The Living Bridge – the Meeting of the Volunteers from Eretz Israel with the Holocaust Survivors, 1983 [CLOSED]

Curator: Nava Schreiber

Jewish Brigade soldier teaching refugee children, 1946 (From The Beit Hatfutsot Exhibition: “The Living Bridge” – The Meeting of Volunteers from Eretz Israel with The Holocaust Survivors, 1983)

The exhibition – “The Living Bridge – the meeting of the volunteers from Eretz Israel with the Holocaust survivors” is dedicated to the memory of Haim Laskov.
Haim Laskov, renowned as one of Israel’s chiefs of staff, was among those who volunteered for service in the British army. As an officer in the Jewish Brigade, he took part in the historic encounter with the remnants of European Jewry which this exhibition records. Towards the end of his life, in his capacity as President of the Israel War Veterans’ League, he was one of those who initiated this exhibition.

“The Living Bridge” was prepared on the initiative and with the active assistance of the Israel War Veterans’ League. Its objective is to bring to the knowledge of the general public, and in particular the young generation, a dramatic and vitally important chapter in the annals of the Yishuv, which must never be eradicated from national consciousness. By virtue of the volunteering movement, which brought thirty thousand Palestinian Jews into the ranks of the British army, the historical fact that was established that Jews, fighting under the Jewish flag, took part in the battle against the Nazis. And thanks to the Zionist mission which these volunteers carried out after the War ended among the Holocaust survivors, in the DP camps and along the escape and illegal immigration routes, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were transformed into a great force, fighting for the right to build their home in their historic homeland. There can be no doubt that the organized pressure of the survivors played a significant, perhaps decisive part in the political developments which led ultimately to the establishment of the State of Israel.

The various sections of the exhibition endeavors to reconstruct, with the aid of photographs, the encounter of the volunteers with the Jews of the Diaspora – in the Middle East, in North Africa and in Europe. The visual material has been taken in part from the I.D.F. Archives and other public archives, but the great majority was provided by private individuals – former volunteers in British army units. Members of the Israel War Veterans’ League played an important part in collecting this material.