From Hell and Back

By Steve Rodan

In the 1930s, Jews were pleading to escape Germany and much of Europe. Hitler was on the march and signaling that his solution to the Jewish problem would culminate with genocide. Most of the Jews were waiting on long lines outside offices of the Jewish Agency for a British entry certificate to the Land of Israel.

But in Palestine, the Zionist leadership had very different ideas. The leadership refused to issue certificates to nearly 90 percent of applicants. Working with the British, the aim of the Zionists was to tighten immigration until it reached nearly zero in 1939.

There was a second and complementary agenda by the Zionists -- to reorganize the Jewish community in Palestine so that only those regarded as strong and well-to-do would remain. Those deemed inadequate -- whether physically, emotionally or financially -- would be deported to the same Europe that they had escaped.

For more than a decade, the Zionist Organization conducted a campaign of what was termed repatriation. The effort was directed against Jews only. No gentile in Palestine faced deportation for not fitting in.

The Vaad Leumi, the body that claimed to be the parliament of the Jewish community in Palestine, established a fund to send unfit Jews back to Germany and other countries of origin. Thousands of Jews were marked for deportation and this required money. Chaim Yassky, director of the Hadassah Medical Organization, urged the Zionist establishment to find a way to rapidly expel these Jews.

"[They] are causing a continual burden on the public and on its social institutions," Yassky wrote in the 1937 edition of the Bulletin on Social Welfare in Palestine of the General Council of the Jewish Community.

The deportation policy was based on German eugenics. Theodore Herzl was acutely aware of the German view of Jews as a "degenerative race," which possessed unsavory and harmful traits that must be eradicated for the good of mankind. Herzl saw the worst of these traits in the Jews of Eastern Europe, particularly in the shtetels of Poland and Russia. As Herzl told Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1895, the priority would be to improve the Jewish race. They must turn from lazy, shifty and uncouth to industrious and virtuous warriors. This must take place before or upon the arrival of Jews to their new homeland.

Herzl, who died in 1904, did not live to see his experiment in eugenics. His ambitions continued through Max Nordau, a neurologist and one of Herzl's closest associates, who called for Jews to end their "hereditary" nervous state through physical exercise. Nordau became an inspiration to the ruling Labor Zionist movement headed by David Ben-Gurion.

But the one who sought to translate eugenics into policy was a young university student named Arthur Ruppin. In 1907, Ruppin was sent to Palestine by the German Zionist Organization to advise on how to colonize the territory. A year later, he was appointed director of the Palestine Office, which determined who could settle the Land of Israel. Rejected by gentile society and obsessed with what he called his "ugliness," Ruppin's image of the ideal immigrant was based on the German model -- particularly the facial features of the applicant. An admirer of the Muskeljude, or muscular Jew, he studied Herzl as the physical model of the new Jew.

Over the next four decades, Ruppin would play a leading role in the development of the Jewish community in Palestine. He determined what land to purchase, who would live there, the health care and education they would receive, and what laws would they be subject to. Regarding immigration, Ruppin stressed that only the most fit of Jews should be allowed to enter.

"The elimination of such persons should be taken care of by the doctors of the Palestine Immigration Offices in the ports of sailing; but a second examination should take place in Palestine in the ports of arrival," Ruppin wrote in 1919.

Despite the safeguards, Jews later deemed unfit gained entry to Palestine. The number of physically and mentally impaired increased sharply in the 1930s when tens of thousands of German Jews immigrated to the Land of Israel. The Zionists, working with the British Mandate, sought to formulate character traits that could rapidly determine whether an applicant could be depended upon to do physical labor, particularly in agriculture.

Immigrants were forced to undergo medical tests during their first year of residence to determine whether they were functional. Zionist leaders were adamant that they would not spend more money on mental health care.

"The low frequency among Palestinian Jews...is largely due to the selection of immigrants and the prevention of admission of persons with mental disease," Lipman Halpern, a Zionist representative who worked with the British, wrote in a study in 1936.

The Zionist leadership also sought to use eugenics in determining who should have children. In the 1930s, the Kupat Holim Sick Fund and the Hadassah Medical Organization opened so-called advisory stations that would examine couples preparing for marriage. Physicians encouraged the use of these services for what Dr. Yaacov Zass, a leading professional, termed "racial hygiene."

Children were the most vulnerable to the eugenics policy. In 1934, Israel Rivka'i, writing under the name I. Rubin, urged physicians and teachers to examine what he termed the "psycho-biological specificity" of Jewish children in Palestine. Rivka'i, a leading member of Kupat Holim, said this was imperative in the "creation of a new, corrected and perfected type of Hebrew."

All the while, eugenics dictated that undesirables be expelled from Palestine. The Jewish Agency had recommended repatriation to Europe of the mentally ill even before Hitler, and by the end of 1930 hundreds of Jews were returned to their former countries. The practice continued throughout the decade. In 1935, the Vaad Leumi established a fund to deport Jews with a range of disabilities to Germany and other European countries.

A third of those expelled were said to have been diagnosed with what was termed "nervous or mental disease," seen by eugenics as particular to Eastern European Jews. The Vaad Leumi and Jewish Agency were aided in locating the impaired by cities and settlements throughout the Yishuv as well as Kupat Holim, the League for Fighting Tuberculosis and the Society for Aiding the Chronically Ill.

In his article in 1937, Yassky said the Vaad Leumi expelled tens of Jews said to have been chronically ill. He said the Vaad fund had financed the ship journey to Europe of 39 people over the previous two years. The fund also contributed to the travel expenses of another 63 deportees. In all, 226 people were given money to leave the Jewish homeland.

There were many more Jews who needed to be thrown out of Palestine, Yassky wrote. But the Vaad, which raised money through taxes on the Jewish community, did not have enough funds to pay for additional deportation.

"The experience of the past two years since the fund's establishment, which proves its importance and its benefit, shows that it is necessary to increase its income, and the Vaad Leumi now needs to consider ways to find sources to do that," Yassky wrote.

The fate of those Jews sent back to Germany required little imagination. Hitler had demanded that the Jews leave Germany after they surrendered nearly all of their assets to the Nazi regime. Those who could not leave faced severe persecution, including imprisonment in camps in which scores of inmates were killed daily. Those deemed unfit were targeted by a euthanasia program that secretly began in 1935 and tested the new gas chambers. All this was known to the Zionist leadership.

But this did not impede the Zionist campaign to eliminate the undesirables. In August 1939, months after Hitler openly warned of extermination, the Vaad Leumi proposed expelling Jews who simply needed care or were seen as an embarrassment. How many Jews were ultimately sent back to the Third Reich has never been released.

"Without a doubt, one of the most acute problems in the social life of the land is the question of caring for the chronically ill, the mentally ill, pulmonary cases and different invalids that are deprived of the ability to work by accidents or continued illness," the Vaad Leumi said in a report by its Department of Social Service. "[Those] not absorbed in fitting institutions, who wander outside, who endanger the public's peace...,greatly ruin the face of the Jewish community in Eretz Israel,."

Below: Jewish immigrants arrive in Palestine.