Irith Cherniavsky, Be’or shineihem: ’al ’aliyatam shel yehudei polin lifnei hashoah (In the Last Moment: Jewish Immigration from Poland in the 1930s). Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015. 277 pp.

Abstract

This chapter reviews the book Be’or shineihem: ’al ’aliyatam shel yehudei polin lifnei hashoah (In the Last Moment: Jewish Immigration from Poland in the 1930s) (2015), by Irith Cherniavsky. In the Last Moment provides an overview of a mass migration that was critical to Polish Jewry and the Yishuv. More specifically, it explores Polish Jews’ immigration to Palestine during the Fifth Aliyah (1930–1939). During the 1930s, strict immigration quotas in the United States made Mandatory Palestine the main destination for Polish Jewish immigrants. Cherniavsky criticizes scholars who have tended to focus on Polish Jewish immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah (1924–1926), even though “immigrants from Poland also comprised the majority of the Fifth Aliyah, of which only fifteen percent were from Central Europe (Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia).”