c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Many great moments in history have taken place in the Mediterranean Sea, and last week (July 1-3) another chapter was added to that list of extraordinary events.

Six hundred jubilant American Jewish teenagers _ members of the North American Federation of Temple Youth (NFTY), Reform Judaism’s youth organization _ sailed from a Mediterranean port to Haifa, Israel, on a ship that re-created the turbulent July 1947 journey of the “Exodus.”

That voyage was made famous in the 1960 movie bearing the ship’s name that starred Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. Author Ruth Gruber’s book about the “Exodus” vividly describes how 58 years ago, 4,515 Jewish Holocaust survivors, including 655 children, crammed on board a Chesapeake Bay steamer in Site, France, and sailed for Haifa, the chief port of British Mandate Palestine.

The small 1,814-ton ship, built in 1928, was originally designed to hold only 300 passengers, and as the “President Warfield,” it had once peacefully ferried passengers between Baltimore and Norfolk, Va. The ship was named for S. Davies Warfield, the ferry line’s president, and the uncle of Wallis Warfield, the future Duchess of Windsor.

But in 1947, the Haganah, the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, purchased the ship whose top speed was only 15 knots. It sailed from Baltimore for Site in late February of that year where the desperate Jewish refugees were waiting to leave blood-stained Europe for Haifa and begin new lives in the Jewish homeland that became the independent state of Israel in May 1948.

But this was no ordinary ferryboat ride. In 1947, Britain had thrown up a tight blockade to prevent Jews from “illegally” entering Haifa or any other part of the Holy Land’s coastline. After loading the Holocaust survivors onto the “President Warfield,” the overcrowded ship was renamed the “Exodus” and flew a Honduran flag. But no one was fooled by the Haganah’s ruse, certainly not the British naval forces patrolling the Mediterranean.

Perhaps fearful of the severe damage that 4,515 Jews _ especially the frightened children _ could inflict on the mighty Royal Navy, the “Exodus” was trailed in its slow eastward voyage by the British cruiser “HMS Ajax,” five destroyers, and two minelayers.

On July 18, 1947, as the “Exodus” neared Haifa, the British rammed the ship and forcibly boarded it. Two refugees and a crewman were killed and 30 other Jews were wounded in the on-board battle.

Conditions on the “Exodus” were life-threatening. Gruber, an eye witness to the saga, wrote: “The ship looked like a matchbox that had been splintered by a nutcracker … we could see a muddle of bedding, overflowing toilets, half-naked men, women looking for children …” Many of the women handed Gruber their babies. One mother cried: “I’m going to stay alive so my child won’t be burned in a gas chamber. I’m going to live in decency without being afraid. There are no frontiers to Jewish hope.”

The “Exodus” was towed to Haifa, and the British returned the Jews to Port-de-Bouc France in three other ships. But the refugees refused to disembark, and the French authorities did not force them off the boats.

Finally after three weeks, the British, in a colossal public relations catastrophe, decided there was only one other place to send the Jews. Where else but Germany? Once there, the Jews, whose mistreatment by the British had caught the world’s attention, were interned in two camps nears Lubeck.

World public opinion was furious at the British and the obscenity in detaining Jews behind barbed wire in Germany. The British again moved the group, this time to Cyprus, where the Jews of the “Exodus” remained until the new state of Israel warmly welcomed them as citizens.

The “President Warfield/Exodus” burned in 1952 at Haifa and was ultimately scrapped in 1963. But the ferryboat’s final voyage gained it immorality and a permanent place in Jewish history. Gruber aptly called it “The Ship That Launched a Nation.”

Last week as the NFTY teenagers joyously sailed the same route as the “Exodus,” they were joined by two of the 4,515 refugees _ a couple who had met on the ship, later married, and settled in Israel since those tumultuous days.

As they neared Haifa, and saw Mount Carmel and the Israeli shoreline coming into view, the American Jewish youngsters joined the “Exodus” couple in singing “HaTikvah” (The Hope), Israel’s national anthem _ the same song the Jews sang 58 summers ago as they defied the Royal Navy and broke the back of the British Mandate.

KRE/JL END RUDIN

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)