For this reason, the Jewish underground organisation Haganah had been organising illegal migration to Palestine since the early 1930s. The US-American steam ship President Warfield was purchased and modified for this purpose in 1946.
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On July the 11th 1947 the ship left the port of Sète in France. 4.515 Jewish DPs were on board, 650 of them were children. The Royal Navy followed them with HMS Ajax and five destroyers. On July the 17th, the ship was renamed “Exodus from Europe 1947” and a flag with the Star of David was risen.
The Exodus sailed to Haifa then. But, during the next night, the British rammed and boarded the ship. The migrants posed a strong resistance. There were numerous wounded and five dead: four Jews and one British sailor.
Upon arrival in Haifa, most of the migrants were moved to prison ships. Only pregnant women and the wounded were allowed to stay.
The prison ships were to take the migrants back to France but in Port-de-Bouc only a few accepted to leave the ships.
The prisoners were then taken to the British Occupation Zone in Northern Germany. They arrived in September to Hamburg. There, the prisoners were taken out of the ships by force and interned in camps.
But the international press had started reporting on the story and the drama turned into a media scandal. On October the 6th, the British authorities set the prisoners free.
When David Ben Gurion declared the independence of Israel on Mai 1948, most of the refugees form the “Exodus” had already made it to their destination.
This model of the exodus from our collection was built in a scale of 1:125 by Robert Mourat and is displayed on deck 6 of the museum.
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The prison ships were to take the migrants back to France but in Port-de-Bouc only a few accepted to leave the ships.
This model of the exodus from our collection was built in a scale of 1:125 by Robert Mourat and is displayed on deck 6 of the museum.