Ma'abarot

Ma'abarot (Hebrew: מעברות) were immigrant and refugee absorption camps established in Israel in the 1950s, constituting one of the largest public projects planned by the state to implement its sociospatial and housing policies.

[4] According to Dr. Irit Katz, the camps were the product of the 1944 One Million Plan, which produced detailed recommendations for absorbing a significant population influx, particularly of Jews from Arab countries.

[a] Dr. Roy Kozlovsky notes that the prior existence of the One Million Plan suggests that "the concept of the ma'abara was in fact the precondition for, not the effect of, mass immigration".

20% of the North African Jewish immigrants vetted at Marseilles required long and intensive hospitalization and trachoma rates reached 70%.

[7] Given the urgency of the situation, and the incapacity of foreign hospitals to cope with the large numbers of aged and ill, plans to treat such populations before making aliyah or subject them for medical selection, as suggested by the Jewish Agency, were dropped in favour of transporting all potential olim irrespective of their health, to Israel, creating a critical burden for the nascent state's health system.

'[11]Eshkol's proposal aimed to make immigrants independent of the Agency, provide them with housing and jobs, and position them so that they could be integrated into the pre-existing economy by residential contiguity with Israel's towns and villages.

[13] Plans to provide immigrants with jobs requiring heavy physical labour, and with housing and plots of agricultural land in outlying areas, were generally unsuccessful, with many migrating back to camps near cities and towns on finding themselves ill-equipped or unprepared for the task.

Violent confrontations broke out over issues of forced secularization, which were opposed by Yemeni Jews, and several people were shot dead or died during these clashes, variously at Ein Shemer, Beit Lid and Pardes Hanna in the first half of 1950.

[3] In those conditions, infants were separated from their mothers and placed in children's housing where nursing personnel had almost exclusive control and parental access was highly restricted.

[16] On occasion, these children were transferred to hospitals without the knowledge of their families, and parents encountered great difficulties in travelling from the ma'abarot to these distant facilities.

Cases exist of parents arriving at hospitals only to be informed their child had died, occurrences which fed into what became a narrative of suspicion that the state putatively engaged in having the missing children adopted out to childless couples.

[20] A considerable numbers of immigrant transit camps and ma'abarot were established in former British military bases transferred or sold to Israel.

After this responsibility was transferred to the local authorities, the Jewish Agency claimed it could no longer oversee maintenance due to financial and manpower constraints.

[19] By the following year, 172,500 were registered as living in 111 canvas tents, and another 38,544 in provisory wooden shacks, the latter by 1953 were erected to cope with the housing needs of 70,000 immigrants in 42 of ma'abarot.

[28] Beit Mazmil (today Kiryat HaYovel), named after the former Arab village on the site, was one of two large ma'abarot established in Jerusalem, and consisted of hundreds of asbestos huts inhabited by new immigrants from both North Africa and Eastern Europe.

[19] Most of the camps transformed into development towns, among them Kiryat Shmona, Sderot, Beit She'an, Yokneam, Or Yehuda and Migdal HaEmek.