As the 1950s progressed, emigration acquired a new international dimension, affecting Israel’s relations with other countries and harming the ability of Israelis to travel freely in Europe.

From 1951 to 1953, emigration from Israel amounted to more than double the number in the preceding three years. Many of the emigrants intended to go to Canada, but due to Canadian procedures, many migrants got stranded in Europe en route from Israel to Canada. The complications reached their apogee in the Foehrenwald DP camp in Bavaria, which was closed only in 1957 and thus became a magnet for Israeli remigrants seeking sanctuary from the troubles they had encountered in Europe. The illicit movement into Foehrenwald was an impediment to the German efforts to close the camp and terminate the Jewish refugee problem in Germany. It also led to the ironic situation whereby Israeli remigrants were threatened with deportation from Germany to Israel. Their status developed into a diplomatic issue between the Israeli and West German governments. Other European governments also imposed restrictions on immigration from Israel.

Israeli emigration now drew negative international attention from government officials, relief officers, and Jewish community leaders, tuning it into a source of political embarrassment for Israel.

This chapter deals with the difficulties of Jews who left Israel in the immediate years following independence. During those years, Europe was the main destination for emigrants from Israel. But while some emigrants wished to settle in Europe, many went there in search of further emigration possibilities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the hardships faced by new immigrants in Israel and the motivations behind emigration. It then focuses on the circumstances surrounding emigrants’ departure from Israel and arrival in Europe, their encounters with relief agencies and Jewish communities, and their attempts to emigrate overseas.

Emigrants found that relief agencies and countries of immigration were reluctant to provide material support and resettlement services to people who had already settled in Israel, which was regarded as the foremost country for resettlement of Jewish refugees. Migrants also encountered constraints imposed by the Israeli government which obstructed emigration from the country. They found that by leaving Israel, they had gone against the grain and put themselves in conflict with the bodies on whose assistance they were hoping to rely. Immigration to Israel for them was not a permanent return from exile but rather another stage in the struggle to find a home.

The first chapter focuses on the experiences of Jewish refugees who came to Palestine before or during World War II but sought to return to their European countries of origin at war’s end through a repatriation program launched by the Middle East office of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Since the repatriation program took place during the heightened period of the Zionist struggle for statehood in Palestine, it became a source of conflict between the Zionist leadership in Palestine and the UNRRA. The former accused the latter of encouraging Jewish return to Europe, whereas UNRRA officials accused Zionists in the Yishuv of trying to prevent repatriation and of ostracizing those opting to return. The chapter analyzes this conflict from the perspectives of UNRRA, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish press in Palestine, and the refugees themselves. It shows that the controversy derived from conflicting ideological and political considerations regarding the role of Jewish refugees in postwar reconstruction. But the positions of the quarreling parties were disconnected from those of repatriation applicants, who were determined to rebuild their lives outside Palestine, but conceived of postwar reconstruction mainly in material and personal rather than ideological and political terms.

In response to the emigration crisis, the Israeli government introduced in late 1953 a series of administrative measures aimed to reduce emigration and to ensure that those leaving the country would not fall as a burden on Jewish bodies and local authorities abroad. The government also undertook a press propaganda campaign designed to discourage emigration. As part of the campaign, journalists reported to the Israeli public about the miseries of Israeli emigrants abroad, while also denouncing emigration as an act of treason.

Those steps limited the movement of emigrants and helped to entrench their image as social outcasts and traitors. They were also accompanied by extensive public debate about topics such as the fate of the Zionist project in the post-independence period, the political culture of young Israel, and the character of Jews migrating into the country. In addition to creating difficulties abroad, emigration came to the forefront of the national consciousness, serving as a focal point for discussions about fundamental issues in Israeli public life. Although Israel was regarded as a country of Jewish immigration, the nature of the fledgling state was also shaped and understood through the prism of out-migration.

The Introduction lays out the main purposes, themes, and arguments of the manuscript and places them in a historiographical and theoretical framework. It discusses the tension between exile and homeland, the significance of the Land of Israel, and the importance of the theme of return to the land in Zionist consciousness, and provides a historical overview of Jewish immigration to Palestine/Israel from the late nineteenth century to the early years of Israeli statehood.

This background helps to clarify the degree to which emigration was antithetical to the Zionist spirit, and was therefore seen as a threat to the national project and condemned as an act of treason. The Introduction demonstrates the various ideological, political, and logistical challenges that emigration posed to the Israeli state and society, to Jewish diaspora communities, and to relief agencies in countries of destination. It engages studies of migration and nationalism to clarify the problematic role of emigration as a phenomenon and emigrants as individuals in the Israeli nation-building process.

The Introduction also discusses the statistical and demographic aspect of the story, presenting information on yearly rates of emigration, destination countries of emigrants, and emigrants’ personal backgrounds.

In November 1951, a group of 150 Indian Jews, members of the Bene Israel community, left their homes in various parts of Israel and staged a sit-down strike in one of Tel Aviv’s main streets. The group members had immigrated to Israel two years earlier, but now demanded that the Jewish Agency transport them back to India. Shortly before the strike, the immigrants sent a letter to the agency, declaring that after experiencing the “very hard and bitter life” in Israel, they had decided that the only place for them was India. They complained that Jewish Agency emissaries in Bombay had promised to send them to religious settlements in Israel, but instead placed them in secular kibbutzim, thus forcing them to commit the “deadly sin” of eating non-kosher food. The attitude toward them of kibbutz people was “very unfriendly” and included “many incidents of heartlessness and mean behavior.” Others who had settled in the town of Beersheba in the southern Negev region complained about bad jobs, difficult climate conditions, economic hardships, and inappropriate treatment by the authorities. Furthermore, in Bombay they had been told that there was no “color bar” in Israel and that all Jews were being treated equally – “but in a shop in Beersheba we were told that we should eat only black bread as we were black and the white bread was only for white Jews.” The immigrants warned that if their demand to be sent back to India at the Jewish Agency’s expense was not fulfilled within eight days, they would go on a hunger strike: “We shall not use violence as we are peaceful people but we cannot look on any longer as our people grow daily weaker from trials and tribulations.”

In the mid-1950s, the United States became the largest destination for Israeli emigration. While Israeli emigrants heading to the United States did not experience the troubles faced by remigrants in Europe, the movement to the United States was not free of frictions and hardships. Migrants faced obstacles emanating from American immigration policies and from the negative attitude of Jewish aid organizations towards emigration from Israel. This attitude in turn led to debates among American Jews regarding the proper attitude towards Jewish migrants moving from Israel to the United States. Emigration from Israel subsequently became a polarizing issue in the American Jewish community. As the chapter shows, it played a similar role, with varying degrees of intensity, in other Jewish communities in the Americas such as those of Brazil and Canada.

Despite these difficulties, however, tens of thousands of emigrants from Israel were able to settle in America – and as their testimonies reveal, many succeeded in building new lives there. They thus repudiated the concept of the rejection of exile and offered a tangible alternative to the idea that Jewish existence outside Israel was pointless or untenable.