• About Us
  • Who Are We
  • Work With Us
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
No Result
View All Result
NEWSLETTER
The Globe Post
39 °f
New York
44 ° Fri
46 ° Sat
40 ° Sun
41 ° Mon
No Result
View All Result
The Globe Post
No Result
View All Result
Home Featured

Between Holocaust and Israel: Jews Jailed on Cyprus

Staff Writer by Staff Writer
08/10/21
in Featured, World
jews cyprus

More than 52,000 Jews were detained in a dozen camps in Cyprus, according to Israel's Holocaust memorial and education center Christina. Photo: ASSI / AFP

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

After surviving the Holocaust, trekking the Alps in winter and crossing the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat, Rose Lipszyc clearly remembers her months incarcerated in harsh British camps in Cyprus.

“After all that, we were back behind barbed wire again,” 92-year-old Lipszyc said, speaking 75 years after British soldiers began imprisoning Jews on the eastern Mediterranean island, dark events whose legacy resonates today.

Lipszyc’s family, from the Polish city of Lublin, were among the six million Jews the Nazis massacred during World War II.

She escaped death using false papers, working as a forced laborer in Germany.

After the war, she walked to Italy. Then, joining an exodus of thousands of traumatized refugees dreaming of a Jewish nation, Lipszyc boarded a rickety boat in Venice bound for British-run Palestine.

“There were 300 of us squeezed into the boat,” Lipszyc said. “We were like sardines.”

But as the shores of Palestine appeared on the horizon, two British warships powered out.

“The English soldiers — who I would have kissed the feet of for liberating me in Germany — were leaping into our little boat with batons,” she said, her voice trembling.

‘Traumatic’

She was taken 155 miles (250 kilometers) northwest to Cyprus, also then under British rule.

Between August 1946 and February 1949, more than 52,000 Jews taken off 39 boats were detained in a dozen camps in Cyprus, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and education center.

“The English weren’t starving us, and they weren’t killing us like the Germans,” Lipszyc said. “But it was so traumatic, that the very same people who had freed me just a short time ago now incarcerated me.”

The British wanted the cramped camps to be a “deterrent” aimed at “breaking the power of the ‘Hebrew resistance movement’ in Palestine”, Yad Vashem said. More than 400 people died of sickness.

It is a history that Arie Zeev Raskin, chief rabbi of Cyprus, who says several thousand Jews pray at the synagogue each year, wants to “teach to the next generation”.

He calls it a “very important piece of the puzzle” between the Holocaust and Israel’s foundation in 1948.

When he discovered a farmer using one of the camps’ last remaining metal huts as a tractor shed, Raskin made it the centerpiece of the Jewish Museum of Cyprus he is building in the port city of Larnaca.

“The huts were boiling hot in summer, and freezing in winter,” Raskin said.

In the camps, some 80 percent were aged between 13 and 35, “among the more spirited and lively survivors of the Holocaust”, said Yad Vashem, which added that 2,200 babies were born in the camps.

Tally Barash was one of them. “They called me Bat Aliya, meaning ‘daughter of the immigration’,” 73-year-old Barash said, recalling descriptions of life in the camps by her parents, Jews from Romania. “It was a very hard time.”

Tunnels and smugglers

Barash served as an Israeli soldier during the Six-Day War of 1967 in which Israeli forces overran the rest of formerly British-ruled Palestine, beginning an occupation that continues to this day. 

Today, decades after she was born in British detention in a military hospital, she runs a print shop in London, and is proud of her past.

“The museum will help keep memories alive,” she said.

Some Cypriots, also resentful of British rule, worked with Jewish militia forces.

Key among them was Prodromos Papavassiliou, who after fighting fascist forces in North Africa with Britain’s Cyprus Regiment, was outraged at the camps, his son Christakis Papavassiliou said.

“He risked his life working with underground Jewish groups,” said Papavassiliou, a retired honorary French consul.

Prodromos helped hundreds of Jews, hiding those who tunneled out in orange groves and caves, until he could organize boats to smuggle them away from coves near the now-popular tourist resort of Ayia Napa.

His exploits were dramatized in the 1960 Hollywood epic Exodus, starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, while the Israeli port city of Haifa named “Papa Square” in his honor.

Papavassiliou, president of the Cyprus-Israel Business Association, said that past had “helped forge close ties” between the two countries.

‘Hate only destroys’

The history holds another lesson, with “obvious parallels” to the migrant crisis today, said Eliana Hadjisavvas, of Britain’s Institute of Historical Research, while acknowledging the “contextual differences” too.

“The history… reminds us that in the face of persecution and suffering, people will endure huge sacrifices in search of safety,” said Hadjisavvas, who is writing a book on the camps.

“As nation states continue to grapple with the political management of migration, draconian measures and detention centers have increasingly become a defining feature of contemporary responses.”

Lipszyc finally reached Palestine “just a week or two” before Israel’s May 1948 declaration of independence, and war erupted again.

Later, she moved to Canada, where the great-grandmother of four offered her life advice to AFP, speaking from Toronto.

“If you could live through what I lived through, then you would see that hate does not help you in life,” she said. “Hate only destroys.”

ShareTweet
Staff Writer

Staff Writer

AFP with The Globe Post

Related Posts

Israeli security forces in Jerusalem
World

Palestinian Gunman Kills 7 in East Jerusalem Synagogue Attack

by Staff Writer
January 30, 2023
Nablus
Middle East

Palestinians Decry ‘Collective Punishment’ Over Israel’s Nablus Closure

by Staff Writer
October 27, 2022
Israel
Middle East

Palestinians Slam UK ‘Review’ of Israel Embassy Location

by Staff Writer
September 22, 2022
Michelle Bachelet
World

UN Rights Chief Slams Israel Over Blocked Staff Visas

by Staff Writer
August 30, 2022
Ben & Jerry's
World

Court Denies Ben & Jerry’s Effort to Prevent Sales in Israeli Settlements

by Staff Writer
August 22, 2022
Shireen Abu Akleh
Media Freedom

US Says Al Jazeera Journalist Likely Shot by Israel But Not Intentionally

by Staff Writer
July 4, 2022
Next Post
Someone eating meat

Make No Misteak: Our Food Choices Are Not Ours Alone

aliban fighters react to a speech by their senior leader in the Shindand district of Herat province, Afghanistan

Young Afghan General Takes Fight Against Taliban to Social Media

Recommended

Transgender Army veteran Tanya Walker speaks to protesters in Times Square near a military recruitment centre

Tennessee Is A Drag on the First Amendment

March 21, 2023
participants of an artificial intelligence conference

How AI Could Upend the World Even More Than Electricity or the Internet

March 19, 2023
Chinese President Xi Jinping

China’s Path to Economic Dominance

March 15, 2023
Heavily armed police inspect the area near a Jehovah's Witness church where several people have been killed in a shooting in Hamburg, northern Germany

Eight Dead in Shooting at Jehovah’s Witness Hall in Germany

March 10, 2023
Myanmar Rohingya refugees look on in a refugee camp in Teknaf, in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar, on November 26, 2016

US Announces $26M in New Aid for Rohingya

March 8, 2023
A flooded road in Batu Berendam in Malaysia's southern coastal state of Malacca

At Least Four Dead, Tens of Thousands Evacuated in Malaysia Floods

March 6, 2023

Opinion

Transgender Army veteran Tanya Walker speaks to protesters in Times Square near a military recruitment centre

Tennessee Is A Drag on the First Amendment

March 21, 2023
Chinese President Xi Jinping

China’s Path to Economic Dominance

March 15, 2023
An earthquake survivor reacts as rescuers look for victims and other survivors in Hatay, a Turkish province where hundreds of buildings were destroyed by the earthquake

Heed the Call of Our Broken World

March 1, 2023
Top view of the US House of Representatives

‘Cringy Awards:’ Who Is the Most Embarrassing US House Representative?

February 13, 2023
Protesters rally against the fatal police assault of Tyre Nichols, outside of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center in Detroit, Michigan, on January 27, 2023

How Do Violent ‘Monsters’ Take Root?

February 3, 2023
George Santos from the 3rd Congressional district of New York

George Santos for Speaker!

January 16, 2023
Facebook Twitter

Newsletter

Do you like our reporting?
SUBSCRIBE

About Us

The Globe Post

The Globe Post is part of Globe Post Media, a U.S. digital news organization that is publishing the world's best targeted news sites.

submit oped

© 2018 The Globe Post

No Result
View All Result
  • National
  • World
  • Business
  • Interviews
  • Lifestyle
  • Democracy at Risk
    • Media Freedom
  • Opinion
    • Editorials
    • Columns
    • Book Reviews
    • Stage
  • Submit Op-ed

© 2018 The Globe Post