Blue and white Zionist flag with a Star of David from the ship Exodus 1947

Michael (Mike) Weiss was a Jewish American from New York, in his twenties who, on April 10, 1946, became a Machal, a volunteer from abroad, for the clandestine effort to smuggle Holocaust survivors from Europe to Palestine and to support the fight for an independent Palestine. Mike worked as a carpenter on the immigrant ship, Hatikvah, formerly Tradewinds, but possibly only during the outfitting. In November 1946, Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, involved in the immigration movement, acquired another ship, the President Warfield, and Mike was assigned as boatswain-carpenter. The ship, a passenger steamboat built in 1928, had previously been put into service during World War II. In September 1942, the US War Shipping Administration (WSA) delivered it as part of the Lend-Lease program to the British Ministry of War Transport. In May 1944, it was commissioned by the US Navy as the USS President Warfield (IX-169) and used as a control ship off Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings on June 4, 1944. It was decommissioned in September 1945, and sold by the WSA in November 1946, to a Haganah affiliated agency. In May 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, there were between seven and nine million displaced persons. The Allies repatriated about six million to their native countries, but 1.5 - 2 million mostly Jewish DPs refused to return to homelands where their entire families had been murdered and postwar anti-Semitism was often violent. Many dreamed of immigrating to Eretz Israel [Palestine]. Great Britain controlled Palestine under an international mandate and had strictly enforced immigration quotas. Several Jewish groups united to make possible Aliyah Bet [illegal immigration], to Palestine. The President Warfield was renamed the Exodus 1947 and outfitted in Baltimore, Maryland, before heading to France in January 1947. Aware of its intended use, the British Navy blockaded it off Italy for seven weeks, before letting it continue. The Exodus docked in the port of Sète, near Marseille, and boarded around 4,500 passengers, including 655 children, all displaced persons and Holocaust survivors, seeking to start a new life in Eretz Israel. It had 70 crew members, mostly Jewish American volunteers, and was captained by Yossi Harel (1918-2008), a Haganah veteran, credited with personally delivering 24,000 immigrants to Palestine. It was the largest ship yet sent to get through the British naval blockade. The Exodus left Sète, on July 11, 1947, escorted by a British naval convoy. As the ship neared Palestine on July 18, Harel tried to outdistance his escort and headed toward shore. The British fired a warning shot and sailors were dispatched to board the ship. The passengers resisted and fighting broke out, killing an Exodus crew member and two passengers and wounding dozens. After several hours, Harel surrendered and the British ships escorted Exodus to the port in Haifa. The ship sailed into port playing the Hatikvah and flying the Zionist flag in place of the Honduran flag under which the ship was registered. Mike removed the flag from the mast before the passengers and crew were forced to disembark. Mike and the crew were taken to Atlit detention camp on the coast. The passengers were transferred to three ships – the Ocean Vigour, Runnymede Park, and Empire Rival -- and taken back to France, where they refused to disembark. Protests and worldwide news coverage made the Exodus a symbol of the postwar refugee crisis and the need for a resolution to the conflict over Palestine among Jews, Arabs, and the British. After three weeks, the British issued an ultimatum to the refugees on the ships: disembark or be transported to Hamburg, Germany. On August 22, 1947, the ships sailed for Hamburg, arriving on September 8. On December 8, the British removed the refugees from the ships by force and took them to displaced persons camps. Haganah pledged to get them all out of Germany, a task completed on September 8, 1948. Mike appears to have been held until nearly January 1948, part of the time with US crew members from the Hatikvah transferred to Atlit from a Cypriot internment camp. The Hatikvah, also an Aliyah Bet ship, was captured by the British on May 17, 1947, a month before the Exodus. He may have returned from Lydda, Palestine, via Transcontinental and Western Air, to New York on January 7, 1948. Mike eventually settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1977, Mike gave the flag to a friend in Israel, Rabbi Kolidetsky, who was married to his cousin. Mike had personally inscribed the flag with his name, the ship’s former and current names, the prison camp name, Atlit, and the date of his enlistment with Haganah. Mike had no children and his date of death is not known. The Exodus burned to the waterline on August 25, 1952, while moored in Haifa, and was scrapped in Italy in 1952.

The flag was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016 by Tom and Bill Silverstein.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Bill and Tom Silverstein

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