Refugees, Migrants, or Traitors? Israelis in Europe, 1949–54

This paper examines the tension between the self-perception of migrants and the institutional approach towards them. It traces the experiences of several thousand Israeli emigrants who in the early 1950s found themselves stranded as transmigrants in several European cities on their way from Israel to North America. Many were Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Israel from Displaced Persons camps in Europe after 1948, but then sought to leave the Jewish state. They returned to Europe to obtain visas to their final destinations, mainly Canada, but failed to do so.

Unable to proceed with their journey, unwilling to return to Israel, and facing deportation from the passage country, they sought help from Jewish and international relief agencies, from local Jewish communities, and even from Israeli government officials. The extensive correspondence between the parties involved and the testimonies of transmigrants reveal the differences in attitudes towards these individuals. The transmigrants perceived themselves as refugees entitled to resettlement and relief assistance; the relief agencies, which were struggling to end the refugee problem in Europe, saw them as voluntary migrants who should quickly proceed to appropriate destinations; and Israel viewed them as traitors to the national cause, but offered an amnesty program of repatriation for those willing to express repentance and abide by certain conditions.  

The paper will show how these differing approaches shaped the experiences of transmigrants. It will suggest that emigrants who left Israel during its first years of independence were driven by a combination of motives typical of other migratory movements, but were still regarded as people working against the grain of history, and were thus constructed as a pariah group both inside and outside Israel. The discussion will shed light on the relations between national collectives and individuals who choose to cross their physical and ideological boundaries.