Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

ילדי טהרן
Tehran Children
הילדים של חורף שנת 43

On September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Jewish families, and their children, fled from Poland to the Soviet Union.
On June 22, 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of Polish Jews were sent to the interior of the Soviet Union, and more children became separated from their families as a result.

In 1941 the families and children were released from the labor camps, some Jewish children found temporary refuge in orphanages and shelters in the Soviet Union, most were left to wander the Southern Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

In 1942, the Soviets authorized the resettlement of 24,000 Polish civilians and Anders Army recruits to Iran, including 1,000 Jewish children, mainly orphans, who became known as the Tehran Children.
Many came orphanages and shelters across the Soviet Union, travelled by train from Samarqand to Krasnovodsk, and then by ship to Bandar-e Pahlavi, or from Bukhara to Kazan and Ashkhabad, to Bandar-e Pahlavi.
In 1942, many orphaned. suffering from starvation, illness and cold, the cildren, pretending to be non-Jewish Polish refugees, arrived in Tehran.
In October 1942, Zipporah Shertok, wife of the head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), went to Tehran to direct the orphanage, Beit haYeled haYehudi (Jewish Child's Home).
Two Jewish Agency representatives, Reuven Shefer and Avraham Zilberberg, were sent to open a Palestine Office.
The children moved to Afhaz.

On January 3, 1943, immigration permits had been obtained from the Mandate authorities, and a ship was obtained through the British authorities in Iran,
716 children traveled with escorts by truck to Bandar Shahpour, from there on the freighter, SS Dunera, to Karachi. IsraCast cites 861 children and 369 adults; 719 orphans, and 142 children with one or both parents
The Iraqis refused to grant them transit visas through Iraq.
They boarded Noralea , and sailed around the Arabian Peninsula, through the Red Sea to Suez.
After a two day quarantine in El Arish, they crossed the Sinai Desert by train.

On February 18, 1943, more than 800 children arrived at Atlit.
Youth aliyah activists, headed by Henrietta Szold and Dr. Hans Beyth, made all-out efforts to absorb them.
From Atlit, they were sent to eleven transit camps, kibbutzim, moshavim, children's homes and schools, where they recuperated.

On August 28, 1943, a second group of 120 children arrived in Palestine, via Iraq, after the British suppressed Rashid Ali's revolt.

In all, 870 Tehran Children arrived in Palestine.
35 died either as civilians or as soldiers in the 1948-1949 War of Independence.
The 35 soldiers were commemorated in Yizkor the Tehran Children, by Meir Ohad, published by the Public Commission to Commemorate the Tehran Children, Tel Aviv, 1979.