A man who has secretly worked to rescue Jews from lands of persecution for more than 40 years has finally come out of the shadows.
Shaike Dan, 76, is the subject of a six-hour television documentary to be screened in Israel on next year’s Independence Day. In it, he will be honored by many of those he brought to the safety of Eretz Yisrael and by Israeli leaders, including some of the people who worked alongside him.
Last week a group of leading British Jews were shown extracts of the program at a special preview at the home of the Israeli Ambassador in London, Yehuda Avner. It was attended by Dan himself and his wife Eva, a member of an illegal aliya transport he organized from Yugoslavia in 1946.
A PERSON OF GREAT DETERMINATION
Dan, a tall, white-haired man with a wry sense of humor, emerges as a person of great determination for whom helping a single Jew to reach Israel is as important as helping 1,000.
Among those who pay tribute to his work are Tony Simonds, former commander of M19, the British intelligence unit in Cairo which organized the escape of Allied prisoners from Nazi-occupied Europe; former parachutist Reuven Dafne, assistant director of Yad Vashem; former Premier Shimon Peres; former President Yitzhak Navon and Knesset member Yitzhak Artzi.
EXPLOITS DURING THE WAR
The program is entitled “Blind Jump,” a reference to Dan’s exploits as one of the 26 Jews from Palestine parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in the midst of World War II. Several lost their lives in this highly risky operation, including two women — Hanna Senesh and Haviva Reik.
Their mission, organized by British intelligence, was to organize escape routes for captured British and American pilots from occupied Europe. But they also made contact with Jewish community leaders and other anti-German forces.
In the program, Simonds says that the parachutists had only a 10 percent chance of themselves escaping capture by the Nazis. They were double heroes, he says: if caught they could be shot twice — as enemy agents and as Jews.
Simonds, a pro-Jewish officer who served with Orde Wingate in Palestine, says that M19 had to keep its wartime collaboration with the Jews a strict secret not only because of the Nazis but because of the Palestine police whom he calls “a bloody nuisance.” They were so anti-Jewish, he says, that “you would think they were on the wrong side in the war.”
AN IMPORTANT ZIONIST ORGANIZER
Dan is portrayed in the program as the single most important Zionist in organizing aliya from Eastern Europe both during the war and in the decades which followed. He was also involved in tracking war criminals and in securing staging posts for the Zionist arms lift to Palestine in 1948-9.
He was a man of many different aliases, one of which featured in the anti-Semitic Slansky trial in Communist Czechoslovakia.
The program suggests a link between this and the mysterious murder in Prague in 1968 of Charles Jordan, the American Jewish head of the Joint Distribution Committee. Dan is said to have confirmed that he himself was the intended victim of Jordan’s killers, who had been confused by the slight similarity in their second names.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
