Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Moshe Elephant was put in charge head of the Tiyul escape organization which spirited people across the Romanian border from Slovakia and Poland to escape to Palestine.
Robert Rozett, Yad Vashem, Research Collection, XXIV, cites: “The Tiyul, a project undertaken by two Jewish communities under occupation, Slovakia and Hungary, for the rescue of a third, the Polish, is a phenomenon that has no equal in the history of the Holocaust. The risks taken were enormous and the rescuers were aware that the enterprise’s success would not earn them any direct benefit. Feelings of solidarity, sympathy and even compassion for the last remnant left in Poland impelled these activists to seek to save what could be saved. The majority of Jewish fugitives, who reached Hungary in this context, arrived after July 1943.”

Moshe Elephant supervised production and distribution of forged documents, and helped establish children’s homes that saved the lives of 5,000 children and youths.