Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence: Courts, Escape Networks and Press Coverage of the Cyprus Internment Camps

This session of the conference Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence presents three papers on the British internment camps that held Jewish refugees in Cyprus between 1946 and 1949.

Shlomi Balaban of the University of Haifa examines the internal comrades' courts (Mishpat Chaverim) established in the camps in June 1947. Drawing on labor movement archives and interviews with Haganah commander Ephraim Gilan, Balaban shows that the tribunals and an internal police force were set up by the Haganah and operated by the camp secretariats to curb theft, defamation and violence without drawing British intervention. While the JDC, led in Cyprus by Morris Laub and Yehoshua Leibner, officially ran camp welfare, correspondence proves that Laub knew of the courts and turned a blind eye. Balaban documents 120 trials in the winter block and 125 in the summer block. Judges from seven Zionist movements sat in rotating panels of three. Balaban argues that this pluralism reflected both a proto-state self-perception and the political balance in the camps, where a united Mapam outnumbered Mapai.

Yitzhak Kerem traces Greek and North African Sephardic detainees and the networks that smuggled fighters out of Cyprus. He begins with the August 1946 voyage of the Henrietta Szold, carrying Greek Auschwitz survivors including Thessaloniki boxer Jacko Razon and partisan leader Lazaros Azarias (Lazaros Lazaridis), who fought British sailors in Haifa Bay before being deported to the Karaolos camp near Famagusta. He also discusses North African Jews arriving on vessels such as the Yehuda Halevi and Shivat Zion and their friction with Ashkenazi survivors. Kerem then details how the Haganah and Palmach under Yehuda Drexler worked with the Cypriot party AKEL and Prodromos Papavassiliou in Larnaca and Famagusta: digging five escape tunnels, hiding escapees in caves, and using Greek Cypriot drivers and boats to smuggle crews and draft-age men to Palestine.

The final paper, written by Vasiliki Selioti and read by Evangelia Matthopoulou, surveys Greek Cypriot press reporting on the camps at Karaolos and Xylotymbou from August 1946 to February 1949. Newspapers such as Eleftheria, Kypriakos Typos, Esperini, Anexartitos and Grammata described barbed wire enclosures, water shortages, hunger strikes, a football victory over British guards, and clashes with German prisoners of war brought from Egypt to build the camps. Selioti shows that Cypriot institutions initially feared a permanent settlement would alter demographics and harm enosis, until an October 1946 manifesto signed by Lazaros Azarias assured Cypriots that the detainees sought only to reach Palestine. Thereafter the press framed both Greek Cypriots and Jews as victims of British colonial rule.

In the closing discussion, Balaban addresses the European legal training of the judges, trial procedures, and why the courts had jurisdiction only over detainees, while participants discuss German prisoners of war visiting Cypriot villages.