MIGRATION SPAWNING MIGRATION – ON CONTINUITY IN JEWISH EMIGRATION FROM YUGOSLAVIA TO PALESTINE/ISRAEL

Yugoslav participation in Jewish emigration to Mandatory Palestine and, post 1948, to Israel, can be defined as a process consisting of six clearly separate stages. Each of these was defined by dramatic changes in internal and foreign political circumstances. The existence of clear borders between individual stages of migration can hardly be denied, if solely the socio-political context is examined. This discontinuity is however, hardly visible when the same process is brought down and analyzed on the level of participating families and individuals. The aspiration of an individual to join members of his families already in Palestine, especially after the tragic losses suffered by the community in the Holocaust, persevered as one of the key motives driving emigration from Yugoslavia. This paper deals with the way in which family ties continuously drove emigration to Mandatory Palestine/Israel and tied its individual stages into an integral whole. The relatively small community of Yugoslav Jews living in Mandate Palestine after World War Two had ended proved to be a driving force for further individual and then mass emigration. On account of the number of participants alone, organized emigration from Yugoslavia to Israel between 1948 and 1952 proved to be a particularly complex phenomenon. With every single wave of organized migration, the Yugoslav community in Israel became significantly more numerous and more influential in the sense of spawning further emigration. Apart from being influenced by previous stages of the migration process, organized emigration proved to be a self-sustaining movement, with every single wave influencing the waves to follow. This paper is primarily based on documents kept at the Archives of the Jewish historical Museum in Belgrade.