Ruth Klieger Aliav

Ruth Klieger Aliav, née Polishuk (1907-1979), was a Jewish Zionist activist, assisting in the Aliya Beth before and after World War II, and later a figure in the Mossad. Born in Chernivtsi (then in Austria-Hungary until 1918, afterward part of the Kingdom of Romania, and nowadays in Ukraine), she was a graduate from the University of Vienna who could speak nine languages.

Early activities

Klieger Aliav went to Palestine after her marriage in 1936 and later joined the Mossad, being sent on missions to Romania. The head of operations in Romania sent the "Tiger Hill" September 1939 and the "Hilda" January 1940. After Romania became an Axis Power, she escaped to Istanbul, Turkey and there together with other Mossad agents organized the dispatch of the Darien II in March 1941. A full account of these deeds is in her autobiography "The Last Escape," which was a best seller in 1974, and filmed as The Darien Dilemma 2005.

She was a Mossad agent in Cairo from 1941 to 1944. In 1944, with Charles de Gaulle's help, she arrived in a liberated Paris and was the first Mossad agent to contact survivors of the Holocaust.

1945

In October 1945, Klieger Aliav acquired a troopship, the "Ascanious", from an American, Colonel Ernest Witte, of Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff. It was planned that the vessel would convey orphans to Palestine and it was soon crammed with 2,600 Holocaust survivors. On arrival in Haifa, the British government of Palestine had no choice but to let them in. The colonel wanted to repeat the passage, but it was vetoed by Eisenhower because of British pressure.

In October 1945, David Ben-Gurion arrived in Paris and, to avoid eavesdroppers, he and Klieger Aliav went for a four-hour walk in the Bois de Boulogne. Ben Gurion wanted to know if the Holocaust survivors would be ready to sail in the cramped Mossad "nutshell" ships. Klieger Aliav convinced him that after the Holocaust, the refugees would endure any hardship in order to reach the new homeland.

Later career

Paris then became the headquarters of Mossad; soon afterwards Klieger Aliav left for South America and the United States, raising money and buying ships. After Israeli independence in 1948, she was public relations manager at ZIM, the Israeli shipping company.

Klieger Aliav divorced in 1940. There is an urban legend that she was Ben Gurion's lover but this has never been proven. Ben Gurion suggested to Ruth a new Hebrew surname: Aliav ("V" and "B" are the same Hebrew letter).