Jewish Refugees

This 1945 photograph courtesy of the Government Press Office shows the British ship Mataroa bringing 1,204 refugees from Nazi persecution to the Port of Haifa in Palestine. Jewish immigration to Palestine had gone from a trickle in the 1920s to a sustained surge in the 1930s to a deluge in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War and Jewish persecution being revealed to the world. Mandate authorities struggled to deal with the sheer scale of the influx.