Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence: Archives and Memory of the British Detention Camps in Cyprus

This second session of the conference on historical perspectives of the Jewish presence in Cyprus, chaired by Arye Kochavi of the University of Haifa, examines archives and personal memory relating to the British detention camps for Jewish refugees in Cyprus between 1946 and 1949.

In the first paper, Rina Offenbach, director of the Clandestine Jewish Immigration Information and Research Center at Atlit, explains how her center builds a bilingual database of personal testimonies and life stories of the ma'apilim, the clandestine Jewish immigrants to Mandatory Palestine. Out of an estimated 120,000 to 140,000 clandestine immigrants, some 53,000 were detained by the British in camps in Cyprus, including around Xylotymbou and Famagusta. Offenbach shows how the Atlit center, located at the former British detention camp south of Haifa that became a national heritage site in 1987, cross-references scattered records to reconstruct family histories for detainees and their children born in the Cyprus camps. She traces specific cases through partial passenger lists from ships such as the Chaim Arlosoroff and the Henrietta Szold in the Central Zionist Archives, Criminal Investigation Department memoranda in the Israel State Archives, pages of testimony at Yad Vashem, rabbinical board notebooks recording marital status in the National Library of Israel, and November 1946 birth registers from the Makarios Maternity Hospital in Nicosia. She concludes with a March 1949 public works letter from the Cyprus State Archives proposing that the concrete floors and masonry of the dismantled Famagusta camps be broken up to form the foundation of the Ormideia to Xylophagou road.

In the second paper, Anat Kutner presents the Jerusalem holdings of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives and its dedicated Cyprus collection, which records JDC administration, relations with the British authorities and the Jewish Agency, supplies, medical cases, and camp life. Connecting archival work to gerontology in Israel, Kutner describes how former detainees and the babies born in the Cyprus camps, now in their seventies, use these records to recover their personal histories. Because the original summer and winter camp structures no longer survive on the ground in Cyprus, visitors returning to the island find little physical trace of their detention and turn instead to the archives, where British military hospital birth lists and JDC photographs document camp schooling, weaving, carpentry, art classes, and Passover concerts in 1948 by the singer Shoshana Damari and composer Moshe Wilensky.

A question-and-answer session follows on the International Tracing Service records at Bad Arolsen, Greek and Hungarian passengers on the Henrietta Szold, and how retirees engage with historical research.