A recent article in The Jerusalem Post, describes a planeload of French Jews making Aliyah to Israel, in spite of the continuing war with Hamas and threats from Iran. More than 1,000 French Jews have made Aliyah since October 7, and thousands more have opened files intending to do so. Incredibly, 24,000 Jews from all over have moved to Israel since October 7.

The modern Zionist movement has always been more than simply a nationalist enterprise. Every Zionist leader, from Herzl onward, made it clear that Jewish survival was at stake. Nothing better highlights this point than the Transfer (in Hebrew, Ha’arava) Agreement, signed on August 25, 1933. Without it, the state of Israel might not have come into being. Yet, other than works like The Transfer Agreement, there has been little attention to this critical period in Jewish history.

The Transfer Agreement allowed German Jews to convert some of their assets into German goods (for example textiles and industrial machinery) to be exported to Palestine and sold. The person immigrating would receive part of the proceeds, and the rest were set aside for communal economic development. The agreement was essentially an investor immigrant scheme. Each immigrant was required to have assets equivalent to $5,000 US dollars (equivalent to more than $100,000 dollars in today’s currency). This helped circumvent British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The agreement was controversial. Jewish leaders in the Diaspora were in favor of an anti-Nazi boycott of German products, while Revisionist Zionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky felt that negotiating with Nazis was unacceptable. From the German perspective, the agreement lessened the possibility of a widespread economic boycott of German products, while at the same time, creating an avenue for ridding the country of its Jews.

About 60,000 German Jews immigrated to the area between 1933 and 1939, under this arrangement. It ended with the onset of World War II. Besides likely saving 60,000 Jews from the Holocaust, the transfer of assets was an important boost to the economy of the then-British Mandate at a critical point during the Great Depression.

I grew up knowing about this episode because of my family’s story. My parents met in their early teens in Montreal in the mid-1920s, after immigrating to Canada from Eastern Europe with their families. Attracted to Labor Zionist ideology, they went to Mandatory Palestine and joined a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley in 1932. The kibbutz, founded in 1924 mainly by Latvian Jews, was located close to the point where the Yarmuk River, the Jordan River’s largest tributary, meets the Jordan.

Some of the men of the kibbutz, including my father, worked in construction to augment the meager income provided by agriculture. The work was associated with Solel Boneh, a cooperative-based construction company founded in 1921 by the Histadrut, Israel’s national trade union.

My father’s work gave him a sense of purpose and a high degree of job satisfaction. (I found his Histadrut membership booklet, his pinkas, in his effects after he died.) He excelled at calculating the number and lengths of rebar reinforcing rods required for various concrete construction projects, and he was a good organizer, an ability that served him well later in life. Unfortunately, his job became the casualty of a power struggle between the Latvians, the dominant group on the kibbutz, and the newcomers from Germany, arriving as part of the Transfer Agreement.

The German newcomers exacerbated existing factional tensions. As Canadians, my parents were outsiders. (Only 316 Canadian Jews immigrated to Mandatory Palestine between 1919 and 1948, according to Encyclopedia Judaica.) He and my mother, and their daughter of two years, left the kibbutz and returned to Canada in 1937.

My father’s story describes an unintended result of the Transfer Agreement. However, it does not change the fact that the Agreement did save many Jews. Efforts were underway during the summer of 1939 to extend the Agreement to Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Italy. In fact, as the Nazis extended their rule to Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, an additional Czech transfer of 2,500 to 3,000 Jews to Palestine took place. But when Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, time ran out.

Zionism still is a survivalist imperative. According to the Jerusalem Post article, for those on the flight from France, “it was better to come to Israel, Iranian threat and all, than to stay in France, where antisemitism had become normalized.”

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.

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