ORT Training Ship

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 lone children.

The ORT School had a merchant marine training ship, the Joseph Hertz near London, in Grays, Essex. Members of the Boys were on the ship.

Background

Vocational training was given by ORT, from the Russian Óbchestvo Reméslenava Trudá, or Society for Trades and Agricultural Labour, which was set up in St. Petersburg in 1880 to provide professional and vocational training for Jewish youth. As a philanthropic organization, it assisted Jewish artisans, workers and cooperatives and soon developed into a worldwide network. In the 1900s, it began to open its own vocational schools.

Vocational training was widely used in the Displaced Persons camps in Europe after the war as it was believed that it was the best way for adolescents and children to process trauma. The experience was also an important tool in group bonding.

The ORT Story

British ORT was set up in 1921 and was based on New Cavendish Street, London. In its early years it focused on fundraising.

This situation changed abruptly on 29 August 1939, two days before the outbreak of World War II, when 104 teenage students and seven teachers from the ORT school in Berlin left Charlottenburg Station on a train heading for London. The Berlin school eventually found a home in Leeds and was funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee until it lost its funding after the United States entered the war in 1941 and closed down as a result.

In Britain, vocational courses were part of the Committee for the Care of the Concentration Camp Children’s ethos of collective living within a Jewish environment and provided adolescent survivors with a sense of belonging and re-enforced their Jewish identity. The ORT school was designed as a temporary measure to enable refugees to support themselves in a country in which they should eventually settle.

The Training Ship

Named in memory of the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth between 1913 and 1946, the ship was run by the Jewish Marine League to prepare young men for careers as merchant navy officers and navigators.

The chief officer of the ORT Training ship, the Joseph Hertz, was Captain N.F. Israel, a World War II veteran who had been in Battle of the Atlantic.

The first intake of 21 boys included 17 former inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. During their training the boys wore Royal Navy uniforms with a Star of David badge attached to their sleeves. Many of the Boys ultimately left for Israel where they served both in the merchant navy and later in the newly created Israeli navy. Many were recruited by the Jewish underground to fight as Machal volunteers in the 1948 War.

Training on the Joseph Hertz was closed on 10 October 1947.

ORT was a key element in creating the Boys. The ORT schools not only equipped students with new skills but gave them the confidence to imagine a future in which they could use them.