Introduction

The photograph and poem with which this book begins epitomize its central theme: The bloodbath in Ukraine, Yemen, and the Orumiyeh region of Iran between 1917 and 1921 and the story of the persecuted refugees and migrants who experienced the events of those years firsthand are an essential part of the study of immigration to Palestine in the 1920s. Viewing the Third Aliya and Fourth Aliya solely from the perspective of the halutzim or that of the Polish-Jewish petty bourgeoisie misses the mark in terms of historical truth because it detaches immigration to Palestine from its broad historical context and ignores the dramatic, tragic events the Jews of Ukraine and Orumiyeh experienced in the years before the Holocaust.

Four children in rags, survivors of the carnage, face a photographer who memorialized the aftermath of the May 1919 pogrom in the Khodorkov shtetl (Kiev Governorate). The children’s faces are blackened with soot; their hands are bandaged; and they look panic-stricken, confused, and stunned by the terror they have just experienced. The boy in the center of the picture looks to be about six or seven. The other three are clearly teenagers. The girl on the left, with the exposed breast, is supporting her injured, bandaged arm. It is presumably no coincidence that the girl is facing the camera lens in such an undignified, immodest way. Perhaps the photographer was hinting that she had been raped during the pogrom, as many Jewish women in Ukraine were during the civil war.1 We have no way of knowing if the four were related, but they certainly knew one another. We have no idea who helped them or what happened to them afterward. Did they go to the United States or Palestine? Did they stay in Ukraine and eventually perish in the Holocaust, or did they survive? We have no further details about the picture or the people in it, but we do have eyewitnesses to what happened in Khodorkov during the pogrom.

Although the defenders mustered and fought the gang, they quickly discovered that they could not withstand them. Some were killed in the fighting. The others fled up the road toward the Popelnia station, which is twenty parasangs from Khodorkov. But the ruffians pursued them twenty parasangs from the town and cut down the fugitives mercilessly. The entire road was covered in dead bodies. After finishing off the defenders, the murderers returned to the city and started to wipe out the Jews in the city. They killed them viciously: killed, butchered, threw their victims into the Irpin River, condemned them to burn. They murdered men and women, old and young, even small children and suckling infants. They knew no mercy. Almost all their victims were killed with cold steel. Only those who were thrown into the river were shot to finish them off. They set fire to the homes and the other buildings. They took about thirty people to Meir Ribak’s stable, shut the doors, and set fire to the stable. Everyone in the stable was burned. No one survived. After the massacre, farmers with carts were sent to collect the bodies lying in the fields and on the roads, so that they wouldn’t stink up the air. For four days the farmers brought heaps and heaps of dead bodies to the Khodorkov cemetery and buried them in other people’s graves. One hundred twenty victims in one grave. But they were unable to collect all the victims. Many were left lying in the fields and on the roads and were eaten by dogs and wild animals. Even afterwards, farmers kept finding large numbers of bodies in gardens and fields and they brought them to town for burial. Up to two thousand people were murdered.2

Kiev: A Poem; and Two Drafts of a Poem in Memory of Tetiev Ya’akov Orland

All my life I have written of Tetiev.

After three score and ten, nearly eighty years—

I am still writing of Tetiev.

In all my scrawls—Tetiev is there, if only at the tip of my pen.

Whether I said Kiev, Kishinev, Galaţi, or Constanţa,

Whether I said Constantinople,

Jaffa, Tel Hai, Kefar Giladi, Migdal, Tiberias,

Or spoke of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa—be it long ago or here and now . . .

Tetiev has stalked me constantly.

Like an enemy.

Like a huntsman, trapping and despoiling quarry.

Throughout my youth and young adulthood,

My wanderings around the world,

My kin,

Even my parents’ blessings

And my airs’ metaphorical wings—

All their footsteps are dogged by the day of Tetiev.

It pursues me relentlessly

Since the early morn when I—hitherto a lad haunted by ghostly dreams—

Called out to a God who didn’t answer.3

In the summer of 1921, after a long journey, Eliezer and Batya Orland arrived in Palestine with their seven-year-old son, Ya’akov. They had survived a brutal pogrom in Tetiev, Ukraine, by the skin of their teeth. Four thousand Jews in the town had been murdered, including eight members of their family.4 Ya’akov, five years old at the time, had hidden in the garbage barrel in their yard. Through a crack in the barrel, he watched his relatives being murdered and saw his grandfather’s severed head rolling at his feet. In a lull between attacks, he fled with his mother to a nearby church, where they found refuge. After the pogrom, his family went to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. From there, they crossed the Dnieper and Dniester Rivers to Bessarabia and lived in Kishinev for about a year.

In January 1921, the Orlands reached the port city of Constanţa; from there, they sailed to Palestine via Constantinople.5 They lived first in Kefar Giladi and then moved from place to place: Tel Yosef, Migdal, Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, Ya’akov attended the Tachkemoni school, and after his family moved to Tel Aviv, he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium. He graduated from the Hebrew Gymnasium in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem. Throughout his life in Palestine and Israel, Ya’akov retained the “anguish of silence and the landscape of speechlessness” that had seared him with fear at the bottom of that garbage barrel in the Ukrainian shtetl. In 1985, while in his seventies, he wrote, “From the age of five, Tetiev has filled me with horror and fear as a chaotic, bloody town, merciless and corpse-strewn, that would be best obliterated from under God’s heaven. But such is the scorn of fate that Tetiev was not obliterated; only its Jews were. Its forests are thicker than ever, the acacias are growing madly, and the lilacs yearn. There is always something there. Bits of memories of Tetiev have burned and scorched me on and off since the pogroms in April 1919, which I witnessed and was physically involved in.”6 The pogrom was a significant event in Ya’akov Orland’s life. It shaped his personality and remained with him throughout his years in Palestine and Israel until his dying day: “All my life I have been writing Tetiev. After seventy years, or the threshold of eighty—I am still writing Tetiev.”7

The Orlands were not the only family to go to Palestine after surviving a pogrom. Many refugees arrived in Palestine in the 1920s who, like Orland, carried with them the trauma of the Ukrainian civil war and the murder of their family members,. The refugees were part of a larger wave of migrants, most of whom hoped to go to the United States. Scattering throughout eastern and central Europe, they tried desperately, against all odds, to obtain the precious visa for the United States, which had closed its gates to immigration at one of the Jewish people’s hardest times.

Along with the refugees from the Ukrainian pogroms, Jews who had lost their livelihoods in Poland, Bolshevik Russia, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen arrived in Palestine in the 1920s. The severe famine in Russia claimed many casualties, while the economic crisis in Poland drove the Jews into desperate, unrelenting poverty. Iraq heavily taxed its middle class, thereby eroding the status of Jewish merchants. In Yemen and Iran, Jews were persecuted and marginalized both socially and economically. Halutzim and members of youth movements also arrived in those years, drawn by Zionist ideology and the desire to build a just, equal society in Palestine.

The historiography of the Yishuv (Jews living in Palestine before the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel) has divided immigration to Palestine in the 1920s into two waves with different social compositions and motivations. The Third Aliya (1919–1923) has always been identified by Zionist historians as halutzic aliya, whereas the Fourth Aliya (1924–1928) is characterized as bourgeois and petty bourgeois. The young people of the Third Aliya came from the pioneering youth movements. They settled in the periphery of Palestine, founded the Labor Battalion, established moshavim and kibbutzim, and farmed the land. The members of the Fourth Aliya settled in the big cities and worked in skilled trades and commerce.

This division into two waves, however, does not faithfully reflect Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1920s. The vast majority of Jews who entered the country in those years did not belong unequivocally to either of those waves from an ideological or social standpoint. Had they been asked, they no doubt would not have known whether they were part of the third wave or the fourth. Most were refugees and immigrants, survivors of the bloodbath in Ukraine or the pogroms in Orumiyeh; for them, Palestine was a last resort or land of refuge after the countries across the Atlantic had refused to let them in.

Although the familiar division into waves of aliya took shape in the minds of their contemporaries, that does not mean historians must accept it unquestioningly. The economic historian Nachum Gross, for instance, has proposed examining the Mandate period based on long-term processes such as economic growth or immigrant absorption rather than short periods such as waves of immigration. Gross maintains that the distinction between the Third Aliya and the Fourth Aliya is dubious because the immigrants were socioeconomically diverse at the time of the Third Aliya; a large proportion of them came from a distinctly Polish, middle-class background.8

I accept Gross’s fundamental assertion that the boundaries of the Third Aliya and Fourth Aliya were fuzzy. Unlike Gross, however, my research indicates that the boundaries of the study were dictated not by the economy of Palestine but by European geopolitics after World War I and by the Zionist and British immigration policies that took shape in the 1920s. The heroes of Land of Refuge are ordinary immigrants, those who carried Jewish people’s suffering on their backs and decided to migrate with their families from Europe, North Africa, and Asia to Palestine. Some were welcomed by the Zionist establishment; others came despite it and against its recommendation. At the heart of this story is not their actions in Palestine after they settled there but the bumpy road they traveled on their way, from their vacillations about emigrating until their arrival on the shores of Palestine. The hardships of integration and acclimatization in the new land are therefore not addressed in this work.

The 1920s were fateful years for Jewish immigrants. The geopolitical situation had changed unrecognizably after World War I, making their lives more difficult: the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had broken up, and the new countries that had arisen ex nihilo atop their ruins violated the Jews’ rights and worsened their living conditions. In the brutal civil war that broke out in Ukraine, one hundred thousand Jews were murdered or wounded, and tens of thousands became refugees throughout Europe. In Palestine, the new British Mandate instituted immigration regulations that limited the entry of Jews. The United States passed immigration quota laws in 1921 and 1924 and finally closed its gates to the immigrants. The American quota laws changed the direction of Jewish migration, as tens of thousands of Jews had no choice but to go to Palestine instead of America. Once in Palestine, they surprisingly energized the Zionist enterprise and helped it strengthen its demographic, economic, and social hold on the country.

The pogroms against Russian Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formed an inseparable part of the Zionist narrative and ethos. They were perceived as proof that Zionism was right and served as an impetus for further immigration to Palestine. The pogroms in the southern Pale of Settlement in 1881 spurred Leon Pinsker to write Autoemancipation and led to the founding of the Hibbat Zion movement. The first members of Bilu arrived in Palestine, followed by the farmers of the First Aliya. The Kishinev pogrom, on the eve of Passover 1903, came as a severe shock to the Jewish world and the Zionist movement. Forty-nine Jews were murdered, and a delegation headed by Chaim Nachman Bialik was dispatched to investigate the pogroms. The delegation’s mission was to take testimony from the victims and to gather the investigative material necessary to bring the accused to justice. In 1904 and 1905, more than three thousand Jews were murdered in hundreds of outbreaks of violence in the southern Pale of Settlement. The first halutzim of the Second Aliya arrived in Palestine at that time, and they brought with them the idea of Jewish self-defense.

The Third Aliya and Fourth Aliya are not usually identified with the pogroms in Ukraine. Despite the destruction wreaked in the Ukrainian civil war, Zionist historiography has not attributed great importance to it. After the Balfour Declaration and the British promise to establish the national home of the Jewish people in Palestine, there was no longer an ideological need for pogroms and the murder of Jews to justify the Zionist idea. In 1964, Am Oved published the thousand-page Sefer ha-Aliya ha-Shelishit (The book of the Third Aliyah).9 Its editor, Yehuda Erez, set forth the history of the Third Aliya from the training camps in eastern Europe to the establishment of the Labor Battalion and the first kibbutzim and workers’ moshavim in the Jezreel Valley. Wrinkled halutzim nearing the end of their days recalled starting out in Palestine, describing it with great nostalgia. Thus, the slaughter of Ukrainian Jewry faded from the national collective memory and was not etched in it as a decisive historical event like the pogroms in 1881 and the Kishinev pogrom.

Historical scholarship has also done little to link immigration to Palestine in the 1920s with the carnage during the Ukrainian civil war. Baruch Ben-Avram and Henry Near dealt critically with the Third Aliya period in their book Iyunim ba-Aliya ha-Shelishit: Dimui u-Metsiut (Studies in the Third Aliyah: image and reality). They noted a disparity between the image and reality but ignored the murder of Ukrainian Jewry, which they did not consider a major factor in immigration to Palestine.10 David Shapira and Moshe Lissak’s studies about the start of immigration to Palestine also completely disregard the impact of the pogroms.11 In her book Be-Meruts Kaful Neged ha-Zeman (Dual race against time), about immigration policy in the 1930s, Aviva Halamish notes that there was a large number of aliya applicants in the early 1920s because “eastern European Jewry suffered from persecution and pogroms. The plight of Ukrainian Jewry was particularly grave, as they found themselves on the battlefield between the Whites and the Reds in the winter of 1918/1919. From late 1917 until 1920, some 75,000 Jews were killed there, tens of thousands were wounded, women were raped, and a great deal of Jewish-owned property was plundered and destroyed.”12 In Mi-Bayit Leumi li-Medina ba-Derekh (From national home to a state in the making), Halamish addresses factors that pushed eastern European Jews to emigrate. Among them were the pogroms in Ukraine.13 Halamish is the exception that proves the rule. However, although she does emphasize anti-Jewish discrimination and persecution in her study of immigration to Palestine in the 1930s, even she does not portray the pogroms as a constitutive event that should be used as the basis for exploring immigration to Palestine in the 1920s.14

In this volume, I consider immigration to Palestine in a broader historical context. I maintain that it is impossible to understand the essence of that immigration without addressing the slaughter of Ukrainian Jewry and its consequences for eastern European Jews. It was a national catastrophe on a scale previously unknown to modern Jewry, although it was overshadowed by the extermination of European Jewry during World War II. The pogroms in Ukraine are a thread running through this book from the first chapter to the last, as they are relevant to various aspects of immigration to Palestine.

The story of immigration to Palestine between 1919 and 1927 is not only an eastern European one. About 10 percent of the immigrants in those years came from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and the Maghreb. In Orumiyeh, Armenians massacred Jews; in Yemen, the Jews were degraded, persecuted, and discriminated against. Bereft of hope and financial prospects, they viewed Palestine as a lifeline and refuge. Arriving overland, they became an integral part of the immigrant population in the 1920s. Any perspective that does not consider all the immigrants to Palestine during the Mandate period, and in the 1920s in particular, is deficient and may skew our understanding of history.

One of the outstanding characteristics of immigration between the two world wars was regulation by means of laws and orders. Before World War I, migration policies were open and free. People could leave their homes and go to any country without a passport or visa. They needed only to pass their medical exams and prove to immigration officials that they had enough money to live on while starting out in the new land. After the war, conservative migration policies limited immigrants’ choice of destinations. The United States passed laws imposing quotas for each country of origin, and in Palestine, the Mandatory government issued immigration permits (“certificates”) sparingly, and only for various categories of immigrants.

The development of the Mandatory and Zionist immigration policies, political influences on the distribution of the certificates, and the bureaucratic procedures involved in entering Palestine directly impacted immigration to Palestine in the 1920s. Immigrants had to cross a field of administrative thorns to obtain visas and aliya certificates. Some had a hard time understanding the ever-changing immigration laws, and many were forced to rely on assistance from the Palestine Offices and Jewish migration societies that had been established in Europe.

One outcome of the new global and Mandatory immigration policies was the establishment of a hierarchical bureaucracy that dealt with all aspects of immigration to Palestine. By focusing on immigration policy, we can trace the Zionist movement’s deliberations regarding the character of Jewish immigration to Palestine and its dilemma as to the desirability of different categories of immigrants amid pogroms, government persecution, and economic hardship between 1919 and 1927. An aliya bureau headed by Professor Hermann Pick was established to resolve this dilemma. In addition, the Zionist movement established Palestine Offices in the main countries of origin of Jewish migration as well as aliya bureaus in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem. In meetings held after World War I, the Zionist General Council and the Zionist Congress decided to establish a Palestine Office in every country where there were Jews who wanted to go to Palestine. These offices would be subordinate to the Zionist Organization and would receive instructions from the Aliya Department.

Palestine Offices were indeed established in most countries of origin of Jewish migration, and they helped immigrants from the decision-making stage through their arrival in Palestine. The Aliya Department, based first in London and later in Jerusalem, issued instructions to the Palestine Offices in accordance with Zionist and British immigration policy. Coastal aliya bureaus were established in Haifa and Jaffa. In addition, a bureau in Jerusalem handled arrangements for the immigrants’ entry into Palestine and offered them assistance in their first days in the country.

Alongside the refugees from the pogroms and ordinary immigrants were the other heroes of the book—the professional and executive echelons of the aliya bureaus. They were the ones who greeted the immigrants and removed bureaucratic obstacles. The most prominent of them were the directors of the aliya bureaus in Jaffa (Joshua Gordon), Haifa (Levi Shvueli), and Jerusalem (Ze’ev Leibowitz) and the directors of the Palestine Offices in Europe and around the world, especially Warsaw (Chaim Barlas) and Trieste (Giuseppe Fano). These were highly experienced experts who were intimately familiar with the complexity of the immigration procedures, who dealt with big and small problems concerning entry into the country, and who were ready to suggest sound solutions and methods of action. On more than one occasion, they found themselves between a rock (British and Zionist immigration policy) and a hard place (refugees and immigrants desperate to reach Palestine). In the mid-1920s, Joshua Gordon published an impressive and comprehensive study of various aspects of immigration to Palestine in the first decade of the British Mandate. Gordon addressed the various difficulties and problems the Aliya Department had to contend with after immigration resumed in the first years of the Mandatory regime.15

One methodological challenge for scholars of immigration, and especially of immigration to Palestine, concerns the difficulty of understanding the complexities of the various reasons and motivations for immigration. The decision to uproot oneself from one’s native land and move to a new country is a complicated and difficult one. There is no one consideration or single motivation to emigrate but rather a whole slew of interrelated considerations and motivations. It is not always possible to isolate one component that led to someone moving to a different country. Consequently, terminology is crucial if we want to understand the entire range of factors that brought the immigrants/olim/refugees to Palestine. These terms embody a long list of reasons and motives, and they help us understand the real weight of the push and pull factors in the countries of origin and destination.

Few words in the Hebrew language other than aliya have had such a powerful impact on shaping the collective memory and on how Israeli society interprets history, expresses its national narrative, and delineates its borders. The word aliya embodies a wide world of values that encompasses the totality of thoughts and feelings evoked upon arrival in the Land of Israel. Literally, aliya means movement from a low place to a high place, but in Hebrew it has taken on another sense: Jews coming from the Diaspora to settle in the Land of Israel. The biblical commentators gave the word aliya its values connotation, and the Zionist movement made it a central component of national activity. Aliya is not immigration; in the Zionist discourse, there is a clear, sharp distinction between olim (ideaological immigrants) to the Land of Israel and immigrants to other destinations.

The distinctions between aliya, immigration, and refugeeism and between olim, immigrants, and refugees are among the cornerstones in Zionist thought. Zionist historiography accepted unquestioningly the basic assumption that the first three waves of aliya were pioneering ones and that the Jews who arrived in those years were olim and not immigrants. Jews who went to Palestine starting in the late nineteenth century have been regarded as full-fledged olim. The ideological baggage embodied in the term aliya is so deeply rooted in the Hebrew language that it became hard to distinguish between Jewish immigrants to Palestine and olim. Thus, the Zionist narrative was differentiated from the history of general Jewish migration. It turned aliya into a unique, exceptional phenomenon unparalleled in the history of the Jewish people and other nations.

The first historians of the so-called aliyot recognized that the newcomers included some large groups that were not involved in rural settlement and did not advocate communal living and farming. Yehuda Slutsky, for example, asserted in his book Mavo le-Toldot Tenuʻat ha-ʻAvoda ha-Yisre’elit (Introduction to the history of the labour movement in Israel) that the terms Second Aliya and Third Aliya have two senses: a chronological sense—that is, all Jews who arrived in Palestine in 1904–1914 and 1919–1923; and a sociological-ideological sense, which encompassed a certain subset of olim who brought with them specific national and social views.16 Thus, Israeli historiography absolved itself of having to discuss all immigrants and focused instead on the founders of the moshavot from the First Aliya and the pioneering builders from the Second Aliya and the Third Aliya.

Nevertheless, even in later studies, preference is given to the word aliya over other words describing the movement of people from place to place. Halamish, for instance, claims that “the use of the word aliya in an essay written in Hebrew does not indicate the adoption of a values-based stance; rather, replacing it with other terms is evidence of ideological bias.”17 Avi Picard, in his book about aliya in the 1950s, takes a similar position, arguing that the use of the term aliya for the immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel “has values-based significance. However, the use of the term immigration also attests to a values-based stance that negates the unique significance of Jews coming to the Land of Israel; therefore it is not neutral. Treating aliya as immigration makes it hard to understand the motivations of the olim and of the establishment that brought them over.”18

Historical scholarship on the waves of immigration to Palestine has focused mostly on the integration of the so-called olim and their contribution to the Yishuv. The questions asked deal with the localities they established and the cities in which they settled; the political groupings to which they belonged; the institutions that assisted them and those they themselves founded; and the economic, social, and emotional hardships they experienced in their first years in the country. Immigration to Palestine as a historical event, separate from political or settlement activity in Palestine, has rarely been studied. Five studies have addressed immigration itself rather than aspects of absorption and settlement: Moshe Mossek’s Palestine Immigration Policy under Sir Herbert Samuel: British, Zionist, and Arab Attitudes; Aviva Halamish’s Be-Meruts Kaful Neged ha-Zeman; Magdalena Wrobel Bloom’s Social Networks and the Jewish Migration between Poland and Palestine, 1924–1928; Meir Margalit’s Ha-Shavim be-Dim’a: Ha-Yerida bi-Tekufat ha-Mandat ha-Beriti; and Hagit Lavsky’s The Creation of the German-Jewish Diaspora: Interwar German-Jewish Immigration to Palestine, the USA, and England. These are certainly not representative of scholarship in general.

In their books, Mossek and Halamish discuss immigration policy; Lavsky examines German-Jewish migration in the 1920s and 1930s to three destination countries—Palestine, the United States, and England—from a comparative perspective; Wrobel examines the practical aspects of migration; and Margalit looks at Jews who went to Palestine but for various reasons chose not to stay. Moshe Yakir wrote Toldot ha-Mahlaka la-Aliya shel ha-Histadrut ha-Tsiyonit: Ha-Shanim ha-Rishonot 1919–1927 (The history of the Zionist Organization Aliya Department: the early years, 1919–1927), as an internal Jewish Agency publication from 2006.19 His in-depth study, which describes the activity of the aliya bureau and the Palestine Offices in Europe in the first decade of the Mandate, contributed greatly to this volume.

Land of Refuge is devoted to the early stages of the migration process, from the vacillations and internal wrestling about whether to emigrate and where to go through the migrants’ administrative registration, the start of their journey, the voyage itself, and their arrival on the shores of Palestine. The discussion ends with the immigrants’ arrival on the shores of Jaffa or Haifa or at some overland border crossing. The book begins in 1919 with the resumption of immigration to Palestine after the British conquest and ends in 1927, when departures exceeded arrivals and immigration stopped almost completely. Furthermore, by 1927, the entire bureaucratic array of aliya bureaus had been established, the British and Zionist immigration policies had taken shape, and there were no additional dramatic decisions that affected the scope or social composition of immigration.

The primary sources in this volume consist of correspondence between the Palestine Offices and coastal aliya bureaus and the central aliya bureau in Jerusalem. The documents, which are stored in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, are diverse and rich in content and information: minutes of meetings, lists of applicants for immigration and of people entering the country, letters from Jews expressing interest in immigrating to Palestine and references from their relatives, contracts and agreements with shipping companies, literature offering guidance to immigrants, and many other documents pertaining to immigration to Palestine. Also important are the National Archives of the United Kingdom in the London suburb of Kew; Mandatory government documents stored there provide the British perspective on immigration to Palestine.

The book consists of six chapters. The first chapter examines immigration to Palestine in the broad context of general Jewish migration: the number of Jewish migrants and their destinations, the reasons for the quota laws passed in 1921 and 1924, and the migration societies established in the 1920s to help Jewish migrants through the societies’ cooperation with the Zionist Organization. The second chapter focuses on the push factors in the countries of origin: the pogroms in Ukraine, economic hardship in Bolshevik Russia and Poland, and the Zionist youth movements that pressed their members to settle in Palestine and fulfill the Zionist ideal. The third chapter deals with the British and Zionist policies governing immigration to Palestine in the wake of the violence in 1920–1921 and the refugees from the Ukrainian civil war who started to reach Palestine in increasing numbers. The fourth chapter follows the bureaucracy of immigration: the travel papers needed to go to Palestine, the cost of immigration, and the hardships with which the immigrants had to contend from the moment they contacted the local Palestine Office until they reached the shores of Palestine. The fifth chapter deals with the final stage of the journey, from the Jewish immigrants’ encounter with the Arab boatmen, to the medical exams on board the ship and at the quarantine camp, to the immigrant homes in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. The sixth and final chapter focuses on immigration from Asia and the Maghreb and compares the Palestine Offices’ attitude toward immigrants from Islamic countries with their attitude toward immigrants from eastern Europe.