Handcrafted commemorative coin medallion created for a US crew member on an illegal immigrant ship

Paul Kaye (formerly Kaminetzky (?)) was born in 1927 in the Bronx in New York, NY, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1944 and served as a marine engineer. He was on his way to the Pacific theater when the war ended in 1945. He was discharged in 1946. He was working in a record store in New York in 1947 when he received a phone call asking him if he wanted to help his people. A clandestine meeting was arranged and Paul was recruited by Haganah, the paramilitary organization that later became the Israeli Defense Force, to join the Mossad L’Aliyah Bet, an organization formed by the Jewish leadership in Palestine in 1938 to coordinate illegal immigration efforts. He was told that men were needed to sail small boats between Cyprus and Palestine and warned that he could be arrested by the British for these illegal actions. Palestine was controlled by Great Britain under a United Nations mandate and the British severely restricted the number of people allowed to immigrate. Ship travel was the most common form of transport and thousands left Europe every year. Most of the ships were stopped by the British Navy before reaching Palestine and the passengers and crews were interned in detention camps on the nearby island of Cyprus. Paul went to Baltimore where he boarded the Tradewinds, a dilapidated former Coast Guard cutter, and sailed to Europe. After being refitted with bunks and other facilities in Lisbon, the ship left for Italy and picked up about 1500 illegal refugees, mostly Holocaust survivors, and sailed for Palestine. They soon were spotted by a British reconnaissance plane and surrounded by British warships. Renamed the Hatikvah, the ship was captured about fifty miles off the coast of Palestine on May 17, 1947. There were twenty-seven American crew members: the British arrested six, a couple escaped, and the rest managed to blend in with the passengers in order to be sent to Cyprus instead of a British prison in Palestine. As Paul spoke Yiddish, he probably managed this with ease. Most of the crew members stayed together in the camp. Haganah was an active force there and they assigned the Americans to a tunnel building project. They then assigned the Americans the task of building a bomb that could blow up one of the British prison ships that picked up refugees from Cyprus every month to fill the immigration quota for Palestine. After fourteen weeks, Paul and the other crew members were selected for this transport. The bomb was successfully smuggled aboard and, after everyone had disembarked, the ship, Empire Lifeguard, exploded in the port at Haifa on July 23, five days after the Exodus incident. Paul and the other crew members were taken to Atlit prison camp in Palestine. After two months, he escaped with the help of Haganah. They provided Paul with a false identity as a South African named Kaplan and smuggled him into France where he worked with their underground unit. In 1948, Paul returned to New York and became the engineer on another ship, the S.S. Director, a former Hudson Bay Liner. Renamed the S.S. Galila, it sailed to Marseilles and transported fifteen hundred refugees to Haifa in the new state of Israel, which was established in May 1948. Paul joined the Israeli navy, serving in an underwater demolition unit during the War for Independence. About a year later, still affiliated with the Israeli navy, Paul returned to the US to attend college. After graduation, he worked for a while tracking down former Nazis. Paul regularly speaks to groups about his experiences. He is a former president of American Veterans for Israel and Temple Hillel on Long Island, New York. He married Susan Turner and they have five children.

The medallion was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2001 by Joseph Rosenthal, the nephew of Paul Kaye.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Joseph Rosenthal

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.