by Shoshana Bryen, The Times of Israel
Sunday marks 35 years since 66 Vietnamese refugees, fleeing the communist takeover of their homeland on a small, leaky boat, found deliverance. They were without food and water, and ships from Panama, Norway and Japan had ignored their distress signals (violating the most basic rule of the sea). They despaired of rescue.
Captain Meir Tadmor of the Israeli cargo ship Yuvali was on his way to Japan when he saw them on 10 June 1977. The Yuvali’s Chief Engineer wrote the following late last year:
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I was there. In South China Sea, close to Vietnamese coast, we met small fishing boat, few people on the deck, asking for food and water. We stop ship, and first wanted to give them as they asking: food and water, but than come on the deck a woman with small baby in the hands, and told us that they are Vietnamese refugees. That is when we decided to take all on board… Their leader was the only one to talk English, very nice person, he was with family – wife, child, wife’s sister and parents. We took care of them, give them proper food and accommodation (sic).
After receiving permission from the Israeli government to find them refuge, Capt. Tadmor made an unscheduled stop in Hong Kong, which refused to allow the ship to dock. He sailed on to Taiwan, where the refugees were refused because they had no citizenship.
That would be fixed.
In his first official act, newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made the Vietnamese citizens of Israel. The Taiwan government then allowed the former refugees to enter the country, receive assistance and be taken to the airport for their trip to Israel, the first of nearly 300 Vietnamese refugees to find safe harbor there.
At the ceremony to welcome them, Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption David Levy chastised those who had ignored the leaky, dangerous boats and ignored their hungry, sick and desperate passengers:
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Let them do as we have. May they lend a hand to save women and children who are in the heart of the sea without a homeland, and lead them to safe shores.
Israel understood boat people because Jews in living memory had been boat people.
Prime Minister Begin told President Carter:
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We never have forgotten the boat with 900 Jews, the St. Louis, having left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War… traveling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge. They were refused… Therefore it was natural… to give those people a haven in the Land of Israel.
There was the St. Louis, and there were other boats.
More than 100,000 Jews tried to reach Palestine by sea between 1934 and 1948 on 120 ships making 142 voyages. Only a few thousand made it to Israel that way. More than 1,600 drowned. More than 1,000 were killed on the SS Struma (768 dead, one survivor) and the Mefkura (345 dead, five survivors), both sunk by Soviet torpedoes. The British interned as many as 50,000 in Cyprus, or back in Germany, including the passengers of the Exodus in 1947. The Hannah Senesh docked; theEnzo Sereni didn’t. The Salvador and the Europa were wrecked in storms.
The experience of Jewish refugees and the hopelessness of statelessness made Israel sensitive to the hopelessness of people from another place, another culture, another war, giving the Vietnamese a place to start over.
(For those rolling their eyes on behalf of stateless Palestinian refugees: It is precisely the Jewish experience with statelessness that impels Israel to continue to seek a mechanism by which Palestinians can achieve the state the Arab states declined on their behalf in 1948 – without losing the State of Israel.)
Some of the Vietnamese left Israel, looking for a more familiar culture (and seeking Vietnamese spouses for their children), but others stayed. You can see the story of Hanmoi Nguyen, who remained in Israel, and his five daughters in the film “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen.”
The Yuvali’s Chief Engineer left his e-mail on his blog post so the Vietnamese could contact him, saying, “I do believe that they all remember me.”
No doubt they do.
Meir Tadmor is an amazing guy… when I heard the story in my youth, I was deeply moved. Israel acted when the rest of the world refused to give these people a haven. Has the world really changed today?
Then it has no right to lecture Israel on humanity to unwanted people.
The Vietnamese boat people were TRUE refugees. Israel did a beautiful thing in rescuing them and taking them in.
The many thousands of hostile, Muslim invaders who have crossed into Israel are NOT refugees. They must all be kicked out immediately and not allowed to remain as a very dangerous fifth column. They have 56 Muslim nations they can go to.
Every nation’s leaders that refused to take in terrified Jews fleeing from the Holocaust will surely be punished by G-D for this dreadful crime against humanity. As the phoenix declares: you are either GOOD or EVIL. I believe it was Dennis Prager, who said: There are only two kinds of people in the world: “The decent, and the indecent.” How true that is.
@ Miriam 1:
Thank you Miriam.
@ BlandOatmeal:
Bland oatmeal,
your name suits you. If you can’t understand the comparison–how one type of boat people breeds compassion for another–then there is something missing in your soul. (If you have one)
@ the phoenix:
“Phoenix” all I can say is BLESS YOU!
I don’t see what the Vietnamese refugees have to do with the former Jewish refugees,except that both were refugees. Now you have mostly Sudanese refugees, but I don’t see “St. Louis” stories here about them. Meos, Viets and Chinese have been generally beneficial to countries that take them in, refugees or no.
“More than 100,000 Jews tried to reach Palestine by sea between 1934 and 1948 on 120 ships making 142 voyages. Only a few thousand made it to Israel that way. More than 1,600 drowned. More than 1,000 were killed on the SS Struma (768 dead, one survivor) and the Mefkura (345 dead, five survivors), both sunk by Soviet torpedoes. The British interned as many as 50,000 in Cyprus, or back in Germany, including the passengers of the Exodus in 1947. The Hannah Senesh docked; theEnzo Sereni didn’t. The Salvador and the Europa were wrecked in storms.”
P R E C I S E L Y !!!
being first hand aware of the sinking of ‘struma’, the ‘floating coffin’, (my late mother’s brother was on that ship and he was NOT the one who survived…), the ‘exodus’, ‘the st louis’ (may fdr rot in hell!!!)and others, such as the ‘mefkura’ that i did not know before (god, i LOVE israpundit…there is soooo much to learn!), i am becoming more and more aware, how ridiculous and useless and DISTASTEFULL, this charade known as ‘diplomacy’ really is.
you are either GOOD or EVIL. if you have to take a few hours to explain and justify why there was no action taken to come to the rescue of a helpless human being in need…it is pathetically coward, and revolting.
the goodness of a jewish soul, is amply demonstrated in captain tadmor’s rescue and begin’s acceptance of these ‘boat people’…
let there be no antisemite bastard, or any brain-dead liberal starting with some equivalence of navi marmara or the defecators-on-the-street from africa….
the FABRIC of the jewish nation in israel is being soiled and dammaged. from within and from without.
when a building is on fire, the chief fireman arrives on the scene and starts barking orders that must be followed promptly to save what is.
there is no time for diplomacy (or better yet, as mr belman puts it THERE IS NO DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION),
there is no time to please everybody
action must be taken DECISIVELY strongly, and repeatedly (as an old teacher of mine once said regarding treating a bacterial infection with antibiotics: “hit it hard hit it fast and let nature heal”)
first and foremost on the agenda should be annexation of y+s and expulsion/population transfer/relocation (take your pick)of the ENTIRE 5TH COLUMN which are the muslims.
1400 years of inbreeding coupled with following the words of a pedophile/rapist/robber/pervert/necrophiliac etc (viewed as the insan al kamil, the one who has achieved perfection….) has left as an end product, a subhuman species that is glorifying murder, rape, maiming torture etc)
those who aid these ‘people’ are as guilty as these ‘people’.
you can NOT have an infectious element living inside the organism and expect it to live a healthy life.
as the late (unfortunately)rabbi kahane said: “they must go!”