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The Yugoslav participation in the Jewish emigration to Mandatory Palestine and, after 1948, to Israel, can be defined as a process consisting of six stages. When the migration is observed on the level of socio-political circumstances, the discontinuity between these stages is apparent. However, the same discontinuity is not to be found when the process is deconstructed down to and examined on the level of families and individuals involved in it. The aspiration of individuals to join members of their families already in Palestine, especially after the tragic losses suffered in the Holocaust, has persevered as one of the key motives driving emigration from Yugoslavia. This paper examines the way in which family ties continuously drove emigration to Mandatory Palestine/Israel and pulled its individual stages into an integral whole. It is primarily based on documents kept at the Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.

In the process of taking necessary preparations for mass Jewish emigration to Israel, during which almost 8,000 people left Yugoslavia, executives of the Federation of Jewish religious communities of Yugoslavia decided on defining a specific structure within the community to deal with two basic tasks – communicating information relevant to the migration to all of the participating sides and dealing with problems potentially arising from the process. This was to be achieved through a network of Emigration Commissions. The Central Emigration Commission, established in Belgrade and consisting of Federation Executive Board Members, was in charge of coordinating the migration process on a grand scale. Regional Emigration Commissions were formed with larger Jewish communities, each of them responsible for organizing the migration in a number of communities under their jurisdiction. Finally, local Emigration Commissions were founded with each community taking part in the migration. In theory, the interaction of these Commissions was limited by a very strict hierarchy. While top to bottom communication honoured the proposed model for the most part, passing information in the opposite direction proved to be much more of a challenge. Traditional dynamics within the Jewish community proved a much more significant influence than the proposed internal hierarchy. It was due to this what interpersonal relations ended up playing a far more significant role than did the network of Emigration Commissions. This paper examines how the organized emigration process was influenced by the proposed hierarchy, how the proposed distribution of different duties amongst the various levels of Emigration Commissions functioned when applied to real problems and what led to this internal framework finally failing. Relevant documents, used in writing this paper are held at the Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.

This paper deals with the continuity between the illegal influx of Jewish refugees into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the organized emigration of Yugoslav Jews to Israel, which took place between 1948 and 1952. For it to be possible to directly point out the connection between two separate stages of Yugoslav state participation in the migration process, the interwar-period migration to Palestine and the mass migration movement of the post-war period were deconstructed to the level of individuals taking part in it. The case of Ernest and Ilsa Beschinsky was examined, as they are the only refugees whose movement can be traced in relative detail from the moment of arrival in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, consequent to the “Anschluss”of Austria to the time of applying for the organized emigration to Israel. The paper is based on documents held in the Archives of the Jewish historical museum in Belgrade.