In July 1947, a ship dubbed the Exodus set sail from France to Palestine. More than 4,500 Jewish refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, were on board. That voyage was to become the subject of international renown, after it was turned away by the British and the passengers sent to displaced persons camps in Germany. On the 75th anniversary of the controversy, we explore the real story of what happened to the ship. The episode went on to be fictionalised in Leon Uris’ bestselling 1958 novel.
We welcome Rabbi Roderick Young, whose father was an RAF pilot stationed in Malta from 1946 to 1948. His job was to patrol the Mediterranean Sea looking for Jews to send to the camps in Cyprus. Young learned this while studying to be a rabbi in Jerusalem and it was there, in 1995, that he met Ada, who had been turned back by his father's patrols, and began to ask whether it was his father who turned back the Exodus.
Celia Michaels also joins us. She is the daughter of Ruth Gruber, the American journalist who stood on a wharf in Haifa on 18 July 1947 watching the British board the boat, and first broke the story in the international press. Gruber would go on to publish Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation. Plus, we’ll share exclusive footage of an interview with Naomi Pope, one of the last survivors of the Exodus, recorded by Sephardi Voices not long before she died.
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