Like the exodus of their Biblical forefathers from Egypt, the departure
of European Jews out of Germany to board the ship Exodus 1947 was a
hurried affair. The order to swiftly transfer a large number of displaced
persons (DPs) to France was issued by the Mossad le-Aliyah Bet (Mossad)
toward the end of June 1947. In less than two weeks, some 5,000 people
left the DP camps in Germany ( Yahil 1981, 143-44; Habbas 1954, 23).
Most of them set sail on 11 July 1947 aboard a ship, whose name at that
time was still President Warfield.

In the spring of 1947, the Jewish DPs in the American occupied zone
in Germany were in a state of near crisis. Two years after the end of the
war there were some 150,000 Jews still living in the zone, after having
experienced seven years of hell and whose future was foggy at best. At
the end of the Second World War, at a time when displaced persons from
other nations were making their way eastward back to their countries of
origin, the Jews were moving southward to the Mediterranean coast in
the hope of eventually reaching Palestine. It was soon evident, however,
that the way to Palestine was neither short nor swift and by an ironic
twist of history, many Jews were forced to "seek refuge for the night" on
their way to the Promised Land, in Germany of all places. This
temporary overnight stop stretched from months into years, and as time
passed, wave upon wave of Holocaust survivors gathered on German
soil.

By spring of 1947, more than half of all the Jewish DPs in Europe were living in the American occupied zone in Germany. ¹ There were
several reasons for the fact that this region served as a lodestone for these
people. In August 1945, the Americans began setting up special camps
to house the displaced Jews. The British, on the other hand, did not
recognize the Jews as having a separate national identity, and placed them
together with other nationalities, claiming that "it is undesirable to accept
the Nazi theory that the Jews are a separate race. Jews, in common with

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