How Zionists Prevented Jewish Refugees From Returning Home After WWII

Zionists in Israel and Palestine prevented Jewish refugees from going home after the Holocaust.

Moshe Shertok, head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, and later Prime Minister, persuaded the Greek government to refuse Greek Jews in Palestine repatriation documents. (Photo: Public Commons)

Many tens of thousands of European Jews who found refuge in Palestine before or during World War II sought to return home after the war. The Zionist leadership in Palestine, and then the State of Israel, was not just hostile to the idea, but worked with foreign consular offices to prevent their return. This is the story of how Zionists in Israel and Palestine prevented Jewish refugees from going home after the Holocaust.

By December 1944, over 35,000 Jews in Palestine had applied for repatriation to their home countries — Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and Poland. Josef Liebman, for instance, an 80-year-old man who immigrated to Palestine from Germany in 1939, wanted to reunite with his Christian wife after the forced separation caused tremendous hardship. Johanna Wasser, a 57-year-old Austrian woman who reached Palestine from Yugoslavia in 1944, sought to reunite with her daughter in Milan after learning she survived Auschwitz.

To Zionists in Palestine, people like Joseph and Johanna were deemed opportunistic and selfish, often dehumanized and even likened to animals. One Zionist writer accused repatriates of “escaping like mice” from the Land of Israel and of “carrying the dangerous virus of Jewish self-hatred.” The newspaper ⁨ha-Mashḳif⁩, an organ of the right-wing Revisionist movement, said these Jews had “filthy souls,” while the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth described the behavior of Jewish repatriates to Poland in 1947 as “piggish.” Jews were needed in Palestine to fight both the demographic and kinetic war awaiting them, and Holocaust survivors who wanted to return home were often considered traitors as a result.

Thanks to historian Ori Yehudai, we now know the extent of the Zionist strategy to prevent Jewish return to Europe. In his 2020 book, Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II, Yehudai mined foreign consular records and the archives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to tell a rich story of the Zionist leadership’s efforts to hold Jewish refugees as demographic hostages.

The hostility transcended beyond rhetoric into Zionist policy in the 1940s. David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, and Moshe Shertok, head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, persuaded the Greek government to refuse Greek Jews in Palestine repatriation documents. They also threatened Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian representatives in Palestine that “reprisals will be taken if the flow of repatriated persons is not stopped.” 

Austrian Jews who wanted to return home faced the most hostility. Some had given up their jobs and apartments in Palestine with the expectation of repatriation, and once they revealed their intention to leave to the Histadrut, the Jewish Labor Federation, they were put on a blacklist. Many of them were then prevented from leaving and stuck in limbo, denied employment opportunities, housing, and ration cards. Some faced physical violence and had to move around in groups to avoid harassment or worse. In some cases, they were even greeted with an upraised Nazi salute, ‘Heil Renner, go home, Austrian,’ even though it was the Nazis who ruined their lives and exterminated their entire families and communities. Irgun members also threatened Jews helping Jewish refugees return home with physical violence unless they ceased their activities.  

During the 1948 War, the Zionist community in Palestine made it even harder to leave, “very rarely” issuing exit permits to Jews. 

After the war, the state began to allow Jews to leave, but still restricted emigration. Between September 1948 and June 1951, Israel rejected about half of the 120,000 Jews who applied for temporary exit permits. This figure does not include the many thousands of applications filed before 1948 not yet processed, none of which were dealt with after the war.

Germany, in particular, was deemed a no-go zone. In Dec. 1949, the Israeli government stamped all Israeli travel documents with the phrase, “valid for all countries except Germany” while Israelis requesting exit permits to move to Germany would be banished from the country forever.

Many Zionists refer to the establishment of Israel in 1948 as Jewish "liberation" even though a more accurate portrayal might be Jewish “lockdown.”

Samuel Cohen, a French Jew who moved to Israel to fight for the Israeli army in July 1948, wanted to return home to France after the war. Israel refused to let him leave, instead holding him hostage as a demographic weapon. “I served in the Israel Defense Forces [IDF], was wounded and released from the army due to an illness,” he wrote. “Now I wish to return to France . . . Holding us here against our will is a betrayal of trust. I was promised that I would be able to return to France….It is a shameful thing for the State of Israel to keep people against their will – people who had fought in the name of freedom.”

The goal of Zionism was not about ensuring the well-being of Jews, supporting Jewish family reunification or helping Jewish refugees, including many Holocaust survivors. The goal of Zionism was to establish a Jewish State in Palestine, at whatever the cost. And when the interests Jews stood in the way of the putative interests of the Jewish State, the political leadership sacrificed the former to secure the latter.

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