Israel

Immediately after liberation the majority of the members of the Boys wanted to make new lives in Palestine. Many of them would eventually settle in Israel.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

Members of the Boys were held in Nazi labour and concentration camps and used as slave labourers, they had also survived World War II in hiding or as feral children.

Background

Many had signed up to come to Britain in the hope it would be the fastest route to Palestine, which was at this point controlled by Britain under the League of Nations Mandate system

One Bachad volunteer who had been at the Windermere reception centre was Esther Calingold. She later went on to work at the Jews Temporary Shelter where she made friends who more members of the Boys. These exepriences inforced her Zionist fervour. In 1946, she volunteered to fight in Israel. She was sniper in the old city pof Jerusalem, where she was killed.

Between 1945 and 1948, British government policy put the authorities on a collision course with British Zionists. In the March 1939 White Paper, the British government had imposed strict limits on Jewish immigration into the Palestine Mandate that they controlled.

The Labour Party had promised in the 1945 election campaign to repeal the White Paper. When they took office in the summer of 1945 they did not keep their promise. The 100,000 British troops garrisoned in Palestine soon found themselves in the frontline fighting a Jewish insurgency,” he said. “Off the coast the Royal Navy were boarding illegal immigrant ships crammed to the brim with desperate Holocaust survivors who were promptly interned on arrival in Haifa.

Coupled with this in post-war food and fuel were in short supply. The Jewish community was blamed for the shortages and levels of anti-Semitism in Britain the early summer of 1946 reached a new high. Tabloid headlines reported attacks on British soldiers in Palestine, which inflamed public opinion and would eventually lead to widespread riots in British cities.

On June 29, 1946, the crisis in Palestine deepened when the government ordered the arrest of Jewish leaders as part of Operation Agatha. The following Sunday, Jews took to the streets of London in their first large-scale public protest. Many of the Boys, even those living outside the capital, took part and their black-and-white photograph collections usually include snaps of the protest that culminated in Trafalgar Square.

Days later, a serious pogrom broke out in the Polish city of Kielce. It left 42 Jews dead and thousands of Holocaust survivors began to flood out of Poland, desperate to reach safety in the Jewish homeland. It was a turning point,” Asher said, not only for Esther but for many of the Bahad youngsters and the survivors the had befriended.
The vast majority of the concentration camp survivors Esther worked with were also Zionists. After the liberation, when the Red Cross in Theresienstadt had asked them where they would like to start a new life, nearly all had said Palestine.

Geoffrey Paul, a friend of Esther’s and later editor of the Jewish Chronicle, also volunteered to work with them at the Temporary Shelter, and later wrote that they “wanted to go out into the streets and punch every passing policeman as a protest against the actions of the Palestine Police. There was a most provocative recruiting poster for the Palestine Police right opposite the Shelter and the kids had to be restrained from defacing it.”

Aliyah Bet

Kibbutz Lavi

The kibbutz played an important role in the Boys story. It was founded by Bahad in 1949

The archive at the kibbutz holds many documents that relate to the story of the Boys.