Library

This Virtual Museum relates the history and most of the names of the approximately 1,500 American and Canadian men and women, including Jews and Christians, who risked their lives in the service of the Jewish people from 1946 to 1949. They served on the ships to smuggle Holocaust survivors through the British blockade into Palestine or as volunteers with the Israeli armed forces. The volunteers aboard the ships participated in Aliyah Bet ("Immigration B"), the effort to thwart England's extremely-restricted "legal" immigration quotas for Palestine with clandestine immigration. Those serving in the armed forces were known as Machal, the Hebrew acronym for mitnadvei chutz l’aretz – “volunteers from abroad." The museum is sponsored by American Veterans of Israel, the organization of Aliyah Bet and Machal veterans in the United States and Canada. It draws upon the Aliyah Bet and Machal Archives in the University of Florida Libraries, and also upon the Museum of American and Canadian Volunteers in Israel’s War of Independence located in the University of Florida Hillel, Gainesville, Florida.