Word: haifa
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Soon after midnight, guards at old Acre Prison, near Haifa, entered his cell and shook Dov Bela Gruner until he woke up. Sleepy-eyed, bewildered, he was taken to a large, dimly lit room. There stood a gallows. There also stood three other men of Palestine's Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist organization. This was their first notice that death had come for them...
Early in the afternoon of Sabbath eve two British minesweepers spotted their quarry entering Palestine's territorial waters near Haifa. She was a battered, 750-ton freighter jampacked with 1,350 Jewish refugees from Europe bent on entering the Holy Land. She had had a long, hard voyage-30 days from Goteborg, Sweden, which she had cleared as a Greek ship (the Ulua), bound for South America. Now she flew the blue-and-white Zionist flag and her bridge carried a freshly painted name: Chaim Arlosoroff (in honor of a murdered Palestine labor leader...
Soon came more boarding parties, heavily armed. Fierce fights broke out as the immigrants refused to permit the British Navy to take over. While passengers clawed and pummeled the sailors, the ship zigzagged through converging Navy craft. Finally the Arlosoroff scraped aground, just 100 yards off Bat Galim, Haifa's seashore suburb. Behind the barbed wire on the beach, hundreds of Jews waved handkerchiefs at the immigrants, cheered as a dozen leaped overboard and struggled ashore-to certain capture. On the ship the fight continued...
...news spread to Haifa. Thousands stopped work and swarmed angrily toward Bat Galim. They passed Barclay's Bank Building, shattered by a bomb soon after the ship's interception (two Jews were killed). Then they ran into tough, maroon-bereted British paratroopers, who barred their way. Jews and soldiers traded insults. Then the Jews went away into the dusk of Sabbath eve. Four hours after the first encounter aboard the Arlosoroff the fight went out of the immigrants on the ship...
...spite of the impending strife, Jews from Europe were still trying to find homes in Palestine. Last week 650 refugees, packed on a schooner off Haifa, hurled bottles and belaying pins at 100 British soldiers who boarded the ship to prevent illegal immigration...