Israeli maritime students hunt for sunken 1946 immigrant ship

JERUSALEM, July 27 (JTA) — Recent graduates of an Israeli maritime high school have found a novel way to commemorate 100 years of Zionism. In a project merging their nautical training with an event in Zionist history, graduates of the Mevo’ot Yam maritime school in Michmoret set sail last week for a small Greek island near
Rhodes. They hope to locate the wreckage of the Rafiah, a boat which was carrying in 1946 more than 800 illegal Jewish immigrants from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to British mandated Palestine, when it sunk in a storm. Some 800 survivors were rescued and taken to internment camps in Cyprus. Thirty people were never found. The bodies of eight drowning victims were transferred to Israel in the 1972. “We looked for a way to connect 100 years of Zionism with the four years of nautical education,” said one of the participants, Shalom Gutman. “We hope to bring back some historical artifacts. We will erect a monument there for the victims of the sinking.” Since little documentation was available on the sinking, students spent the year piecing together the history of the incident through the stories of survivors with whom they met. “We put together the pieces of the puzzle to find where the ship is,” Gutman said. One of the survivors who worked with the students throughout the year is accompanying them on the journey. “Shlomo Reichman was born a few days before the Rafiah sank. When it happened, he was thrown into the water, wrapped in blankets like a parcel,” Gutman said. “He hopes to somehow learn what happened there, who caught him and saved him, and how he got to Israel.”