The basic story of the Exodus 1947 is well known. Not as well known, however, is the fascinating story of its captain.
First, to recap the known: The Exodus, an old ferry boat originally called The President Warfield, is a symbol of Aliyah Bet (illegal immigration to Eretz Yisrael). Its famous voyage was designed to call the world’s attention to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Jews left homeless in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In desperation, the Haganah paid for a dilapidated ship ready for the scrapheap which had been dormant for four years after sailing the waters between Baltimore and Norfolk. The vessel –designed to hold 400 – sailed from the port of Sète (near Marseilles) on July 11, 1947, with 41 crew members (almost all American) and 4,515 passengers, mostly Holocaust survivors.
On July 18, a veritable British armada rammed the ship in international waters just outside Eretz Yisrael and boarded her. The Jews mounted a spirited defense, but to no avail; two passengers and a crewman were killed, 30 were wounded, and the Exodus was towed to Haifa, where the passengers were forced onto deportation ships bound for France.
At Port-de-Bouc, the passengers remained in the ship’s holds for 24 days, refusing to disembark – despite a heat wave, a hunger strike, inhuman crowding, and abominable sanitary conditions. When the French government refused to force them off the boat, the loathsome British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in what proved to be a public relations catastrophe, decided to return the Jews to Germany, “the Land of the Final Solution” or, as one American newspaper headline fittingly characterized it, “Return to the Death Land.”
On August 22, 1947, the ship left for Hamburg, where the Jews aboard were forcibly taken off the boat and transported to two DP camps.
Exhibited above is a rare original Exodus 1947 Certificate issued in the Poppendorf, Germany exile camp. The interior reads: “Holder of this No. _____ is a Maapil of ‘Exodus 1947;’ he/she was brought by force to Germany from Haifa, and is in exile on his way back to Eretz-Israel.”
The fate of the Exodus and its crew commanded international attention, and journalists who covered the dramatic struggle described to the entire world the brutality of the British. Exhibited here is a stunning rarity, an original press telegram sent to the Daily Press in London by “Ginsburg,” an English journalist, upon the arrival of the Exodus in Haifa port:
Haifa refugee ship President Warfield renamed per refugees quote Exodus 1947 unquote was chased at finally boarded per units ex royal navy early morning [stop] when steaming into Haifa harbor at 1620 part of 4500 repeat 4500 immigrants stood on densely crowded upper deck singing Jewish national anthem [stop] Wooden superstructure had been heavily damaged during boarding when refugees resisted fiercely and suffered inflicted casualties to sailors but none fatal [stop] shortly after began transshipment to libership Ocean Vigour [note: one of the deportation ships to which deportees were transferred in Haifa port] one woman had died during journey per childbirth seemingly only fatal casualty [note: this was incorrect – there were three casualties; the newborn son lived] between 1600 men 1300 women 1600 youngsters [stop] when transshipment was in full swing judge president exunscop at yougoslav (sic) representative quote Simich unquote [note: Stanoje Simich, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister] arrived to watch disembarkation which now proceeding smoothly more Ginsburg
Broad public outrage forced the British to change their policy, world condemnation forced them to turn the “Palestine question” over to the UN, and the Exodus undoubtedly contributed to the UN vote in favor of partitioning of Eretz Yisrael and the birth of a Jewish state. Although many of the Exodus passengers could not make aliyah until after the establishment of the State of Israel, most of them ultimately settled there.
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Shown here is an incredibly rare photograph of the Exodus inscribed by its captain on the upper right: “To Michael, son of my old friend Nelly, from Ike (Yitzchak Aronowitz).” Born in Lodz, Poland, Aronowitz (1923-2009) moved with his family first to Danzig and then to Eretz Yisrael in 1933. He became a seaman at age 17 when, wanting to fight the Nazis but unwilling to join the Jewish Brigade because “the British gave us lousy jobs,” he stowed away on a Histadrut-owned Solel Boneh ship to Odessa. He planned to join the Russian Army there, but he was caught and returned home.
Desperate to sail, he bribed a fellow named Perlman to arrange for him to board a Palestinian ship sailing from Haifa to Tobruk (in northern Libya) and, after sailing on various ships, he took officers’ courses in London. Upon his return to Eretz Yisrael in 1942, he learned that the Palmach had launched a naval division called Palyam and, eager to join, he persuaded his friend Yitzchak Sadeh – who happened to be the co-founder of the Palmach and its first commander – to intercede on his behalf.
Aronowitz sailed as first mate aboard The President Warfield from Baltimore under a non-Jewish American captain who was paid off after crossing the Atlantic Ocean. A practiced seaman by Israeli standards – he had a whole eight months of sailing experience – he was appointed captain of the Exodus at age 23 with Haganah codename “Ike.” After the ship set sail from France on July 11, 1947, the Haganah radioed the ship and ordered it to change its name to the “Exodus 1947.”
Notwithstanding his lack of experience, Aronowitz proved to be a skilled and bold commander. Successfully avoiding detection by French authorities while sailing out of Marseille, he dangerously navigated through narrow channels at night and maneuvered in a port made for ships one tenth the Exodus’s size without the assistance of a tug, which the ship could not afford, and with no support from a heavily-bribed French pilot, who failed to appear.
Although Aronowitz had operational command of the Exodus, political command was under the Haganah’s man, Yossi Harel, whom Aronowitz, chafing under his interference, characterized as “a guy who didn’t even know what the inside of a ship looked like, let alone how it worked.” (Paul Newman’s character in the famous Otto Preminger movie was modeled after Harel.)
The battle of leaders came to a head as the ship approached the coast of Eretz Yisrael and was cornered by the British navy. Harel urged surrender, but Aronowitz rebelled by, amongst other tactics, throwing cans of kosher corned beef at British seaman attempting to board. Three passengers were murdered, including an American crew member and a young Jew who was clubbed to death and died in Aronowitz’s bunk.
Aronowitz took control of the ship’s steering and planned to ground the Exodus at maximum speed on the soil of Eretz Yisrael and to free the refugees into the hands of Haganah fighters waiting for them. He explained how the ship was in no danger of sinking, but Harel, who believed that the old hulk could not survive such a desperate maneuver, followed Ben-Gurion’s order to surrender, a decision that infuriated Captain Ike to his dying day. Aronowitz believed that Harel’s capitulation was the seminal event leading to the U.N. decision to divide Eretz Yisrael.
Within a year of the failed attempt by the Exodus to bring its Holocaust-survivor passengers to their Jewish homeland, Aronowitz went on to captain another large illegal immigration ship called the Kibbutz Galuyot (“Ingathering of the Exiles”). After Israel’s War of Independence, he became a ship owner, running lines to China, Singapore, and Iran; continued to sail; and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University.
From 1993 until his death, he lived in Zichron Yaakov, where his love of the sea manifested itself in the design of his home: He built a family residence shaped like a ship, including rooms in a row, a reproduction of a mast, and large windows offering a broad view of the Mediterranean.
Captain Ike strongly disapproved of Uris’ famous novel which, though it became a legendary part of the founding mythology of Israel, was a fictionalized version that significantly altered important facts. When Uris was researching his novel in 1956, he interviewed Aronowitz, who told him: “You’re a very gifted writer, but not a historian, and therefore it shouldn’t be you writing the history of the Exodus.”
Uris was insulted but, as Aronowitz later told the press, “I turned out to be right” because “neither the book nor the movie had anything to do with reality…Exodus, shmexodus.”
The Exodus remained in Haifa harbor along with other refugee ships captured by the British until Abba Khoushi (born Schneller), the mayor of Haifa, figured out that he could promote broad interest in his city by turning the historic ship into a floating museum. However, as the commonly accepted story goes, it caught fire and burned shortly afterward (in 1952) – the cause disputed, but ultimately unknown – and the remaining shell was towed to Shemen Beach, where it was sunk; Aronowitz called it “the greatest tragedy of my life.”
On August 23, 1964, an Italian firm tried to retrieve the hulk of the ship for scrap metal, and a heart-rending photograph exists of Aronowitz watching the failed effort. In The Jews’ Secret Fleet (1987), authors Joseph M. Hochstein and Murray S. Greenfield report that soon after, a contractor to the Israel Port Authority raised the hulk and towed it to the River Kishon, where it was scrapped. According to an article by Brent Dibner, a respected Israeli Navy historian and philanthropist, some of the machinery of the Exodus was decomposing in Haifa’s municipal dump as late as 1975.
The original bell of the Exodus and an outstanding scale model of the vessel may be seen at the Maryland Jewish Museum in Baltimore; there is a marker to the ship at the city’s Inner Harbor promenade (dedicated 1997); and monuments to the ship may be found in other countries, including France, Italy, and even Germany.
Incredibly, however, there was no memorial to the Exodus in Israel until July 18, 2017 (the 70th anniversary of the British attack) when, through the efforts of Jerry Klinger, president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, a monument was dedicated at Haifa port in a ceremony attended by some 150 Exodus passengers.
Klinger’s fascinating story begins with his effort to identify the precise location of Shemen Beach and to enlist support to erect a memorial to the ship there because, he believed, “the Exodus is too important a story to let simply slip beneath the waves.” However, after conducting extensive research, he was chagrined to discover that notwithstanding the iconic importance of the Exodus in Israel’s history and lore, no one could identify the location of the beach. (Klinger’s article on this subject, “In Search of the Exodus,” is a terrific read.)
Finally, after Klinger tracked down Brent Dibner, he was advised that Shemen Beach no longer exists due to landfill expansions in the Port of Haifa; that, in any case, the entire relevant coastline area is off limits to the public; but that a map he was provided marks the precise spot where the remains of the Exodus could be found. Klinger met with Ronen Zaretzky, an editor at Haaretz and a co-producer of “The Sand and the Sea.” In one of the final scenes of the film, Aronowitz stands at the bow of a small fishing boat sailing into Haifa harbor and, pointing to a pier, tells the helmsman, “It is there.”
After Aronowitz’s death, then-President Shimon Peres, noting that the Exodus set sail only because of Captain Ike’s leadership, courage, and tenacity, described him as not only the ship’s captain, but also as “its spirit” who “gave the voyage a special character” and who manifested great love for the Jewish people.
