He left this world on his final voyage from Hadera, not far from where I made this image earlier in the month. I pray he finds a seat among the Just at the Heavenly Table in Gan Eden.
In an interview last year with Ruthie Blum Leibowitz, Captain Aranne recounted his first command.
It was the first ship of which I was captain. Six months earlier, I had become first officer - and I had four months missing to becoming a captain. But, because it was a boat from Honduras, where they didn't give a hoot about such regulations - I could do it. If that same boat had carried a British rather than a Honduran flag, there's no way I would have been made captain, because to become captain required seven years seatime, and I only had six and a half. [He is referring to the fact that after the ship was purchased by the Hagana from the American navy, which had anchored it, following its service in the allied invasion of Normandy, the Honduras consulate gave it permission to sail under its flag.]
We had a commander who was sent by [head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine who would become first prime minister of Israel] David Ben-Gurion. His name was Yossi Harel. [The character Ari Ben Canaan, played by Paul Newman, is loosely based on him.] He died a year ago. He was a politruk brought to the ship to supervise us Palmahniks whom Ben-Gurion considered to be a bit nutty. And we told him he could go f---k himself. He was a guy who didn't even know what the inside of a ship looked like, let alone how it worked - though later he would go on to study naval architecture. Anyway, he got it in his head that the ship was going to sink. I told him he was talking nonsense - that the ship was not sinking.
Because the British rammed it 20-odd times, so water began seeping in. But I tried to explain to him that the ship itself wasn't damaged at all. You see, this ship - originally called The President Warfield - was built for shallow water. [Named after the president of a shipping company in the Chesapeake Bay, it was originally a luxury liner that sailed between Baltimore, Maryland, and Norfolk, Virginia, during the years 1928-1940. In 1940-1, it was converted into a troop and supply ship for the British navy. Then it was assigned to the US navy, where it took part in the allied invasion of Normandy. It was the short draft of the ship that caused Aranne to notice it in the first place at the ships' "graveyard" in Baltimore in 1946, and purchase it for the Hagana for the purpose of bringing Jewish refugees to Palestine. Its short draft is precisely what would enable it to get close enough to the coast of Palestine unhindered by boats that could sail only in deep water.]
Anyway, the point is that Harel was not a seaman, and didn't know anything about it. But he thought the ship was going to sink, and Ben-Gurion told him to surrender. So he surrendered.
While most folks remember the Exodus from the movie, the ship had a special place in my family. It attained legendary proportions--my father had been the first choice.
The story is that my father was a master mariner was home from the sea, which means as every sailor knows he was looking for his next ship. A skipper of merchant vessels and LST-795 in WWII, Mel Jackson in 1946 tried to start an inter island freight and mail service in the South Pacific with the Schooner Effie M. Morrissey.
The story goes that he was approached by the Haganah for two reasons: He was a Master Mariner with an American Passport and he was Jewish. Would he like a job to help out "the Cause"? He was told to go to a newsstand and buy a paper, which he did. His eyes at this point in the story would grow wide with awe and wonder when he recounted how a black car pulled up and two of the "biggest guys I have ever seen in my life" jumped out, grabbed him under the arms, and lifted him off the ground into the back of the car, blindfolded him, drove around for an hour, took him inside some building with the windows blacked out and a glaring light in his eyes. They repeated the process when the interview was done.
The Deal was he was to pick up a ship in Marseilles, filled with contraband refugees, and set sail for British Palestine. If for some reason the arrangements or any other part of the plan was discovered by British Intelligence, everything was off and another ship and crew would be used.
For whatever reason, my father did not go; but, the story forged a major part of my Jewish family heritage. On those occasions when we were sailing together, he would bring it up, wistfully.
He went on to sail as captain several times, including on the C2 Twilight. In 1948, he got a plumb command out of San Francisco but it turned out to be the great Pacific Coast shutdown of 1948--he'd been hired as a strike breaker and was told by the First Mate, carrying a picket sign, in no uncertain terms NOT to cross the line.
He used to tell me, when we were alone on the water someplace, with a gleam in his eye, that on the drive back across the country, some place near Elko, Nevada, he decided to "make an honest woman out of your mother". When he got back to New York, he married my mother, moved to Florida, finished his BA, went to Harvard, and became the Curator of Maritime History at the Smithsonian in 1969. He never looked back except to the time in 1947 when he was asked to take a part in returning the Exiles to The Land.
I always wondered who took command instead. Now, I know.
Blessed is the Righteous Judge. God should send comfort and peace to his family, and to all mourners in Israel.
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