Following the publication last Monday in "Israel Today" as part of the celebrations of the 73rd anniversary of the Knesset, which presented the call of Knesset Speaker MK Miki Levy to those born on the illegal immigrant ship "Knesset Israel", they contacted the newspaper and it turns out that they keep in touch WhatsApp "Born in the illegal immigration ship of the Knesset of Israel", which has about two hundred members.
Members of the group said that "it's crazy. From the advertising control the WhatsApp group is turbulent and tumultuous. There is a list of babies born on the ship, there is documentation, there is a lot of stuff."
The first baby born on the Knesset Israel ship that sailed on November 5 and sailed for a month, and was born two days later, is Mordechai Saar Marmorstein, now 75 years old like the other babies born on the ship.
Marmorstein is the center of the WhatsApp group, who over the years has written an exciting journey diary about each day on the ship with testimonies he has collected from it over the years.
Mordechai Saar Marmorstein, Photo: Coco
"Everyday life on the ship was not simple, 4,000 people who are Holocaust survivors in a nutshell, 8 floors of bunks with each one half a meter by half a meter to sleep on. If someone vomits from the eighth floor, the vomit seeps over everyone. Just describe a condition of seasickness, "One half of the people vomited. One of the babies born on the ship died in childbirth and had a naval burial. It was a military ceremony that they put in a small locker and on a kind of slide slid it into the sea. It is very difficult to think about it," he shares.
When his mother Esther knelt to give birth, his father Abraham was looking for a midwife.
"A 24-year-old girl named Ella arrived, who was a nurse and she became at that moment my midwife and the babies born after me. The captain cleared his room to allow my mother to give birth on the table. "For days there was a covenant on a ship, it was the largest covenant in history in my opinion - and it was mine. Four thousand people attended it, their sons will also go to mohel - his name was Israel Reef," shares Marmorstein, an economist by profession and a doctor of Israeli history. , Grandfather of 13 and also has two great-grandchildren.
Miriam Winkler, Photo: Coco
Over the years, he has collected testimonies and today he lectures on the history of the ship. His name Saar was given to him by the godfather, one of the passengers on the ship - former MK Yoav Sidon. "He told my parents that it was not enough to call me Mordechai after my grandfather who was murdered in the Holocaust and needs a name to express what is happening at this time. "There was a storm at sea and there was a metaphorical storm in the people of Israel with the days before the establishment of the state, and therefore I was also given the name Saar on the ship," he shares excitedly.
Miriam Winkler, an educator living in Ramat Gan, was born about two weeks after Saar. She shares that her mother Magda, who was 30 when she was in her womb, decided to board the ship in a spontaneous decision. "The story I was born on the ship is a very heroic story. This is how they have always seen me around. But to this day I sway with myself between admiring my mother who gave birth like this, and criticizing her for boarding a ship at such an advanced stage of pregnancy is an act of irresponsibility. "The ship because of me, who could not walk around the street and see corpses on the floor as she walked the streets of Budapest. She told the family that she was not staying here and boarded the ship with them. They left a house behind as if they were just out shopping," Winkler shares. "I was very excited to read the article that my son, who also sent me abroad, wrote to me that he would appear with me in the Knesset," she concludes.
At the Knesset, a new historical tour was initiated at the Mishkan's visitor center, which will be presented to visitors as the Omicron wave subsides.
In the unique tour, the guides will also tell about one of the most heroic illegal immigration operations that the Palmach knew with the siege of the illegal immigration ship "Knesset Israel" about 3848 passengers of the Holocaust survivors by three British destroyers off the coast of Haifa.
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