Sha’ar HaAliyah

A route from Radyvyliv

A memoir in the Radyvyliv memorial book describes a family leaving the Soviet Union through Poland and arriving in Israel in April 1957. After ten months at Shaar HaAliya, the Jewish Agency moved them to Holon. This connects the site with Jewish survivors from a town now in Ukraine; it does not establish an ethnic-Ukrainian camp population. The journey illustrates how displacement and resettlement could continue well into the 1950s.

That route fits a documented wave: between 1956 and 1960 communist Poland permitted free Jewish emigration, and an estimated 50,000 people reached Israel by it, among them some 13,000 to 15,000 Jews from the Soviet Union allowed to repatriate to Poland. Radyvyliv lay in interwar Poland and is now in Ukraine. No breakdown of the camp’s arrivals by region of origin has been found, and the memoir remains the only Ukraine connected account of the camp.

Processing and everyday uncertainty

Arrivals were driven by lorry from Haifa port or Lod airport. Inside they passed border control, documents and customs, then blood tests, vaccination, chest screening by minograph and disinfection, with BCG for those showing no sign of tuberculosis. The sorting was meant to take five days, after which a person left as a citizen and a member of Kupat Holim and the Histadrut. Most stayed ten days or more.

Planned for 5,000 people, the camp held between 10,000 and 12,000 at its peak. Fencing and health restrictions provoked arguments about quarantine, citizenship and the treatment of newcomers. Experiences varied: some remembered distress and anger, while others regarded their stay as an uneventful part of immigration.

When the cabins filled, people went into tents. Cabins were dirty, tents came down in winter storms and dirt floors turned to mud. More than forty institutions worked inside the camp, whose staff were required to speak Hebrew. It was run by Yehuda Weisberger, director from 1949 to 1957, and the largest staff count, about 400, came in 1950.

A changing reception system

The enclosure was the most contested feature. Isolation was enforced by a barbed wire fence and a police patrol, and Kalman Levin of the Absorption Department’s Haifa office wrote that the camp had to be fenced and closed because it was a quarantine. In 1950 the Knesset member Yaakov Meridor asked publicly whether it accorded with the honour of the Jewish state to hold new immigrants behind barbed wire. The Jewish Agency refused a police request for a wall that year, fearing the impression of a prison courtyard, but one was under construction by April 1951.

Contemporary reporting in June 1955 described controversy over sending immigrants to Shaar Haaliya. The proposed move would renew a period of waiting in a transit camp after the Jewish Agency had increasingly arranged direct journeys from ships to prepared settlements. This debate shows that the camp was one stage within a changing housing and settlement system.

The fence never worked as intended. Weisberger acknowledged in November 1950 that people left through holes in it despite the guards, and the common summary was that in theory the camp was closed but in reality it was open to all. On 9 August 1951 thousands of immigrants from Iraq refused transfer to the ma’abarot after two months in the camp; about two thousand left after police threats.

The later years

Pressure was eased by a second site: early in 1951 the former Atlit detention camp became a screening camp known as Sha’ar Aliyah Bet. From 1952 a fenced off section housed a large centre for children with ringworm and trachoma, which ran until 1960.

Throughput declined sharply after 1952. Later residents included people requiring additional assistance, such as older immigrants without family support. The camp officially closed in 1962. Its total admissions and its residents on any particular date are different measures.

Staffing fell with the numbers: about a thousand immigrants were in the camp in December 1953, and by March 1955 only twenty six staff remained. Over thirteen years nearly 400,000 immigrants passed through, the overwhelming majority of them at the beginning of the mass immigration. The study puts that majority at 325,296 and describes it as concentrated in 1949 to 1952, but its own Table 1 gives precisely that total for 1949, 1950 and 1951 together, with 1952 adding a further 14,342; the figure and the span the text attaches to it do not agree.

Closure and the site today

The camp’s land was taken into the municipal area of Haifa in 1958, and the camp closed at the beginning of 1962, its last residents passed to the care of Haifa municipality. A residential quarter planned on the ground afterwards carries the camp’s name. In 2021 a renewal scheme was approved for it, replacing 184 older flats with more than 800 homes.