Excerpt from Robert Rockaway’s book. “BUT HE WAS GOOD TO HIS MOTHER. ”
A Haganah emissary, Reuvin Dafni, who came to the United States in 1946 to raise money for the Haganah, also met with some well-known Jewish gangsters. Dafni had been born in Croatia in 1913. He immigrated to Palestine in 1936 where he became one of the founders of Kibbutz Ein Gev. In 1940, he joined the Jewish Brigade of the British army. In 1944, he parachuted with other paratroopers behind enemy lines into Yugoslavia and joined the partisans. After the war, he returned to his kibbutz. He did not stay there long. In 1946, the Haganah sent him to the United States to raise funds.
A few months later, the Haganah sent Dafni to Los Angeles. One day, he received an intriguing phone call from a man who identified himself as “Smiley” and requested a meeting. When they met, Smiley asked Dafni to “Tell me what you’re doing. My boss is interested.” Smiley’s boss turned out to be Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Smiley was Allen Smiley, Siegel’s right-hand man.
Smiley arranged a meeting between Siegel and Dafni at the LaRue restaurant. At the appointed time, Smiley and Dafni went into an empty room at the rear of the restaurant. After a few moments, Smiley left, leaving Dafni alone. Soon two tough-looking goons entered and searched the room. When they were satisfied it was safe, they left.
Shortly thereafter, Siegel came in. He sat opposite Dafni and asked him to tell why he was in Los Angeles. As Dafni relates, “I told him my story, how the Haganah was raising money to buy weapons with which to fight. When I finished, Siegel asked, ‘You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?’ Yes, I replied. Then Siegel, who was sitting across the table, leaned forward till his nose was almost touching mine. ‘You mean fighting, as in killing?’ Yes, I answered. Siegel leaned back, looked at me for a moment and said, ‘OK, I’m with you.’ ”
“From then on,” recalled Dafni, “Every week I got a phone call to go to the restaurant. And every week I received a suitcase filled with $5 and $10 bills. The payments continued till I left Los Angeles.” Dafni estimates that Siegel gave him a total of $50,000.
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And then there’s this…OPERATION EXODUS
The exciting story of the Exodus ship that in 1947 ferried 4,500 Jewish war refugees to the Zionist homeland
Despite the urgent need for relocating concentration-camp survivors and displaced persons (DP) at the end of World War II, Britain refused to allow more than 1,500 immigrants per month to Palestine. The Jewish underground army, the Haganah, secured the boats necessary for transporting waves of refugees to Palestine, such as the large Chesapeake steamer, President Warfield. Veteran popular historian Thomas (Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6, 2009, etc.) moves swiftly from one scene to the other to keep his suspenseful story percolating, using a wealth of information gleaned from official archives, news reports, public records, British intelligence documents and interviews with passengers. The author paints a complete portrait of a variety of settings: within the Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street, as well as its outposts in New York, including the basement of the Copacabana nightclub, called the Kibbutz Fourteen, where Zionist leaders like Golda Meir stayed; DP camps across Europe; and the office of the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin as he coordinated naval resistance to the “smuggling of illegal immigrants” into Palestine. Thomas looks at the outfitting of the President Warfield by U.S. volunteers, its refitting and slow odyssey in May 1947 from Baltimore harbor to Marseilles, where thousands of refugees at nearby DP camps were ready to board the ship built for holding 400 passengers—all the while tracked by British intelligence. The author then recounts the harrowing trip from July through September, as the now-christened Exodus 1947 was rammed by British destroyers and forcibly boarded, then detoured back to France and Germany before the refugees were finally allowed into Palestine almost a year later
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