THE DREAM OF A JEWISH STATE

At the end of July 1937, more than two hundred men and women responded to the call made by Wilhelm Rippel, a lawyer from Warsaw, a former officer in the Polish army and an ardent follower of Jabotinsky, to travel on foot without visas or immigration permits from Poland through Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Italy to sail to Palestine. Although the Partition Plan, outlining the possible creation of a Jewish state, had already been published, Rippel refused to wait for the gates to open and claimed that he was acting in the spirit of Jabotinsky, even though the latter declined to