JCRC of Greater Phoenix

On This Day — June 10, 1977 Just three decades after the Holocaust — when the world closed its doors and left Jews to die on sinking ships and in sealed trains — the State of Israel rescued 66 Vietnamese refugees drifting helplessly in the South China Sea and made them citizens. For the first time in nearly 2,000 years of exile and powerlessness, the Jewish people had sovereignty … and they chose to use it to save strangers. In the middle of the vast ocean, a leaking wooden boat carried 66 terrified men, women, and children with no food, no water, and failing SOS signals ignored by ships from East Germany, Norway, Japan, and Panama. Death was closing in. The Israeli cargo ship Yuvali, en route to Taiwan, spotted them. Captain Meir Tadmor radioed Haifa for instructions. Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally gave permission, and the Jewish crew took every soul aboard, fed them, clothed them, and diverted their voyage — sailing home to Israel. When the ship arrived, Begin — whose parents and brother were murdered in the Holocaust — stood before the Knesset and declared with deep emotion: “We Jews know what it is to be refugees. We know the agony of wandering the seas while the world looks away. For the first time in two millennia, we are no longer powerless wanderers. We are a sovereign nation — and therefore it is natural for us to give these people a haven in the Land of Israel.” This first group of 66 was only the beginning. Between 1977 and 1979, tiny Israel — still absorbing its own Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the Soviet Union — welcomed more than 300 Vietnamese boat people in total, granting them full citizenship and a new life. Many of these Vietnamese-Israelis went on to build beautiful, fully integrated lives in the Jewish state. Their children grew up speaking Hebrew, served in the IDF, started families with Israeli spouses, and thrived in professions ranging from business and policing to the restaurant industry — becoming a small but vibrant thread in the tapestry of Israeli society. This was not politics. This was the Jewish soul speaking. After centuries of being the stranger, the outcast, the one no empire would shelter … the Jewish people were finally the ones with the power to open their gates. And they chose to remember.