A Rust Bucket of Hope (Extract)

By JOSEPH R. HOFFMAN
Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. A veteran Israeli filmmaker chronicles the role of American-Jewish volunteers in ferrying Holocaust survivors to Eretz Israel "It's 1947. The war is over. I'm working in a record store in Manhattan and a man calls. 'Do you want to help your people? Be at 39th and Lexington at 4 p.m. A man in a black leather jacket will come by. If he is carrying a newspaper under his arm, follow him. If he throws it in the trash, then walk away.'" This cloak-and-dagger conversation, which would not seem out of place in a Tom Clancy novel, is in fact drawn from one of the boldest and brashest chapters in the saga that led to the creation of the State of Israel. The narrator is Paul Kaye, 79, today a successful American-Jewish businessman in New York, who in 1947 was a demobilized sailor from the United States Army. He had been contacted by a member of the Haganah (the precursor to the Israeli Defense Forces), who hoped to recruit him to help Holocaust survivors stranded in Europe to reach the shores of Eretz Israel. Kaye is telling his story with gusto to British-Israeli documentary filmmaker Alan Rosenthal, whose latest movie, "Waves of Freedom," recounts how 27 Americans - most of them Jewish - ferried 1,500 Holocaust refugees from several European ports to Palestine in 1947 aboard a refitted U.S. coast-guard cutter called the "Trade Winds." It was an assignment fraught with danger: the largely inexperienced Americans had to pilot a barely seaworthy ship and overcome the British blockade of the Mediterranean Sea. The effort was part of Aliya Bet, the clandestine operation to bring Jews to Mandatory Palestine, where Britain had imposed severe limitations on Jewish immigration. If you, like this reporter, are an American-born Israeli who is committed to the cause of Zionism, you will enjoy this film. It shows "Us Yanks" in a wonderfully sympathetic light, ready to drop it all to do the right thing. Listening to the recollections of five of the crew calls up the insouciance and swagger of Errol Flynn's "Robin Hood." The film is a reminder - and justification -- of why "We Yanks" made aliya. The 53-minute film, which was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July, includes interviews with the sailors of the Royal Navy, whose job it was to stop ships like the "Trade Winds" from reaching its destination, in Haifa harbor. The testimonies of the two groups form the focus of the film, and Rosenthal has managed to make each side likeable. At 72, the filmmaker is slim, fit and silver-haired with a large, generous smile and an old world charm. His mastery of the King's English - no doubt honed from his years at Oxford University studying law - is precise enough to make you mind your own Ps and Qs. Rosenthal, who was born in London in 1936 and who came to Jerusalem for the first time in 1961, is a veteran filmmaker. His credits include "Stalin's Last Purge," which was shown at the "Stranger Than Fiction" Film Festival in Dublin, Ireland, in 2006 and documented Soviet leader Josef Stalin's increasing paranoia in the final years of his life. He has made some 60 films, written several books on the art and craft of filmmaking, including his memoirs, and is a professor of communications at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Why did these guys, who had their whole lives in front of them, give up everything for this crazy scheme?" Rosenthal asks, explaining what it was that drew him to the story of the "Trade Winds." It turns out, he says, that while some had lofty motivations, like wanting to help relatives from Europe, others wanted "to get out of a bad marriage or avoid going into their father's business." The story of Aliya Bet is one with which Rosenthal had been familiar since his early years in London as a member of the Zionist youth movement Habonim and as a result of reading the 1954 book "The Secret Roads," by Jon and David Kimche, about the efforts to bring Holocaust survivors to Eretz Israel from 1938-1948. Rosenthal's interest in this story was rekindled in 1987 when he met and interviewed Mahal sailors (foreign volunteers during the War of Independence) who had gathered for a reunion in Jerusalem. "They were a very impressive and fun-loving group with many tales to tell." The "Trade Winds" was one of 10 ships (among them, the "Exodus") financed by American-Jewish donors that brought some 30,000 displaced persons to Palestine with the aid of 200 American volunteers. Unable to secure financing for the film, Rosenthal put the story on the backburner for some 15 years. "Waves of Freedom," completed in 2008, revolves around a devil-may-care group of sailors who agreed to forgo payment, and risk capture and imprisonment in order to help the nascent Jewish state. And they did it with panache. Kaye recalls in the film that when he was told, "If they [the British] catch you, they could hang you," he responded, "Let's go." The "Trade Winds" was built in 1898 as an icebreaker. During WWII, it was converted into a coast-guard cutter, and after the war it became a cargo ship, sailing under the Panamanian flag. Its odyssey toward Europe and the Middle East began in Miami in February, 1947, where the "rust bucket," according to one of the crew, was made seaworthy. "It didn't look like it could cross the harbor, let alone make it to Europe," one of the crew states in the documentary. In Baltimore, it picked up its crew, and then began its trans-Atlantic crossing, first to Lisbon, where it was refitted to accommodate 1,500 refugees; and then to Portavenere, Italy, where the survivors boarded. They were intercepted in May on the high seas by the British, who sailed the ship to Cyprus. The crew and the passengers were interned in a displaced persons camp in Famagusta. After two months of incarceration, the group was freed and permitted under the British immigration quota to enter Palestine in July 1947. The filmmaker sets up an interesting contrast between the bravado of the Americans and the reserve of the British and manages to paint a sympathetic picture of both. Sixty years on, the surviving American volunteers, most of whom were in their twenties when recruited by the Haganah are still a zesty, daredevil lot, with remarkable memories that buttress, rather than contradict, each other's recollections. The American crew describes itself in lighthearted terms, "When we arrived in Lisbon, we would work all day refitting the ship, and at night, we would hang out at the bars. We all had girlfriends. We were carefree, happy-go-lucky types." says Murray Greenfield. Greenfield, one of two sailors who eventually made aliya, describes the story of his recruitment. A former member of the merchant marines during WWII, he was approached one day in synagogue in New York. "A man tells me that the Haganah is looking for people with merchant marine experience to help get Jews out of the DP camps. When they told me there was no pay, I knew it must be important. My parents were born in the United States, but they could just as easily have met in Europe, and then, it would have been me who was boarding the ship," says Greenfield, 82, in the film. Greenfield's contribution was just beginning. After returning home to New York, he came on aliya in 1949. He and a second sailor who immigrated, Harold Katz, kept the ship's crew in touch throughout the decades. They organized the 1987 reunion in Jerusalem. A year later, Greenfield, who had established Geffen Publishing House, published "The Jews' Secret Fleet," which chronicled the adventures of the 10 ships, which crossed the Mediterranean. The book, with a chapter on each ship and a comprehensive list of all the sailors, provided some of the research material for Rosenthal's film. Greenfield was also one of the founders of the AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) and served as its executive director from 1960 to 1967. Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.