Conclusion

The book Land of Refuge begins with poet Ya’akov Orland, a child survivor of the pogrom in Tetiev. It concludes with poet Isaac Lamdan, who also lived through the bloody pogroms in Ukraine. Lamdan, born in 1899 in the town of Mlynov, in the Volhynia district of Ukraine, spent World War I and the civil war wandering from place to place with his brother, who was later murdered in a pogrom.1 He arrived in Palestine in 1920, and three years later, he started writing the poem “Masada.” This poem, published by Hedim in 1927, was dedicated to his brother Moshe, “him of the pure heart and precious soul, who fell on Ukrainian soil during the slaughter of the Jews” and whose burial place is unknown.

Lamdan’s poem, a canonical text for Yishuv society of the 1920s and 1930s, expressed the Yishuv’s values and the belief that the Zionist idea would be fulfilled by halutzim joining the growing Zionist revolution in Palestine. They would come en masse, exhausted but determined to save the Jewish people from their suffering and to restore them to their rightful place in history as they rebuilt Palestine from its ruins:

Open thy gates, O Masada, and let me, the fugitive, enter!

At thy feet, I place my disintegrating soul—place it on the anvil of thy rocks and beat it out, shape it and beat it out anew!

For where more can I take this my weary, stumbling body when all the shells of rest have fallen from it?

. . .

Deliver! I shall close my eyes that they be not drawn to this terrible refuge, and that they be not attracted to its flame.—I pin myself entirely to the bars of your gates:

Open them, Masada, and I, the fugitive, shall come!2

The poem consists of six chapters: “A Fugitive,” “To the Wall,” “Night Bonfires,” “Outside the Camp,” “When Bonfires Die,” and “Not Yet.” With tremendous artistry and linguistic sleight of hand, Lamdan sketched the long history of the Jewish people from antiquity until the fulfillment of the Zionist idea in Palestine. Land of Refuge, from start to finish, is about the first chapter of the poem, focusing on that Jewish refugee—whether from Europe or from an Islamic country—in the 1920s. The refugees are the heroes of the epic story of immigration to Palestine in the first decade of the Mandate; it was they who carried on their backs the Jews’ jug of tears, which was unparalleled until the Holocaust.

Two dramatic events directly and immediately influenced Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1920s: the civil war in Ukraine, in which about one hundred thousand Jews were murdered or wounded, and the quota laws enacted by the US Congress in 1921 and 1924. These events impacted eastern European Jewry and changed the fate of the Jewish people beyond recognition. After the civil war in Russia ended, the tragedy of Ukrainian Jewry became clear. Scores of Jewish communities had been looted, destroyed, and put to the torch. Tens of thousands of Jews had become refugees, seeking asylum in the immigration countries. Meanwhile, the US administration started limiting the number of immigrants allowed into the country, especially Jews and Italians. The throngs of Jews seeking to go to the United States were denied entry visas; they were rejected even before leaving their countries of origin. Thus, Palestine became the main destination country for Jewish migrants in the 1920s. In the space of just two years (1924–1925), some sixty thousand Jews arrived in Palestine, around the same number as in all thirty years of the First Aliya and Second Aliya. The US quota laws had more of an impact on immigration to Palestine than did Zionist ideology, which considered the return of the Jews to their land to be an essential condition for its success.

The discussion in this book about immigration to Palestine rather than the settlement of the newcomers in the country offers several insights that touch on the Zionist movement in the 1920s:

1. Periodization of immigration to Palestine: Tracking immigration to Palestine from the decision-making stage through arrival proves that the historiographical periodization of the Third Aliya and Fourth Aliya is irrelevant. Push factors in the countries of origin, combined with Zionist and British immigration policies, had the greatest impact on immigration to Palestine. Halutzim, immigrants, and refugees arrived in the 1920s in varying proportions. Early in the decade, for instance, large numbers of refugees from Ukraine arrived in Palestine, having fled to Odessa and Constantinople and pressured the Palestine Offices there to let them immigrate. In contrast, in the mid-1920s (the time of the Fourth Aliya), members of Hechalutz and Hashomer Hatzair reached Palestine in growing numbers alongside petty bourgeois Jews.
2. Zionist immigration policy: The pogroms in Ukraine were among the most violent, brutal events in Jewish history until the Holocaust. Jewish communities were destroyed, vanishing without a trace. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, became refugees, and attempted to reach Palestine or anywhere else in the world that would have them. The Zionist movement found itself tested in this tough period, as it had to decide: open the gates of Palestine and assist Jews who had lost everything or close the gates and let in only the wealthy, the fit, and the strong. In other words, it was a choice between the limited absorptive capacity of the developing country and the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees seeking admission. The pogroms took place at a time when immigration to Palestine was almost unrestricted and the Zionist movement had a lot of say in how many immigrants would be allowed in. Weizmann and Sokolow did not take advantage of Commissioner Herbert Samuel’s liberal immigration ordinance; instead, at that fateful time for eastern European Jewry, they chose to limit immigration to just one thousand people. For the first time in the history of the Zionist movement, its leaders had the power to influence the scope and human composition of immigration. They chose to restrict it, giving preference to physically and mentally healthy pioneers over the physically and mentally exhausted immigrants and refugees. At the height of the Fourth Aliya, Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann said, “Our brothers and sisters from Dzika and Nalewki are flesh of our flesh, but the national home will not be built on the model of these streets in the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw.”3 Itamar Ben-Avi wrote in his newspaper Doar Hayom, “At the moment, Palestine is not the answer to the enormous crisis that has struck our nation this year in Russia. We must declare this loudly and openly, paying no attention to outcries against it, no matter who is crying out. The entire fate of our activity here depends on our adherence to this principle without budging even a hair’s breadth. This national enterprise cannot be established on compassion and mercy. Where the national revival on the ancestral land is at stake, compassion cannot be put on the scale.”

   The Zionist leadership’s response to the influx of refugees to Palestine was very different from the reaction of American Jewry to the quota law. In the first years of the British Mandate, the Zionist leadership was able to influence immigration policy. It had the power to open up the country and increase the quota of immigrants. Weizmann, as stated, was afraid that masses of exhausted, destitute refugees would become a burden on the Zionist institutions because the country was not ready to absorb so many immigrants. Ironically, the quota instituted by the Zionist movement under Weizmann’s leadership was the first of the various laws and regulations restricting immigration after World War I. It limited immigration, reduced its scope, and encouraged only productive, strong, healthy elements to come. In contrast, the American Jewish leadership attempted to amend the quota law so that as many Jews as possible could enter the United States. Weizmann gave precedence to the well-being of Palestine, whereas the leadership of US Jewry focused on the welfare of the Jewish people.

3. Establishment of an immigration system for Palestine: The 1920s were characterized by the organization and administration of immigration to Palestine. The British enacted immigration regulations and orders and made sure the entry procedure was orderly and well documented, as was customary in other immigration countries, especially the United States. At the same time, the Zionist movement established an orderly, organized, hierarchical bureaucracy that handled all immigration arrangements. Palestine Offices were opened in almost all the countries of origin; they were subordinate to the aliya bureau in Jerusalem, which gave them instructions and insisted that they be adhered to. The Zionist immigration apparatus took care of Jewish immigrants and assisted them from the time they decided to migrate until they entered Palestine, and it continued to assist those without means in their first days in the country. The Palestine Offices interviewed prospective immigrants, conducted medical exams, helped obtain entry visas and travel papers, escorted the immigrants on their journey to the port of departure, saw to all their needs while they waited to set sail, handled the shipping of their luggage to Palestine, negotiated with the shipping companies to improve conditions on the voyage, purchased tickets for the voyage, and essentially handled every problem that arose before and during the journey to Palestine. When the immigrants reached the shores of Palestine, they were welcomed by representatives of the aliya bureaus in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, who ensured their entry into the country would be easy and quick. Representatives met them first on board the ship, during British passport control, and accompanied them to the disinfection station and the quarantine camp. Immigrants who had no relatives to help them and who were unfamiliar with the country were housed in immigrant homes, where they were assisted until they acclimatized in their new land.

   The Zionist immigration policy created problems for the Palestine Offices. Their staffs were forced to maneuver between pressure from the masses seeking to escape to Palestine and the selective immigration policy that restricted their freedom of action and limited their discretion. The Zionist Executive’s instructions were clear, leaving no room for interpretation: undesirable elements (particularly refugees from the pogroms) who were incapable of participating in the building of Palestine and would be burdens were not to be allowed to immigrate. The policy reflected the stance of the Zionist movement, which portrayed itself in the 1920s as the national movement of the Jewish people and not its rescue movement. However, the immigration apparatus had another function as well. Along with providing aid to immigrants and seeing to their welfare, the Zionist movement managed to oversee all stages of immigration to Palestine. The movement restricted and regulated immigration, expedited or delayed it, and most importantly made sure that only “desirable” immigrants came. Hundreds of immigration officials in all the countries of origin of Jewish migration—whether willingly or unwillingly—enforced the selective immigration policy of the Zionist movement, which at the time preferred the welfare of the country over the welfare of the Jewish people. Undesirable immigrants were rejected as early as the interview stage or the medical exams, and their journey to Palestine was delayed or prevented. Immigration officials rejected Bolsheviks, sick people, those with disabilities, the elderly, and people with no occupation and no means, doubting their ability to settle in Palestine and contribute to the country as the Zionist movement demanded. This often sealed immigrants’ fate.

4. Immigration from Islamic countries: The Third Aliya and Fourth Aliya are identified with migration from eastern Europe, but in those same years, Jews also arrived from Islamic countries in Asia and the Maghreb. The number of Jews who lived in the Muslim world at the time is estimated at only 2.5 percent of the total Jewish population, but migrants from those countries accounted for 10 percent of total immigration to Palestine. Their motivations were similar to those of the eastern European immigrants: some were refugees from the pogroms in the Uremiyeh region of Iran, others were pushed to migrate due to economic hardship, some migrated for Zionist or religious reasons, and sometimes there was a combination of factors. The Aliya Department’s attitude toward migration from Islamic countries was ambivalent and tainted by arrogance and ignorance; it foreshadowed the State of Israel’s attitude toward North African immigrants in the 1950s. Aliya certificates were doled out meagerly to all the Palestine Offices, but a certain preference was given to the offices in Europe. When the head of the Baghdad aliya bureau pointed out that the Kurdish refugees in his city were suffering terribly and had to be sent to Palestine, he was told that the distress of the Jewish refugees from Ukraine was greater, so they were being given priority. The motivations for the immigration of the Jews of the Maghreb were more ideological and thus different from those of the Asian and Yemenite Jews.

Jewish immigration to Palestine is the main topic of this book; its focus is on the Jewish immigrants, with their hardships, troubles, and vacillations; their failures and successes; and finally, their grueling journey to Palestine. Whereas traditional historical scholarship tends to look at migration rather than at the migrant, this work follows the experiences of the immigrants themselves and the system that supported them or turned them away. The standard historiographical division into five waves of immigration blurred the heterogeneous composition of the immigrant population and turned it into a homogeneous, faceless, nameless mass. The immigrants’ stories were jumbled together. The people lost their individuality and their identity as they were swallowed up in the hodgepodge of the immigrants over the years, and they faded in the splendor of Zionist ideology. Therefore, to understand the complexity of immigration in general and of immigration to Palestine in particular, we must extricate the story of the Jewish immigrants from the overarching narrative of Zionism and the dry data of quantitative statistical research. The individual immigrant must once again become the protagonist of the drama of immigration—a drama whose plot is full of ups and downs, great hopes and successes, but also crises and bitter disappointments.

The push factors in eastern Europe and in the Muslim world compelled the Zionist leadership to devise an immigration policy and quickly establish the organizational infrastructure needed to help Jews actualize their decision to migrate. In just a few years, the Zionist leadership managed to instill order in the migration process and regulate it. The infrastructure established in the 1920s and the support for migrants throughout all stages of migration made it possible to turn the Balfour Declaration from words into reality.

The arrival of one hundred thousand immigrants and refugees in the first decade of the Mandate laid the demographic foundations on which the national home in Palestine was built. Sheinkin described the immigrants as “folk pioneers” with a healthy national spirit who went to Palestine; settled there; built buildings and roads; planted; earned a living; and through diligence, determination, and survival instinct created the economic and social foundations for healthy national life.

Look at the hundreds of skilled tradesmen among the ordinary Jews who are returning. See how energetically they aspire to take any place, how talented they are at adapting to the new conditions, how patiently they and their families quietly overcome all their initial suffering, and how happy they are when they earn a slice of bread. Are these not pioneers? And how many ordinary Jews did the hardest jobs just to stay in the country—pushing wheelbarrows, carrying loads on their shoulders. How many new immigrants with families learned new trades in Palestine, especially construction work, just in order to feed themselves through their own work. Why shouldn’t these people be called “pioneers” even if they are already middle-aged and have families? In fact, these people are playing a major part in nation-building. They are the strong stones and the strong material.4

Those so-called folk pioneers are the main characters in this book. They include refugees from Ukraine and Uremiyeh, survivors of the pogroms and riots—the homeless, orphans and widows, women who had been raped, the emotionally wounded and fragile. They include immigrants on a grueling journey—those who suffered on the ship and who fell ill on the way, who were detained or sent back, whose suitcases were broken into or stolen. They include ordinary Jews—Polish Jews who had lost their livelihoods, survivors of the famine in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, and survivors of the Bolshevik Yevsektsia. Finally, they include Jews from the fringes of society—the mentally ill who evaded the doctors’ vigilant eyes, people of low morals, thieves, prostitutes, and holders of forged entry visas. Those who didn’t make it into the history books, even as footnotes—this book is about them all.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with the immigrants over the years were workers in the Zionist migration system: the heads of the aliya bureau, the staffs of the Palestine Offices, workers in the immigrant homes, port workers, and so on. Immigration offices were established in the space of a few years in the Jews’ countries of origin, and their employees made the Zionist migration enterprise a reality. These people’s actions, too, have been either forgotten or else criticized and slandered; they and their stories have been left out of the chronicles of immigration to Palestine.

The historiography of immigration to Palestine and Israel has probed and measured immigrants based on their contribution to the Zionist enterprise. Their task was to settle, build, plow, defend, and sacrifice. So long as they served the Zionist ideology, their personal stories fit into the overarching narrative of Palestine, and they found themselves sheltered comfortably within the consensus. But if they exhibited signs of weakness and fatigue, the immigrants became a historiographical footnote. Weak, disconnected, and skeptical people didn’t serve the Zionist narrative; on the contrary, they were liable to cause cracks in it and—heaven forbid—even cast doubt on its vitality. When we focus on refugees and immigrants rather than halutzim and olim, the story of immigration to Palestine becomes more complex and human, centering on the unique stories of ordinary people.