In May of 2025, I went on a work retreat to Israel. And though the war was still raging and 58 hostages were still trapped in Gaza and the Houthis were still flexing by sending an occasional missile Israel’s way, the trip was really, really special. But the highlight of the trip wasn’t the workshops or the socializing or even the insane spread at every Israeli hotel breakfast.
It was an afternoon visit to a prison camp.
Yes, you heard that correctly. While the normal people went to the beach, a small crew of us headed to the now-defunct Atlit detention camp 12 south of Haifa, a relic from the days of the British Mandate.
Most people haven’t heard of it.
True story: When I was in my 20s, I bragged to a friend that I knew ALL OF ISRAELI HISTORY and he could go ahead and test me. (Side note: god I was annoying.) His first question? Okay, Noam. Tell me everything you know about Atlit.
To which I replied what’s that?
It was pretty embarrassing, especially since I had totally forgotten that I had been there before, as a 16 year old on an Israel tour, whose valuable historical information clearly went in one ear and out the other.
My friend laughed at me. I laughed at me. It was funny! But I never forgot that moment, and I kept it in the vault until this morning. Because the truth is, the story of Atlit is the story of Israel, writ small. 16-year-old Noam didn’t appreciate that on his first visit. But it was all 2025 Noam could think about. What this place is. What it means.
Atlit is not an ordinary prison. It wasn’t built to hold thieves or murderers or people who blast TikTok in public without headphones. No, this prison was built in 1938 to detain the desperate Jewish refugees flooding Mandatory Palestine’s shores. By the time it shut down in 1945, tens of thousands of Jews had passed through its doors – most of them Holocaust survivors who had not anticipated that their first destination in the Land of Israel would be another camp.
For hours, we wandered the grounds, taking in the barracks, touring a reconstructed ship that had once brought thousands of Jewish refugees to Haifa – rickety old vessels packed far beyond capacity, without adequate sanitation or supplies. We watched a few films detailing daily life in the camp – including the historic prison break that freed 208 prisoners.
But most of all, we marveled at our own good fortune.
Getting to Israel that summer was – well, I won’t say it was the easiest thing in the world, due to, you know, the ongoing war. But eventually, I arrived in Israel. At the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport, massive Hebrew letters greeted me. Bruchim HaBaim. Literally: blessed are those who come. Figuratively: welcome.
So as I stood on the grounds of Atlit detention camp a few days later, how could I do anything but be amazed by the resilience and stubbornness and sacrifice of these refugees?
These people had survived the worst things I can imagine, and then piled onto dilapidated ships for a miserable journey that was likely to end in either deportation, imprisonment, or deportation followed by imprisonment. But none of that mattered to them. It was Eretz Yisrael or bust, and no amount of inconvenience or misery could stop them.
After hearing stories like that, how could I be anything but humbled by my own undeserved good fortune? And how could I be anything but fired up to tell you about their story?
There’s the dramatic Hollywood-level stuff, like the illegal smuggling networks and the prison break. But I also want to talk about the less-dramatic stuff. The quiet, emotional stuff. The political stuff. Like: why were Holocaust survivors thrown behind barbed wire in the first place? Why did they risk deportation and imprisonment after everything they had already survived? What would it have been like for them, to be IN the Promised Land at last, but unable to walk free?
So that’s what we’re going to cover in this episode. You’ll hear footage recorded in the actual camp, including a conversation with my colleague Yirmiyahu Danzig, the main host of our Unpacked YouTube channel, and the host of our recent podcast Borderlines, as well as in-depth explanations from our rockstar tour guide Judy.
It was a tough and meaningful and emotional day. I hope this episode does it justice.
Chapter One: The British Confront a Major Headache
The British Empire had not expected ruling the region of Palestine to be so. Freaking. Annoying. They had taken over after World War I, but by the 1930s, it was clear they were in way over their heads. The region’s Jews and Arabs were locked in a zero-sum conflict. One’s victory was the other’s loss. And the primary point of contention for the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine was the stream of Jewish immigration. (By the way, sometimes, I’ll say Mandatory Palestine, sometimes, Mandate Palestine. For all intents and purposes, they’re the same thing, it’s just the region of Palestine when it was under the British Mandate, which was later divided into Israel and Jordan.) Anywayyyy, Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine only grew after a certain mustachioed madman was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Which presented a serious problem for the British.
With World War II looming, the Brits had to choose their allies carefully. And the fact was: the Jews were simply not important enough to cater to. They had no control over oil fields. They couldn’t ensure access to the Suez Canal. Plus, it wasn’t like the Brits needed to convince the Jewish people not to fall for the Nazis’ charms.
The Arab world, on the other hand, was at real risk of going Nazi. Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini – more on him in the show notes – had established contact with Nazi officials as early as 1933, hoping for an ally in the fight against the Jews in Mandatory Palestine. Fascist Italy had even armed local Arabs in 1936, in their revolt against the British. And when Nazism came to Iraq, it took off like wildfire.
The Brits knew that if they wanted Arab support – or at least Arab neutrality and continued access to Iraqi oil and the Suez Canal – they needed to throw Arab leadership a bone. And if that meant keeping Jews out, well, that was a “sacrifice” the Brits were willing to make.
So just a few months before Hitler invaded Poland, at the absolute worst time possible, the British announced a stringent anti-immigration policy, applicable only to Jews.
The MacDonald White Paper of 1939 decreed that over the next five years, only 75,000 Jews would be allowed into Mandatory Palestine – roughly 15,000 a year. After that, well, the region’s Arabs would probably be in charge of setting their own immigration policy, and the Brits could wash their hands of this whole nightmare.
Now, I want to be clear: it’s really hard for me to stay objective here. This is personal, and I have a LOT of feelings about it. Mostly horror and sorrow over the cruelty of this policy, which was upheld even as the Nazis steamrolled Jewish communities from Poland to Greece. More than one historian has wondered how many Jews could have been saved, if not for the White Paper of 1939? How many could have found refuge in Mandate Palestine, if only the British had allowed them in? (Nerd corner alert: the White Paper was the brainchild of Neville Chamberlain’s government. Yes, the same Neville Chamberlain who thought Hitler could be appeased. But when Churchill took power in May of 1940, he did not repeal the policy, which remained in effect until the British withdrew in 1948.)
To be fair to the British government of 1939, they weren’t actively trying to condemn the Jews of Europe to certain death. Aside from the fact that no one could have predicted the sheer scale of the coming slaughter, there were significant geopolitical considerations in play. Allies to consider. Regional power to uphold. Countries don’t usually have morals, they have interests. Yadda yadda yadda.
But the Brits did not bank on the Jews of the Yishuv.
Chapter Two: Ma’apilim
There is no direct translation for the Hebrew word ma’apilim.
I can tell you it was used to describe the Jews who made their way to Mandate Palestine despite British immigration quotas.
I can tell you that technically, the closest English equivalent might be illegal immigrants, because that’s what Jews who came to the region without visas were. Immigrants whose presence in the land was a crime.
But I’d be robbing you of so much nuance if I left it at that.
Because the term ma’apilim predates concepts like illegal immigration. Instead, it’s actually the word that the Hebrew Bible, the Torah uses to refer to men who had defied divine decree.
The story goes like this.
As the Israelites wander in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, dreaming of a land flowing with milk and honey, Moses sends 12 spies – one from each tribe – to scout the Promised Land. Unfortunately, 10 of the 12 come back from their 40-day excursion with pretty dismal reports. This is a land of giants that make ordinary people look like grasshoppers. A land that devours its inhabitants.
Only one spy, Caleb, initially pushes back, insisting they can conquer the land. Later, as panic spreads through the camp, another spy, Joshua, joins him, and together they plead with the people not to be afraid.
But by then, it’s too late. The people are already whining and kvetching to Moses and Aaron, like moody teenagers confronting their dumb hopeless parents. WHY DID YOU TAKE US OUT OF EGYPT ONLY TO GET US KILLED BY GIANTS?! WHY DON’T WE JUST GO BACK TO EGYPT?! NO ONE GETS US!
At this point, God is so ticked off that Moses has to talk The Divine out of killing all the Israelites and starting over with a more polite nation, likkkke…maybe the Canadians? So they compromise. The ten spies who talked smack about the Promised Land get hit by plague instantly. The rest of the people get to live, but they are no longer allowed in the Promised Land. For the next 40 years, no Israelite is allowed into Canaan. It’s “wander in the desert” o’clock until all the kvetchers die.
But then, there’s a teeny, tiny twist. The same crowd that was ready to stone Moses and Aaron for making them go to the Promised Land is now like, actually, this place sounds great. Let’s go right now.
Poor Moses. Can you imagine?
Moses is like, guys, God said no. You sure you wanna defy God that way? And they’re like, definitely.
And so, the Torah tells us:
וַיַּעְפִּ֕לוּ לַעֲל֖וֹת אֶל־רֹ֣אשׁ הָהָ֑ר
Defiantly they marched toward the crest of the hill country.
There it is. V’ya’apilu. Ah-peel. Like, ma’a-peel.
Friends, I give you the first ma’apilim in history.
So I’ve always found it funny that the Jews who came despite the British quotas named themselves after these defiant, headstrong Israelites who, in the Bible, ignore Moses, charge into Canaan anyway… and get immediately crushed. Not exactly the marketing campaign I would’ve chosen.
But the name fits. Embedded in the word is a sense of defiance, of strong will, of hearing “no” but saying “yes” anyway. Of asking forgiveness, rather than permission. Using this rare and ancient term was a reclamation of sorts. Early Zionists – even and maybe especially the secular ones – often turned to the Bible for comfort and guidance, for words to describe the present moment.
Unlike the ma’apilim of the Bible, the ma’apilim of the twentieth century weren’t being willful for the fun of it. They literally had nowhere else to go. No other place would take them.
Except for their brothers and sisters in the Yishuv.
By 1938, Yishuv leadership had established a branch of the Haganah dedicated exclusively to bringing ma’apilim to Mandatory Palestine. They called it HaMossad l’Aliyah Bet – literally, the institution for clandestine ascent – and its sole mission was to rescue Jews, whether from Europe or from the Arab world. Jews from the Arab world could sneak into Mandatory Palestine via land. But Europe and Asia – which is where Israel is – are separated by the sea. (Obviously there was also land, but you get the point.) So getting ma’apilim from Europe involved a very unpleasant voyage by sea.
Most of the ships that the Mossad l’Aliyah Bet could get their hands on had seen better days. With their failing engines and leaky hulls, it was a miracle any of these ships could actually float. Especially once they were crammed with too many people and not enough toilets, or water, or supplies. Then there was the fact that the seas were bristling with German U-Boats, Soviet submarines, and sea mines, which is all insane.
No story exemplifies these dangers more tragically than that of the Struma – a repurposed old ship that had once transported cattle. When the rickety, overcrowded, undersupplied Struma set sail from Romania in late 1941, the 767 Jewish refugees aboard expected to disembark in Istanbul, wait for the Brits to hand over some visas, and then head to Mandatory Palestine. But Turkish authorities refused to let the passengers off the ship until they had visas, which the Brits refused to grant. So for two months, the Struma sat in Istanbul’s harbor, growing increasingly unsafe and unsanitary, until Turkish police “solved” the problem by towing the boat out to sea and leaving the crew to figure out what was next. Out of sight, out of mind. A day later, the Struma lay in pieces on the ocean floor, most likely torpedoed by the Soviets. Only one passenger survived. One, out of nearly 800.
No one came out of this tragic episode looking good, but the terrible PR didn’t change anything. Anyway, at this point, the British were no strangers to bad PR. They caught 90% of the ma’apilim who made it to Mandatory Palestine, but then what? They couldn’t send them back to war-torn Europe, but they had no intention of letting them in, no matter how desperate they were.
But when you’re a massive empire with a string of detention camps in the most remote corners of the world, you’ve got options. And that’s how more than 1500 desperate Jewish refugees ended up waiting out the war behind bars on the East African island of Mauritius.
I’ve never visited Mauritius as a scholar in residence – yet – but I am told it is beautiful. Pristine beaches, turquoise waters, jagged mountains blanketed by trees. But the refugees who disembarked on the island after a seemingly endless journey weren’t exactly enjoying a tropical vacation. Diseases ran wild through the overcrowded camps, and the heat in the corrugated iron shacks that passed for shelter must have been unbearable. Lack of food, clothing, and infrastructure rounded out this hellish experience, and 128 Jews died over 4.5 years of incarceration.
It might have been more, but the deportations to Mauritius stopped fairly quickly. For one, the logistics were a nightmare. And the optics were worse.
In May of 1940, three ships set out from Romania to Mandatory Palestine, carrying 3500 Jewish refugees between them. But when they reached the coast of Haifa, the British packed most of the passengers onto a ship bound for Mauritius, literally beating them into submission. In protest, the Haganah sneaked explosives onto the ship. They had no intention of hurting the refugees who had been packed in like sardines. They just wanted to buy some time to figure out their next move.
But someone miscalculated. The explosives were too strong. Instead of causing a minor commotion, they sank the ship, drowning 200 Jewish refugees just meters from the soil of the Holy Land.
After that, the Brits put the brakes on sending ma’apilim to Mauritius. Besides, they had already built a detention camp closer to home: a 22-acre complex in the small town of Atlit, 12 miles south of the Haifa harbor. Over the next five years, tens of thousands of ma’apilim would pass through its doors.
Chapter Three: Atlit
Here is how the novelist Anita Diamant describes Atlit in her 2009 novel Day After Night. Quote:
“It was a perfectly forgettable compound of wooden barracks and buildings set out in rows on a scant square acre surrounded by weeds and potato fields. But the place offered a grim welcome to the exhausted remnant of the Final Solution, who could barely see past its barbwire fences, three of them, in fact, concentric lines that scrawled a crabbed and painful hieroglyphic across the sky.”
Declared a National Heritage Site in 1987, the camp has undergone extensive restoration and preservation with support from Jewish National Fund-USA, its barracks and watchtowers painstakingly reconstructed to give visitors some sense of what ma’apilim would have seen when they crossed its threshold. My crew and I arrived on a bright, sunny day, avoiding rambunctious crowds of Israeli tweens and their teachers. Despite the cheerful bustle, it was impossible not to feel the camp’s eerie, skin-prickling resemblance to Majdanek, the Nazi concentration and extermination camp where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered.
Maybe it was the watchtower, or the layers of barbed wire. Maybe it was the wooden barracks with names scratched into the walls, a desperate sign to whoever else might pass through: I was here. Please tell me I’m not the only one left.
Here’s Judy, our tour guide from our trip, explaining the layout of the camp:
[insert footage, which is somewhere between 1:26 – 11:56]
The camp was on about 25, 30 US acres, … there was barbed wire all around the camp, the men and women were separated, that means the men were on one side of this area and the women were on the other side, you can even see watchtowers, one of the original watchtowers, we’ll see more as we walk around the camp. There was a dining room and kitchen on either side, there was a big infirmary in the beginning of the camp, remember a lot of people coming here had a lot of medical issues, okay, from what they’d been through during the war, and anyone that, it wasn’t enough for them to get the help from the clinic, they were taken to the hospitals in Haifa, one of the three hospitals, but when they got better, they were brought back into the camp.
[back to Noam]
Though the camp had been operating since 1939, absorbing Jewish refugees fleeing the inferno, the vast majority of its inmates had not “escaped” the Holocaust. They had survived it.
For them, V-E day was just the beginning of a long, painful road to healing. By the time the Reich surrendered, Europe was a smoking ruin. Entire villages had disappeared from the map. Dazed survivors emerged from the extermination camps, only to find that they were the last ones left of their entire family tree. Two out of three European Jews were simply gone. And so were the homes where they had once lived.
The United Nations hastily erected Displaced Persons camps as a temporary measure – a waystation for refugees waiting to be repatriated. That is: sent back to their homes, or at least to the countries where they had once lived.
But most Jewish DPs had nothing to go back to. The Nazis had stolen their assets, down to the wedding rings they had once worn. Their former villages were ghost towns. If their homes still stood, they were occupied by often-hostile neighbors. And in some cases, those neighbors finished the job that the Nazis had started. In the first months after liberation, roughly 1,500 survivors were murdered by their former neighbors in Poland alone.
So “repatriation” was not an option for the quarter million Jews languishing in DP camps. Some dreamed of the US, whose streets were said to be paved with gold. A continent that had never seen a state-sponsored pogrom. But most wanted to go home. Not to the European villages that had chewed them up and spit them out, but to their first home. The spiritual and national home that they turned towards when they prayed. The Jewish Agency representatives who visited the DP camps spoke of a land where Jewish children could grow up free. A land where Jew was not a slur. A land that represented a two-thousand-year-old hope.
Once again, the Mossad l’Aliyah Bet – Israel’s clandestine immigration services – kicked into high gear, establishing a kind of “underground railroad” system called Brihah. Escape.
Survivors would leave the DP camps and make their way to a port city – usually in Italy, Greece, France, or Yugoslavia. From there, they’d be loaded onto frail, unseaworthy ships and ferried to Mandatory Palestine, where roughly 90% would be intercepted by the Brits and shipped to a detention camp.
We explored a replica of one of these boats. It was only May, but the berth was already sweltering and airless. Seven people, plus some bulky camera equipment, felt like a tight squeeze. Navigating the slippery, steep, narrow stairs was hard enough for a group of healthy and able-bodied people. I can’t imagine what it would have been like for the scarred and malnourished survivors who walked these splintery planks. And that’s before you get into how incredibly disgusting and dangerous the journey was. I mean, the single toilet was more or less a hole in the floor, and it must have smelled horrific.
Here’s Judy, explaining some of the dangers of the journey:
[time stamp not specific, but it’s sometime between 19:24 – 24:52]
There was a ship called the Knesset Israel that while they were on their way spotted another ship. The Knesset Israel had about three and a half thousand people. They spotted another ship that was stuck at sea with 400 people. That ship now had to put a cable across the two ships and 400 people went by cable from their ship that wasn’t operable onto the Knesset Israel, an already overcrowded ship, now had to take on 400 more people. Imagine these people had to think twice about what they could take in that one little bag with them. And now that they had to go over a cable, they could maybe just, you know, from that bag, pick out maybe two or three things and put it in their pocket. And that was it.
[back to Noam]
But they did it. Thousands upon thousands of survivors climbed eagerly into these claustrophobic, airless vessels, singing HaTikvah and dreaming of their new lives. And on the one hand, I get it. What does danger even mean, when you’ve survived the worst atrocities imaginable? When you’ve already lost everything there is to lose?
On the other hand, I don’t get it at all. I cannot imagine the strength required to survive the annihilation of your entire world and still maintain hope. But they did, somehow, climbing into unseaworthy old boats for a punishing weeks-long journey that usually ended in yet another camp.
Because as I said, the Brits intercepted 90% of the refugee ships. But Mandate Authorities were completely unprepared for this deluge of survivors. In 1945, there was no manual for how to treat survivors of genocide. It would take another 35 years for post-traumatic stress disorder to enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
So no one expected the Brits to greet these survivors with trauma-informed therapists and mugs of tea. But the Mandate authorities provided a master class in unintentional cruelty, a perfect blueprint of how NOT to treat genocide survivors.
Lesson number one: don’t put Holocaust survivors in prison. Especially not a prison bristling with watchtowers, guards, dogs, and barbed wire.
Lesson number two: don’t ferry them to said prison in literal freight trains.
Lesson number three: don’t immediately separate them by sex, spray them with industrial-grade pesticides, and demand they get into a shower.
Lesson number four: don’t let them see the furnace that heats their water, whose open mouth looks exactly like a crematorium.
Lesson number five: have I mentioned don’t put Holocaust survivors in prison?
Here’s Judy again:
[timestamp not clear, sometime between (46:26 – 47:54)]:
Now, remember, all of the people that are coming here, almost all of them, have been living under really poor hygienic conditions for quite a long time. And those that weren’t, that were okay, now they were in a ship packed very tightly, like sardines, up against other people. And some of these people had head lice. Some of these people had other parasites. And the goal of the British was really just to make sure that none of this came into the camp. But if you’re a Holocaust survivor, and now we’re talking after 1945, okay?
…And you see all these watchtowers, and there are dogs, and there are guards. And now they bring you into this building, and they tell you you’re going for disinfect, you’re going for showers. And when you come in, you couldn’t see it back there, but when you come in, you see a smokestack. As you’re coming up to the building, you see a smokestack with smoke coming out of the top, where, I mean, literally, if you’re a Holocaust survivor, and you’ve been to the camps, where do you think you’re going?
48:01 – 48:15
…They wanted the men on one side, the women on the other. They wanted them to get undressed to go into showers. There was horrible trauma and commotion going on in this building to convince them that it really was a shower.
[back to Noam]
After the fumigation and the shower, many survivors had to be coaxed into putting their ragged old clothes in the laundry – a trauma in and of itself.
[Judy, somewhere between 49:21 and 52:30]
…there were people that in all of the trauma and commotion of coming into this building, they forgot that in the jacket they were wearing, they had sewn a small memory of the past, maybe a small piece of jewelry, maybe a photograph, maybe a letter of a loved one. And for a lot of people, they lost these last pieces of memory in this building. They just were ruined by the steam and they couldn’t find them again.
[back to Noam]
Once they were showered, deloused, and wearing clean clothes – many of them donated by local Jews – the inmates settled into the daily routine of the camp.
When new arrivals showed up, inmates would immediately swarm them, asking Where are you from? Do you know my brother? My sister? Is there anything left of Riga or Budapest or Zagreb? Is there anyone left who knew me before?
And sometimes, there was.
[insert footage, somewhere between 55:16 – 56:38]
This woman found her sister. Remember back then, you know, if you got separated from somebody at a train station, it could take a long, long time till you found them again. It’s not like, you know, today we just like, you know, in a second we find them. So people actually found relatives in this camp that they had no clue.
[back to Noam]
But there were also squabbles in a cacophony of languages, French mingling with Yiddish mingling with Greek mingling with Hungarian. Salty curse words muttered into pillows. Screams and whimpers in the night. Technically, every barrack held 40 people. But usually, far more were crammed in, so tight they couldn’t even slide a hand under their cots to reach their meager belongings. Instead, their bags hung from the rafters, giving the place the look of a particularly chaotic thrift store.
Today, the place is covered in photographs.
[insert footage – around minute 52]
Now, if you look at the photographs, … You can see the big variety of all different kinds of people that are here. Religious people, secular, young people, older people.
[Noam]
So they’re haredim and secular in the same place?
[Judy]
Yeah, where were they going to be? Do you think the British were actually going to say, no, no, no, you guys go there.
[back to Noam]
Jews from Poland slept next to Jews from Greece. Ultra-Orthodox Jews slept next to atheists. Dyed-in-the-wool Zionists slept next to skeptics. What did these differences matter anymore? At least they were alive.
And the camp was bustling with life. With prayer services for holidays and Shabbat. With Hebrew lessons. With opportunities to work and keep the boredom at bay. With religious rituals, including a mikvah, a ritual bath, built not by the British but by the inmates themselves, who had missed the holy ritual of stepping silently into the purifying water.
And that is so beautiful to me. So perfectly resonant. When archaeologists excavate ancient sites in the Land of Israel, the presence of a mikveh instantly signals: this was a Jewish community. Thousands of years later, the descendants of those people returned to Israel and began building mikvehs, exactly as their ancestors had thousands of years ago.
Man. Chills.
And then, there were the children.
Many of them were orphans, like the nearly 800 “Tehran children” who had been smuggled out of Poland through Iran, eventually ending up at Atlit. Or like 8-year-old Yisrael Meir Lau, who had survived Buchenwald and would one day serve as Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi.
Some of Atlit’s children had been born in the DP camps of Europe, toddlers whose first memories were of barbed wire and guards. But some were born in Atlit. Technically, men and women were kept separate. But it’s hard to suppress life. Especially after losing so much.
Here’s Judy:
(53:05 – 53:58)
They would be able to visit here and there. They could see them on the promenade and the clinic saw a lot of action, I understood. But if they could go visit the clinic, they could be together…. In the eight years that this camp was in use, more than 500 babies were born here…. It’s so striking, all the smiling faces.
(54:01 – 54:25)
Once they realize, once they realize that the agenda is not of genocide, that there’s no agenda of annihilation, that it’s just a waiting out game that the British made. And they just have to wait it out. It’ll maybe take weeks, it’ll maybe take a year, but they know they have a bed. It’s not pleasant, they’re in prison, but they have a bed and they have food and they will be leaving. It will eventually happen.
[back to Noam]
There were visitors to the camp, too – volunteer teachers and nurses and Jewish Agency reps. But not every visitor was what they seemed.
Chapter Four: Escape
In October of 1945, forty new ma’apilim arrived at Alit. But when the inmates swarmed them, asking the usual questions, they were met with baffled stares. These ma’apilim had not come from the rubble of Europe, and they didn’t understand Yiddish or Romanian or Polish.
Their native language was Arabic. They had escaped Iraq.
We’ve spoken before about the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world – link the show notes. We’ve talked about how quickly Nazism took off in Iraq, about the Farhud pogrom of 1941, about the growing persecution of Iraqi Jews. And we’ve probably mentioned the staggering statistic that once upon a time, less than a century ago, the city of Baghdad was between a quarter and a third Jewish.
By 1951, the vast majority of those Jews would be gone.
But this was 1945, not 1951, and there was no State of Israel for Iraqi Jews to run to. No sanctuary to protect them from their neighbors. The 40 Iraqis who had been detained at Atlit were not allowed to stay. The British weren’t about to send Holocaust survivors back to Europe – at least, not yet, though they did sink to that low in 1947 – but Iraq wasn’t war-ravaged Europe. The Iraqi ma’apilim were allowed to rest for a couple days after their journey, but after that, they’d be shipped right back to where they came from.
It’s hard to believe that the British didn’t know that this was a death sentence. British soldiers had seen the aftermath of the 1941 Farhud pogrom. They knew that Nazism had flourished in the country, that “Zionists” were closely monitored. But they were the British Empire! They had bigger problems than the life – or death – of forty Arabic-speaking Jews.
This is what it means to be a stateless minority – a pawn to be sacrificed on the geopolitical chessboard. There is no one to fight for you. No one to care whether you live or die.
No one… except your fellow Jews.
And the Jews of the Yishuv had not helped their brothers and sisters escape just to have them thrown back to the wolves.
[insert footage]
(32:34 – 34:44)
…Most of us associate the Holocaust and all those years with European Jewry, but at that time, there were about … 800,000 Jews living in Arab countries, like Morocco and Iraq and Tunis and Libya, about 800,000. Now, for those Jews to leave those countries, it wasn’t even as easy as the Jews coming out of Europe. There were no forests, there were no waterways, no rivers. To get out of a country like Iraq, you had to go through desert, which would be almost impossible to do on your own.
Now, in all of these countries, there were Jewish youth groups being set up. They were preparing people for a day when they would be able to leave and to come to the new state of Israel. And as it becomes clear that a new state, country is going to be born, the Arab population calls out to their Arab brethren in these countries to make even more trouble for the Jews that are there already.
(40:04 – 40:50)
… The reason why you mostly hear about Europe and you don’t hear about the Jews coming out of these Arab countries is because they wanted to keep it quiet because these people that did succeed in coming out, they left families there. They left parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters, and they were afraid for the repercussions that would be made on their family if it became known.
[back to Noam]
If these 40 ma’apilim were sent back to Iraq, it wouldn’t just be a death sentence for them. Their families would be targeted, too. So the Haganah – the largest underground Jewish paramilitary in Mandate Palestine – decided to do something about it.
It was time to break the ma’apilim out of Atlit. And they would do it with… Hebrew teachers. Or at least, crack fighters posing as Hebrew teachers.
Co-leading the mission was a 23-year-old Jerusalem-born future Israeli war hero, Prime Minister, peace icon, and, most importantly, the subject of a recent crossover episode of Unpacking Israeli History and Jewish History Nerds. Highlight of his resume, for sure.
But in October of 1945, Yitzhak Rabin wasn’t thinking about his future political and military career. He was busy figuring out how to break every prisoner out of the Atlit detention camp.
The plan he devised went like this.
Seven elite Haganah fighters, members of the Palmach, would enter the camp. As they pretended to teach Hebrew, they would case the place, noting the number of entrances and exits and guards and dogs. They would memorize the guard schedule, the number and placement of prisoners, the fastest way out. Later that night, they would return under cover of darkness with bolt cutters, guns, and a much larger fighting force to break everyone out.
On paper, it sounded simple. But the execution would be much harder.
The British could send the Iraqi ma’apilim back any day now, which meant the mission was a rush job. Plus, the camp was full of malnourished, physically frail Holocaust survivors, not to mention children and the elderly. People who couldn’t move very fast. People who might want to schlep all the meager belongings they had left.
But there is no such thing as a perfect mission, especially not with so many lives at stake. If the Palmach waited too long, 40 Jews would die.
So on the night of October 10, 1945, seven “Hebrew teachers” (and I say that with quotation marks) cut a hole in the barbed wire fence, letting in the rest of the strike force to silence the guards and guide the inmates towards freedom.
Within minutes, the young Palmachniks had babies on their backs, toddlers in their arms, and rows of silent, giddy inmates trailing them towards freedom. Or at least towards the steep, thorny cliffs of the Carmel Mountain range, which they had to climb in the darkness, loose rocks sliding under their feet. The young, healthy Palmachniks had not bargained on how slow and tedious the climb would be. Many years later, Rabin recounted that quote, “halfway up (the mountain), I thought I’m really sweating.” And then he realized: quote, “the warm, wet trickle down my back was coming from the toddler” who he was holding on his shoulders. But he was good natured about it, laughing, quote, “This is just one of the things I had to do to serve my country.”
Several excruciating hours later, the sun was peeking over the Carmel Mountain Range as 208 newly freed prisoners arrived at the summit, where the members of two local kibbutzim were waiting to greet them. Soon after, the British arrived, demanding the kibbutznikim hand over the prisoners. But they hadn’t bargained on the power of gossip. Word of the mission had spread like wildfire through the Yishuv, and some brilliant person put out the call: we need people to confuse the British.
Soon, the British officers found themselves completely outnumbered, as swarms of Jews descended on the two kibbutzim. Students, farmers, housewives, mechanics, kibbutznikim, entire youth groups: thousands of people, all of whom had come to protect the refugees. Because in the crush, it was impossible for the Brits to ascertain who had escaped Atlit and who was there legally. Eventually, the officers recognized they had lost this battle and drove away to the sound of cheers.
Over the next few days, the 208 former prisoners were assigned to various kibbutzim and other communities, where they were readily absorbed into the rhythm of life in the Yishuv. Enraged and frustrated, the Brits shut down Atlit for good. From now on, they would deport all future ma’apilim to detention camps in Cyprus, where it was a LOT harder to break free. After all, there were no underground Zionist paramilitaries in Cyprus. No community of Jews willing and able to shelter escaped prisoners. No Jewish solidarity.
For the prisoners of these detention camps, the next three years passed with agonizing slowness. But by mid-1948, detention camps were a thing of the past. The British left the Land of Israel, and former detainees streamed in. But this time, they were no longer ma’apilim, but olim chadashim. New ascenders. New immigrants. Legal, welcomed, wanted, and embraced.
So that’s the story of Atlit, and here are your five fast facts.
- On the eve of World War II, British authorities decided that in order to keep the Arab world from falling to the Axis, they would restrict Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.
- The White Paper of 1939 decreed that over the next 5 years, only 75,000 Jews would be allowed into Mandatory Palestine – just as Europe’s Jews most needed a safe haven.
- The Jewish underground sneaked in as many refugees as they could, but 90% of these ma’apilim – illegal immigrants – were caught by the Brits and sent to detention camps.
- One of these camps was in Mandatory Palestine itself. Tens of thousands of ma’apilim passed through the Atlit detention camp, until the Palmach orchestrated a mass breakout in October of 1945.
- After that, Atlit was shut down, and ma’apilim sent to Cyprus instead, where they would be interned until the establishment of the State of Israel.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s the enduring lesson as I see it.
To me, the story of Atlit isn’t really about a prison. It’s about a doorway. Or maybe more accurately, a locked door.
For nearly two thousand years, Jews prayed toward one place. Three times a day, they asked God to bring our exiles home.
In Hebrew:
תְּקַע בְּשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל לְחֵרוּתֵֽנוּ וְשָׂא נֵס לְקַבֵּץ גָּלֻיּוֹתֵֽינוּ וְקַבְּ֒צֵֽנוּ יַֽחַד מֵאַרְבַּע כַּנְפוֹת הָאָֽרֶץ:
“Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us together from the four corners of the earth.”
This is what Jews prayed for nonstop for a couple thousand years. It’s pretty direct, and it’s what Jews still say now. Every. Single Day.
At the end of the Passover seder, they chanted Next year in Jerusalem. They dreamed about it. They wrote poetry about it. They cried over it. Then, after surviving history’s greatest catastrophe, they finally reached the Promised Land. Where they were told to wait outside.
Think about how extraordinary that is. For generations, Europe told the Jews they didn’t belong there. Go back to Mandatory Palestine. Except usually they’d shout that with more slurs.
But when Jews tried desperately to get to Mandatory Palestine, they were told: No. You can’t come in. Go back to Poland. Which really meant “you know, it would be a lot more convenient for us if you had died with the rest of your family and friends.”
So the survivors flocking to Mandatory Palestine were stuck between a home they had lost and a homeland they weren’t allowed to enter.
I sometimes hear people yell at Jews today, “Go back to Poland.” Every time, I wonder whether they understand the history packed into those four words. If they realize that go back to Poland means go back to a mass grave. If they even care.
Because you cannot understand the Jewish story without understanding what it means to have nowhere to go. To flee one home, while your homeland remains locked. To spend centuries yearning for a homeland, to finally see it on the horizon… and still be forced to wait behind barbed wire.
That was Atlit. And that’s why Atlit matters.
Because it reminds us that the Jewish story was never only about escaping persecution. It was about ending the condition of having nowhere else to turn. A place where, instead of hearing “Go back,” the first words you hear are: Bruchim Haba’im. Welcome home.