The story
When the war in Europe ended in 1945, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust faced a desperate situation. Many were sick, malnourished and grieving; their families had been murdered and their communities destroyed. Large numbers could not or would not return to their pre-war homes, and in some places antisemitic violence continued. In July 1946, in the Kielce pogrom in Poland, 42 survivors were killed when a mob attacked their communal home. For many, Europe had become a vast cemetery, and they wanted to start life again in a Jewish homeland.
Out of this crisis grew the Bricha, Hebrew for "flight". In late 1944 and early 1945, soon after the Soviet liberation of eastern Poland, Jewish partisans and former ghetto fighters met in Lublin to organise an escape. Early leaders included the partisan and poet Abba Kovner and his group from Vilna, and Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Jewish Combat Organization. They had no official backing and worked in secret, because the Soviet-controlled states did not allow Jews to leave and the British restricted entry to Palestine.
The movement was soon strengthened by officers of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and by operatives of the Haganah, the Jewish underground army in Palestine, while the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee paid for the operation. Guides smuggled people across Polish borders into Czechoslovakia and Hungary, over the Tatra Mountains towards Prague and Budapest, and on through way stations to displaced persons camps in the American zones of Germany and Austria and in Italy. After Kielce the flight accelerated dramatically: about 100,000 Jews left Eastern Europe in three months.
Operating in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia until 1948, the Bricha is generally credited with moving about 250,000 survivors. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that the exact figure is unknown and estimates that at least 150,000 reached the camps and later Palestine or Israel with its help. Ships organised by the Mossad Le'aliyah Bet carried many past the British blockade of Palestine.
The Bricha ended with the founding of Israel in 1948, when Jewish immigration became legal. Many survivors it rescued built new lives in Israel; others went on to the United States and other countries. It remains one of the largest organised rescues of refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War, carried out largely by survivors themselves.
Why it matters
The Bricha gave as many as a quarter of a million survivors a way out of danger and despair, one of the largest organised rescues of refugees after the Second World War, led largely by survivors themselves.
Sources
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.