When Britain chased down Jewish refugees fleeing Europe.
by Charles Gardner.
Calls for reflection on a shameful period of British history are being made on the 80th anniversary of a movement established to help Holocaust survivors escape post-war Europe.
HaBricha, as it was called, enabled 300,000 Jews to travel to Israel, then still under the British Mandate. But since it was illegal, with Britain severely restricting Jewish immigration, such journeys were fraught with danger. And the British Foreign Office, with the help of secret services, did everything in their power to prevent the escape, which is what Bricha means.
Those who made it were smuggled from Eastern Europe to ships waiting to take them to the Holy Land. But British intelligence invested huge resources to track them down, suggesting that Soviet-communist agents were infiltrating the refugees for the ultimate purpose of destabilising the Middle East.
It basically amounted to a misunderstanding of the Jewish determination to find a safe haven in their ancient homeland – a misunderstanding that persists today, even in the UK church, quite apart from the policy’s antisemitic nature.
Dr Miri Nehari, whose father was the Bricha commander in Poland, says our politicians failed to understand the nature of the movement’s activity and values, along with the significance of Zionism.
The limit on immigration was an attempt to appease Arab demands to close the gates of Palestine, as it was then known. And yet Britain had been given the responsibility, approved by the League of Nations and the 1920 San Remo agreement, to prepare the Jewish people for statehood.
The limit (of 75,000 over five years) had applied since a 1939 White Paper which effectively meant that tens of thousands, possibly millions, of Jews who perished in the concentration camps could perhaps have escaped.
In the immediate post-war era, when the Bricha was founded, large-scale immigration was still not permitted. Hence the need for such a movement. But of the 66 illegal ships sailing to Israel after the war, only eight broke the British blockade. The rest of the ships were seized, and the passengers taken to detention camps in Palestine, Cyprus and even Germany!
On February 2, 1946, the British Foreign Office sent a top-secret telegram to the Polish government demanding an end to the ‘illegal’ flow of Jews to Israel which, they said, constituted “an embarrassing administrative problem for us”. We also applied strong pressure on the Romanians to follow suit.
Sabotage attempts were made on some of the ships before leaving European ports, though Britain blamed Arab and Soviet agents. It does make you wonder if our present problems with mass illegal immigration might possibly relate to our shameful treatment of post-war Jewish refugees. Dr Nehari says that British propaganda against the Bricha movement went so far as to link Zionism with the Nazis.
Yet despite all their efforts, Britain failed to stop the movement. An MI5 report conceded that “the Jewish Agency and the other Zionists managed to build an organisation in which there is no country in Europe where it does not operate and managed to neutralise the British immigration policy to Palestine”.
Our shameful attempts to stop Jews escaping from antisemitic Europe is rarely, if ever, mentioned by those, including our own leading prelates, who have relentlessly been calling on us to make reparations to those affected by the slave trade.
Love Never Fails, an umbrella group of Israel-supporting organisations in the UK, are raising awareness of the Bricha movement with the aim of eliciting positive responses of confession and prayer – both in terms of our national guilt and the church’s silent complicity.
There are plans to establish a permanent memorial exhibition to the Bricha work in Haifa for which costs have yet to be fully met. For those wishing to bring comfort to Israelis (see Isaiah 40:1) by supporting the project, go to nachamuami@btinternet.com
Dr Nehari said: “In our times of sadness, anger, anxiety and darkness, we want to sow seeds of hope, meaning and trust in the future. The HaBricha movement represents our people’s coping with the difficulties on the way to the homeland, and the willingness to fight for it, as we are required to do today.”
Another important 80th anniversary will be marked on January 27th when, in 1945, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. It is now known here as Holocaust Memorial Day, when special services will be held throughout the UK to honour the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Many of the Holocaust survivors walked over the Alps in the snow in their desperate attempt to reach Israel.