Cyprus: Where Jews Were Held-Prisoners- By British During WWII

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, of 3,572 sq miles.    It is the third largest and third most populous island in the Mediterranean and is located south of Turkey; west of Syria; northwest of the Gaza Strip, Israel, and Lebanon; north of Egypt; and southeast of Greece. The country's capital and largest city is Nicosia. 

As a strategic location in the Eastern Mediterranean, it was subsequently occupied by several major powers, including the empires of the Assyrians, Egyptians and Persians, from whom the island was seized in 333 BC by Alexander the Great.

 In 115-117, the Jews of Cyprus, under Artemion, took part in the universal Jewish revolt against Rome and slew many of the general population that must have been Roman.  The revolt was bloodily suppressed, and Jews were then excluded from the island. Some, however, returned and inscriptions, evidence gives the existence of communities in the late Classical Period.  Benjamin of Tudela in 1165 found heretics there who observed the Sabbath on Sundays.  As a later date in the Middle Ages, there were communities as Nicosia, Paphos, and especially Famagusta.  Joseph Nasi was partly responsible for the conquest of Cyprus by the Turks in 1571. He was not made King, as he figured he would.  Jews were later deported from Safed (Israel) to help repopulate Cyprus, but there is little record of Jews there under Turkish rule.  At the end of the 19th century, under the British, several attempts were made to establish Jewish agricultural settlements in  Cyprus, but with limited success.                 

 The Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany.  August 3, 1914 - Germany declares war on France. August 4, 1914 - Germany invades Belgium, leading Britain to declare war on Germany.  Cyprus remained nominally a part of the Turkish Empire (Ottoman Empire) , however, and it was only formally annexed by Britain on November 5, 1914, following the declaration of war between Turkey and Great Britain. 

Cyprus was placed under the UK's administration based on the Cyprus Convention in 1878 and was formally annexed by the UK in 1914 at the beginning of WWI. The future of the island became a matter of disagreement between the two prominent ethnic communities, Greek Cypriots, who made up 77% of the population in 1960, and Turkish Cypriots, who made up 18% of the population.                                            

Cyprus was a center for the deportation of "illegal immigrants" from trying to get to Palestine in 1945 to 1949, 11,000 being interned there.  This was the period when Jews of Europe were trying to get to Palestine in any boat they could find, and the English would stop them and they would be dumped in Cyprus, thus the 11,000.                                                     

Then they were imprisoned.   25 Jews were still there by 1990.  The cemetery is at Margo near Nicosia, and another older one is at Larnaca, and hasn't been used for some time. 

                                            

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Seventy years later, Murray Greenfield of New York can still remember  the anger he felt when he was locked up with hundreds of Jewish Holocaust 

survivors in a British detention camp on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

“Your first reaction is you’re mad as hell,” 90-year-old Greenfield told The Associated Press from his home in Israel, recalling the feelings of many stuck behind double 

rows of barbed wire fences and under armed guard. “Why should we, the survivors, 

be behind barbed wire?”

Tens of thousands of Jews saw no future in postwar Europe and sought to start over again in Palestine, but the British were not about to let them in. Some 250 American sailors had volunteered to help Jews sail to Palestine aboard 10 surplus World War II vessels purchased with secret donations from Jewish Americans, he said.

                                                                          

After picking up passengers from the coasts of Italy and France, Greenfield’s ship — 

the Hatikva — was spotted as it sailed across the Mediterranean and British naval 

vessels towed it to Haifa port. Most of the crew and passengers were taken to nearby Cyprus — itself a British colony at the time — and placed in internment camps.

More than 50,000 Jews are believed to have been interned in Cyprus from 1945-1948 and an estimated 2,200 children were born in those camps.

In 2014 a "Garden of Peace" to commemorate the plight of thousands 

Jewish refugees imprisoned in British run camps on Cyprus after World 

War Two was opened in Xylotympou on the east coast of Cyprus.

                                                   

Biblically, Cyprus was called Kittim.  Kittim was a settlement in present-day Larnaca on the west coast of Cyprus, known in ancient times as Kition, or

 Citium. On this basis, the whole island became known as "Kittim" in Hebrew, 

including the Hebrew Bible (Is.23:1, etc). tt was often applied to all the Aegean islands and even to "the W[est] in general, but esp[ecially] the seafaring W[est]". Flavius Josephus records in his 

Antiquities of the Jews that The expression "isles of Kittim", found in the Book of Jeremiah 2:10 and Ezekiel 27:6, indicates that, some centuries 

prior to Josephus, this designation had already become a general 

descriptor for the Mediterranean islands. Sometimes this designation was further extended to apply to Romans, Macedonians or Seleucid Greeks. 

The Septuagint translates the occurrence of "Kittim" in the Book of Daniel 11:30 as ῥωμαῖοι. 1 Maccabees 1:1 states that "Alexander the Great the Macedonian" had come from the "land of Kittim". In the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Kittim 

are referred to as being "of Asshur". Eleazar Sukenik argued that this reference to Asshur should be understood to refer to the Seleucid Empire which controlled the territory of the former Assyrian Empire at that time,

 but his son Yigael Yadin interpreted this phrase as a veiled reference to the Romans.  In Modern Hebrew usage, as Kaphrisin.  Jews lived here 

before the Christian era.  During New Testament times, there were 

important communities at Salamis and Paphos.

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://www.loc.gov/item/a22000924/  on Cyprus

https://www.theweek.co.uk/59782/how-did-the-first-world-war-start

https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-world-war-ii-new-york-city-international-news-events-d4bc0bff836143b59637b76b5afb33cd

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4467036

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Cyprus