Aliyah Beth Museum Atlit
Visited the Aliyah Beth Museum in Atlit today. It was raining something awful. The museum has dry moored a boat that is indeed very similar to the ships that were used to clandestinely bring illegal Jewish immigrants (Ma'apilim) to the shores of then British Palestine. It has been refitted to simulate the experience of what it was like for these immigrants to crowd like sardines aboard a rickety boat and hope to arrive safely on the shores of the Land of Israel. The rain today was so intense I thought that the boat was going to somehow rise off the ground like Noah's ark and return to the sea. This didn't happen and I enjoyed reliving the intense boatride that brought ~130,000 courageous Jewish immigrants to the shores here. The Atlit detention camp built in 1940 was where the British detained the Jewish immigrants that did not have one of the infamous limited certificates for immigrant entry. The flow of these Jewish illegal immigrants intensified following WWII with the large amount of Jewish refugees wandering around Europe looking for a safe new home. To prevent this illegal immigration the British established a blockade off the coastline and too often the British would capture and forbid the immigrants from entering into British Palestine. The captured immigrants were then detained and as their population in Atlit swelled the growing overflow were forcibly transferred to "isolation" on the island of Cyprus for detention. The original building at Atlit that was used to disinfect the newly arrived immigrants still stands. Here many of the post WWII immigrants arriving in Atlit were eerily subjected to British
instructions that the Jewish men and women be stripped and
separated before going into the showers. The clothes were then not cleaned but steamed at high temperatures to kill lice, germs, and disease. The immigrants were sprayed with white DDT powder. I left realizing again how despite those difficult times spent in the Atlit Detention Camp that these Jewish immigrants were not discouraged and were full of hope for the new life they would be building in a new Jewish State named Israel.
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