The SS Patria was an passenger ship that sank in the Mediterranean Sea on 25 November 1940 from a bomb planted by the terrorist group Haganah. It was sailing from the port of Haifa. It was carrying about 1,800 Jewish refugees from Europe during World War II.[1] The British government were deporting them from Palestine to Mauritius because they did not have visas.[2] Zionist organisations opposed the deportation, and the paramilitary group Haganah planted a bomb in the ship to stop it from leaving Haifa.[3][4] It killed 260 people and injured 172.[5] The rest of the passengers were rescued by British and Arab boats that rushed to save them.[1]
The British allowed the survivors to remain in Palestine on humanitarian grounds. 221 passengers were buried in the Carmel Beach cemetery in Haifa.[6]
References
change- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chazan, Meir (2003). "The Patria Affair: Moderates vs. Activists in Mapai in the 1940s". Journal of Israeli History. 22 (2): 61–95. doi:10.1080/13531040312331287644. S2CID 155043034.
- ↑ Bauer, Yehuda (1981). American Jewry and the Holocaust. Wayne State University Press. pp. 143–144. ISBN 0-8143-1672-7.
- ↑ Penkower, Monty Noam (2002). Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy. London: Routledge. pp. 55–59. ISBN 0-7146-5268-7.
- ↑ Ofer, Dalia (2004). "A Dual Perspective: Yaakov Shabtai and the Historian's Account of the Deportation to Mauritius". In Lentin, Ronit (ed.). Re-presenting the Shoah for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 95. ISBN 1-57181-802-2.
- ↑ "Deaths of 260 in 1940 ship explosion commemorated". JWeekly.com. San Francisco Jewish Community Publications Inc. 14 December 2001. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
- ↑ Perl, William R. (1979). The Four-front War: From the Holocaust to the Promised Land. New York: Crown Publishing Group. p. 250. ISBN 0-517-53837-7.
Other websites
change- The story of the SS Patria on Zionism Israel
