Atlit Detention Camp

From survival to another detention camp

The survivor describes liberation in 1944 followed by travel through Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey before entering Palestine. British authorities then detained the family at Atlit. The account establishes the route and destination, but does not supply an unambiguous arrival date. It conveys how escape from Nazi persecution could be followed by another period of confinement under a different authority.

Jack Fried, interviewed for the commission’s archive, was born in June 1938 in a town in eastern Poland now in Ukraine, near the Dniester, with a Jewish population of a little over 2,200 in 1938. He remembered German troops crossing the bridge into the town a month after his third birthday. He and his family were liberated by Soviet forces at the end of 1944 and travelled out with the Red Army; reaching Palestine without papers, they were, in his words, put in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Immigration restrictions and arrivals

The camp operated within the restrictions established by Britain’s 1939 immigration policy. Release depended on immigration quotas. After the war, arrivals increased sharply: the Palyam history records 10,200 people interned from eleven intercepted vessels between January and July 1946. In August, British policy shifted towards deporting intercepted arrivals to Cyprus. Atlit subsequently formed part of the release process for people brought back from those camps.

The White Paper of May 1939 limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, and the Mandate government built Atlit to hold those caught entering outside that quota; everyone released from the camp was counted against it. The first detainees were the passengers of the Orion, 728 people, on 8 January 1940, followed that month by the Hilda and in February by the Sakarya with 2,400. In June 1940 about 2,000 people were held, among them 300 women and 30 children; by October only 356 remained. The camp filled again after the sinking of the Patria in November 1940, whose survivors were held at Atlit instead of being deported to Mauritius. The last of them were released in December 1941, and the roughly 800 who remained, mostly from the Darien, were let go during the second half of 1942, after which the camp closed in that form.

Between those phases Atlit served as a transit station for immigrants who did hold certificates, among them the Tehran Children, a group from Algiers and 585 people from Yemen who arrived by train. It reopened for detention in 1945. After the deportations to Cyprus began the camp emptied of detainees in November 1946, and the Jewish Agency then agreed with the British that those due for release from Cyprus would spend the remainder of their time at Atlit. The agency ran the camp internally, Hadassah provided the medical service and the British kept external control; through 1946 about 750 people a month arrived and stayed on average three months.

Not everyone held at Atlit was released against the quota. The Palyam stamp history records that 1,750 ma‘apilim were deported from the camp for a lengthy detention on the remote island of Mauritius.

Inside the camp

The compound included barracks, a disinfection building, medical facilities, kitchens and dining rooms behind wire fences. In October 1945, a Palmach operation released the detainees then held there. During 1946–1948, the British also confined members of Jewish underground organisations at the site. These overlapping uses should not be mistaken for a single refugee population.

About a hundred wooden huts were built, of which eighty-six housed detainees; the maximum capacity is estimated at some 4,000, and when the huts filled people were put in army tents at the northern end. Men and women were separated by wire. Reception meant registration, separation and disinfection with DDT. Stays ranged from a few days to twenty-three months. Yishuv institutions worked for the detainees’ welfare and organised the teaching of Hebrew. British policy was to release against the certificate quota in order of arrival, with priority for women, children, the sick and men enlisting in the British army.

The raid of 10 October 1945 freed all 208 detainees then held. It was planned and commanded by Nahum Sarig with Yitzhak Rabin as his deputy, and formed part of the Hebrew Resistance Movement. To forestall another attack the authorities allocated an extra 1,500 certificates a month for three months from 15 December 1945.

Reception and remembrance

After Israel’s establishment in 1948, the camp accommodated new immigrants. Later phases included military captivity as well as civilian reception. The surviving heritage site contains restored and reconstructed buildings and an exhibition vessel illustrating clandestine immigration journeys. Its designation as a national heritage site in 1987 helped preserve a place where arrival and detention had become closely connected.

The sequence after 1948 ran from Egyptian prisoners of war, released in March 1949, to an immigrants’ camp that in 1950 received arrivals from Yemen and also held 1,200 families in a transit settlement. When immigration from Iraq grew the families were moved out and the site became a sorting and absorption camp known as Sha’ar Aliya Bet. It should not be confused with the Sha’ar Ha’aliya reception camp at Haifa. Prisoners were again held after the wars of 1956 and 1967; the place was abandoned in the 1970s and used once more during the Lebanon war.

Preservation began in 1986. President Chaim Herzog declared the camp a national heritage site of clandestine immigration in 1987, and it now carries the name of Moshe Sneh. Restored huts and the original disinfection building stand inside the wire. An old Latvian fishing boat bought in 2006 was opened as a museum of clandestine immigration in June 2010, and a research centre established in 2001 documents the voyages and the names of those who made them.

The Palyam stamp history dates the immigrant-shelter phase more closely than the heritage summaries: after the state was established the camp became a temporary shelter for the absorption of new immigrants and served as such until 1970. The same article records the issue in 2014 of a stamp in Israel’s National Heritage Landmarks series.

The camp also figures in later commemoration of the voyages. An account published in April 2022 records that the escorts of the immigrant ship Moledet were captured and sent to the Atlit Detention Camp, that survivors and family members gathered at the camp on 31 March 2022 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ship’s arrival at Haifa, and that a monument co-funded by Love Never Fails and the Atlit Museum was unveiled after the ceremony.