer and Abraham Lidovsky, and Pasha (Isaac) Rajchmann, concluded that there was no future for Jews in Poland. They formed an artisan guild to cover their covert activities, and they sent a group to Cernauti Romania to seek out escape routes. It was only after Abba Kovner, and his group from Vilna joined, along with Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, who had headed the Jewish Fighters Unit of the Polish uprising of August, 1944, in January 1945, that the organization took shape. They soon joined up with a similar effort led by the Jewish Brigade and eventually the Haganah.

Officers of the Jewish Brigade of the British army assumed control of the operation, along with operatives from the Hagana (the Jewish clandestine army in Palestine) who hoped to smuggle as many displaced persons as possible into Palestine through Italy. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funded the operation.

Berihah became the main conduit for Jews coming to Palestine, especially from the displaced person camps, and it initially had to turn people away due to too much demand.

After the Kielce pogrom of 1946, the flight of Jews accelerated, with 100,000 Jews leaving Eastern Europe in three months. Operating in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia through 1948, Berihah transferred approximately 250,000 survivors into Austria, Germany, and Italy through elaborate smuggling networks. Using ships supplied at great cost by the Mossad Le'aliyah Bet, then the immigration arm of the Yishuv, these refugees were then smuggled through the British cordon around Palestine. The effort came to be known as , and ended with the establishment of Israel, after which "immigration" to the Jewish state was legal, although "emigration" was still sometimes prohibited, as happened in both the Eastern Bloc and Arab countries, see, for example refusenik.

External links

* [http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/month_in_holocaust/august/august_lexicon/BERIHA.html Beriha from Yad Vashem]
* [http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/genocide/chap09.html Illegal Immigration in the Aftermath] from the Wiesenthal Center
* [http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/act/38zion.html Immigration to Palestine]
* [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005417 Brihah] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Brihah
* [http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/dp/emigrat2.htm Bricha, Emigration]
* [http://www.jewishhistory.org.il/history.php?letter=b History of the Jewish People] provides information on Brichah (Lublin, Poland), Brichah (Romania) and Brichah (Rovno, Ukraine)
* [http://www.jafi.org.il/agenda/2001/english/wk37/11.asp Aba Gefen's Story - From Smuggling Jews to Israel to Palestinian Terror] Dr. Aba Gefen, Holocaust survivor, NKVD interrogator of Nazis, a leader of the Brichah organization (that smuggled Jews to Israel following the Second World War), Mossad station head in Italy. His book analyzes his role in transporting Jews to safety during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, hunting down Nazi collaborators after the war, and his role with the Brichah. As head of the Austrian section of the Brichah he worked hand in hand with the US Army, and he explains the methods his organization used to smuggle the maximum number of Jews to Mandatory Palestine.
* [http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/displacedjews.htm Displaced Jews in Europe] Matt Rosenberg traces the Migration Following World War II in Europe - 1945-1951

References

*Flight and Rescue: Brichah, written by Yehuda Bauer, published by Random House; New York, 1970, ASIN: B000GKPQG2
*Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, written by Zeev W. Mankowitz, published by Cambridge University Press, 2002, 335 pages, ISBN-10: 0521037565