When Cyprus Became a Prison for Holocaust Survivors

Aug. 19 2021

Following World War II, Britain continued its pre-war policy of keeping Jews out of the Land of Israel, enforcing it more strictly than ever. Peter Martell writes:

Between August 1946 and February 1949, more than 52,000 Jews taken off 39 boats were detained in a dozen camps in Cyprus. . . . The British wanted the cramped camps to be a “deterrent” aimed at “breaking the power of the ‘Hebrew resistance movement’ in Palestine,” Yad Vashem said. More than 400 people died of sickness. It is a history that Arie Zeev Raskin, the chief rabbi of Cyprus—where, he says, several thousand Jews pray at the synagogue each year—wants to “teach to the next generation.”

When he discovered a farmer using one of the camps’ last remaining metal huts as a tractor shed, Raskin made it the centerpiece of the Jewish museum of Cyprus he is building in the port city of Larnaca. “The huts were boiling hot in summer, and freezing in winter,” Raskin said.

In the camps, some 80 percent were aged between thirteen and thirty-five, “among the more spirited and lively survivors of the Holocaust,” said Yad Vashem, which added that 2,200 babies were born in the camps.

Some Cypriots, also resentful of British rule, worked with Jewish militia forces [like the Haganah, which were involved in organizing clandestine aliyah]. Key among them was Prodromos Papavassiliou, who after fighting fascist forces in North Africa with Britain’s Cyprus Regiment was outraged at the camps. . . . Prodromos helped hundreds of Jews, hiding those who tunneled out in orange groves and caves, until he could organize boats to smuggle them away from coves near the now-popular tourist resort of Ayia Napa.

Read more at International Business Times

More about: Aliyah, Cyprus, Holocaust survivors, Israeli history, United Kingdom

The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Grip on Jews

Since the 1930s, Jews have been one of America’s most solidly Democratic ethnic groups. Although, true to form, a majority again voted for Kamala Harris, something clearly has shifted. John Podhoretz writes:

Over the course of the past thirteen months, Jews in America have been harassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler-colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.

And Jews have acted.

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall.

Read more at Commentary

More about: 2024 Election, American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Democrats, U.S. Politics