Bricha

Bricha(Hebrew:בריחה,romanized:briḥa,lit. 'escape, flight'), also called theBericha Movement,was the underground organized effort that helpedJewishHolocaust survivorsescapeEuropepost-World War IIto theBritish Mandate for Palestinein violation of theWhite Paper of 1939.It ended when Israel declared independence and annulled the White Paper.

July 15, 1945.Buchenwaldsurvivors arrive inHaifato be arrested by the British.

AfterAmerican,British and Soviet armed forces liberated the camps, survivors suffered from disease, severemalnutritionanddepression.Many weredisplaced personswho were unable to return to their homes from before the war. In some areas, the survivors continued to face antisemitic violence; during the 1946Kielce pogromin Poland 42 survivors were killed when their communal home was attacked by a mob. For many of the survivors, Europe had become "a vast cemetery of the Jewish people" and "they wanted to start life over and build a new national Jewish homeland inEretz Yisrael".

The movement ofJewish refugeesfrom theDisplaced Persons campin which they were held (one million persons classified as "not repatriable" remained inGermanyandAustria) to Palestine was illegal on both sides, as Jews were not officially allowed to leave the countries of Central and Eastern Europe by theSoviet Unionand 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 withWarsaw ghettofighters inLubinto form Bricha as a way of escaping theantisemitismof Europe, where they were convinced that another Holocaust would occur. After the liberation ofRivne,Eliezer and Abraham Lidovsky, and Pasha (Isaac) Rajchmann, concluded that there was no future for Jews inPoland.They formed an artisan guild to cover their covert activities, and they sent a group toCernăuţi,Romaniato seek out escape routes. It was only afterAbba Kovner,and his group fromVilnajoined, along withYitzhak Zuckerman,who had headed theJewish Combat Organizationof the Polish uprising of August 1944, in January 1945, that the organization took shape. They soon joined up with a similar effort led by theJewish Brigadeand eventually theHaganah(the Jewish clandestine army in Palestine).

Officers of the Jewish Brigade of the British army assumed control of the operation, along with operatives from the Haganah who hoped to smuggle as many displaced persons as possible into Palestine through Italy. TheAmerican Jewish Joint Distribution Committeefunded the operation.

Almost immediately, the explicitlyZionistBerihah 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 theKielce pogromof 1946, the flight of Jews accelerated, with 100,000 Jews leaving Eastern Europe in three months. Operating inPoland,Romania,Hungary,Czechoslovakia,andYugoslaviathrough 1948, Berihah transferred approximately 250,000 survivors into Austria, Germany, andItalythrough elaborate smuggling networks. Using ships supplied at great costby theMossad Le'aliyah Bet,then the immigration arm of theYishuv,these refugees were then smuggled through the British cordon around Palestine. Bricha was part of the larger operation known asAliyah Bet,and ended with the establishment ofIsrael,after whichimmigrationto the Jewish state was legal, althoughemigrationwas still sometimes prohibited, as happened in both theEastern Blocand Arab countries (see for examplerefusenik).

See also

• Aliyah Bet
• Mossad LeAliyah Bet
• Tilhas Tizig Gesheften

References

• Bauer, Yehuda (1970).Flight and Rescue: Brichah.New York: Random House.ISBN9780394417776.OCLC80809.Snippet view only.
• Mankowitz, Zeev W. (2002).Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany.Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare no. 12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN0521037565.OCLC124025531.

External links

• BrihahUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Brihah
• Bricha, Emigration
• History of the Jewish Peopleprovides information on Brichah (Lublin, Poland), Brichah (Romania) and Brichah (Rovno, Ukraine)
• Displaced Jews in EuropeArchived2007-12-12 at theWayback MachineMatt Rosenberg traces the Migration Following World War II in Europe - 1945-1951
• The background to BrichaArchived2014-02-22 at theWayback Machine
• A film review about a documentary film about the Bricha
• The film "The Escape Home", is about The exodus of Holocaust survivors thru Europe to the promised land,YouTube