The Outgathering

For many years before World War II, Joda Isenbart was a contented kosher meat dealer in Vienna. Then came the Anschluss, which joined Austria's voice to that of Germany in Hitler's hymn of hate against the Jews. Joda and his family were sent from one concentration camp to another. All of their relatives were killed, but somehow or other. Joda, his wife and their three children survived. When the nightmare was over at last, Joda, like a million of his kind, raised his eyes from the ashes of his ruined life and his ruined world, toward Israel, the promised land that offered new hope to the Jews of Central Europe. Joda became one of the hundreds of thousands who joined the "ingathering" at the home of his ancestors.

Last week Joda was one of a ragged band of 67 bitterly disillusioned Israelis who, fleeing their land of promise, had been caught smuggling themselves into, of all places, Germany. At Munich's Camp Fohrenwald, last remaining German D.P. camp for stateless Jews (where the feeling against the returners was high), Joda told his story: "When we got to Israel, I was told I was too old to be a butcher any more. I was put to work in a quarry. We were not beaten or mistreated, but otherwise things were not too different from life in the [concentration] camps."

"I am a German," said Berlin-born Arie Kraemer, another of the Israeli refugees, "and now I want to take things up where they were dropped in 1933. What do I have in common with those people there? I feel nothing for those Asiatic and African Jews who swarm into Israel."

German authorities haled the immigrants into court and gave them each a suspended sentence of ten days for illegal entry. But, said a Munich police officer, "we have no prejudice, least of all against these poor people." From Israel, which is now losing more settlers than it is taking in (34,000 have left to seek their fortunes elsewhere since Israel became a state), came harsher words. "Emigrants have no title to sympathy," said Finance Minister Levi Eshkol. "Those who found sufficient funds for sea passage could have done quite well here with the energy and money used to arrange their emigration."

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