Preface

My first book, Imigrantim: Ha-Hagira ha-Yehudit le-Eretz-Yisrael be-Reshit ha-Me’a ha-Esrim [Immigrants: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century], was published in Hebrew in 2004 (an expanded version was later published in English as An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century). I examined the Second Aliya in the historical context of mass Jewish migration from eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For me, Imigrantim was the starting point for the study of Jewish migration. I continued to follow those ordinary Jews in additional articles and books I wrote about Jewish migration, including but not limited to immigration to Palestine. The more I delved into the history of migration, the more I realized that I could only understand its dynamics, characteristics, and causes if I looked at them from the perspective of the individual migrants and their families. Migrants are the main heroes of the drama of migration, which starts in the country of origin and ends many years after they have arrived at their destination.

Land of Refuge opens with an excerpt from Irving Howe’s monumental, inspirational work World of Our Fathers that expresses the spirit of this book: “A story is the essential unit of our life, offering the magical imperatives of ‘so it began’ and ‘so it came to an end.’ A story encompasses us, justifies our stay, prepares our leaving. Here, in these pages, is the story of the Jews, bedraggled and inspired, who came from eastern Europe. Let us now praise obscure men.” Let us also praise the obscure, bedraggled, inspired Jews who went to Palestine from Islamic countries.

The French-Jewish author and playwright Georges Perec believed that if we want to understand migration from Europe to the United States, we must follow the personal story of each of those millions of immigrants. He attempted to break down the human mosaic of the immigrant population and examine every stone in it individually. As he wrote,

five million emigrants from Italy

four million emigrants arriving from Ireland

one million emigrants arriving from Sweden

six million arriving from Germany

three million emigrants arriving from Austria and Hungary

three million five hundred thousand emigrants arriving from Russia and the Ukraine

five million emigrants arriving from Great Britain

eight hundred thousand emigrants arriving from Norway

six hundred thousand emigrants arriving from Greece

four hundred thousand emigrants arriving from Turkey

four hundred thousand emigrants arriving from the Netherlands

six hundred thousand emigrants arriving from France

three hundred thousand emigrants arriving from Denmark

. . . rather than simply saying: in thirty years

sixteen million emigrants passed through Ellis Island

attempting to give palpable form

to what those sixteen million individual stories were,

the sixteen million stories, identical and distinct,

of the men, women, and children driven

from their native land by famine or poverty,

or by political, racial, or religious oppression,

leaving everything behind—village, family, friends—

taking months and years to set aside

the money needed for the trip,

finding themselves here, in a hall so vast that they never

would have dared imagine that there could anywhere

exist so big a place,

lined up by fours,

waiting their turn.1

The distinction that Perec makes here is important and real. It should be adopted with respect to immigration to Palestine as well, specifically in the context of the British Mandate. To understand the complexity of this distinction, we must extricate the Jewish migrants from the Zionist arch-narrative and from quantitative statistics and make them the official heroes of the drama of migration. The main heroes of Land of Refuge are Howe’s bedraggled, obscure Jews, some of whom really wanted to go to America but could not get in and had to make do with Palestine instead. Here center stage is taken not by the pioneers of the Third Aliya, members of the Labor Battalion, and founders of the first kibbutzim but by ordinary Jewish refugees and emigrants fleeing for their lives from eastern Europe and Islamic countries. Through their personal stories as told here we can come to understand those Jews who crossed border after border and the Mediterranean Basin to embark on new lives in Palestine.

Chronologically, Land of Refuge is a sequel to An Unpromising Land, although it differs in the range of topics and issues covered. An Unpromising Land ends with the outbreak of World War I. Land of Refuge starts with the military regime in Palestine following the British conquest; it focuses on the causes of emigration and the journey to Palestine. It explores the migrants’ fears and misgivings before they arrived on the shores of Palestine. The focus is on the personal experiences, stories, and testimonies of the refugees, immigrants, and olim; these add an important layer to our understanding of Yishuv society during the Mandate period. Land of Refuge is not just a chapter in the history of the Yishuv. It is an integral part of the historiography of Jewish migration in the first half of the twentieth century.

I would like to thank those who assisted me throughout the writing of this book: Dr. Yigal Sitry, director of the Central Zionist Archives; Anat Banin, head of the Photograph Collection; and the entire devoted staff of the archives who spared neither time nor effort and demonstrated extraordinary patience in helping me with all my questions and requests. Thank you also to the dedicated staff of the Center for Jewish History in New York. Special thanks go to Professor Gary Zola, executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, for his generous hospitality and warmth during the time I spent in the archives. I would also like to thank Professor Ilan Troen who accepted my manuscript and found it suitable for publication in his series for Indiana University Press. Ilan also gave me a photo of his grandmother’s grave. His grandmother was murdered in a pogrom during the civil war in Ukraine and the photo was placed in the book. The Troen family history tragically repeated itself when Ilan’s daughter and son-in-law were murdered by Hamas terrorists in the Simchat Torah pogrom in Israel on October 7, 2023. This book is dedicated to them. And, special thanks to the Indiana Press team: Anna Francis, Nancy Lightfoot, Laura Abrams, and Stephen Williams.

I am also grateful to Dr. Galia Hasharoni, a student of mine who, while searching for sources for her own research, drew my attention to important historical documents that contributed greatly to my study. I am indebted to Chaim Sonnenfeld, a great-grandson of Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, the first rabbi of the Eda Haredit in Jerusalem, for his graciousness and endless patience whenever I needed help with Yiddish. I thank Reuven Salomons, perpetual auditor and student, whom I consulted when I had difficulty understanding texts in German.

My thanks also go to Deborah Stern for translating the book from Hebrew to English. I have worked with Deborah for many years and am surprised each time anew by the accuracy and brilliance of her translation and especially by how well she manages to preserve my writing style. Finally, I am grateful to Hilla Klor, my partner in writing the book and editor of the Hebrew edition.