The JNF of South Africa will be launching its new partnership project in January 2018 and would like to interview these South Africans and their descendants.
The Bricha Movement organised groups of Holocaust survivors to escape from Eastern Europe to the West and from there to reach Israel.
Abba Kovner, the partisan fighter and poet, was one of the early organisers. Jews fled through Czechoslovakia and Romania to Italy, Austria and Germany. In the wake of the pogrom in Kielce, Poland on July 4, 1946, when 42 Holocaust survivors were murdered, a large number of Jews – around 95 000 – fled Poland. This flood overwhelmed the Bricha organisation.
The approximately 300 000 Jews who used the Bricha routes, including the trail from the Haifa area to inland Israel, renders it the largest organised illegal mass movement in modern times.
* Contact Sharon on sharon@beyachad.co.za
