page_title: Samuel Herschel Schulman
section_title: Exodus and the Aliya Bet
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Herschel Schulman / Exodus and the Aliya Bet
caption_attribution_description: English: Sam Schulman aboard the Exodus,1947.
context_page_description: Samuel Herschel Schulman was the last surviving American crew member of the celebrated ship Exodus 1947, which attempted to bring thousands of Holocaust survivors from Europe to pre-state Israel. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Jewish immigrants from Poland, he moved to Paris in 1932, surviving the Holocaust in hiding in central France.
  After the war, he was repatriated to the United States where he joined the Aliyah Bet, the clandestine immigration movement to bring Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe to pre-state Israel, and then fought with Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
  Schulman returned to the United States in the 1950s and was drafted to the US Army during the Korean War, serving two years training soldiers at Camp Edwards on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. After being released from the army, he went into the jewelry business in New York City.
context_section_description: In March 1947, Schulman was instructed by a contact in the Haganah in New York to go to Baltimore, Maryland, where he thought he would board a ship as a passenger to British-mandate Palestine. When he got to the Baltimore Harbor on March 23, 1947, he learned that he was to become part of the Mossad LeAliyah Bet and serve as a crew member aboard the famed "illegal" refugee ship Exodus 1947. 
  The Exodus 1947 left Sète, France on July 11, 1947, with 4,515 Jewish refugees. Ike Aronowicz was the ship's captain and the Haganah commander of the operation was Yossi Harel. The ship was manned by a crew of some 35 volunteers, mostly American Jews, including Samuel Schulman.
  Schulman also sailed on two other Aliyah Bet ships, the Pan Crescent and Pan York, which left from the port of Burgas, Bulgaria, on December 27, 1947 with over 15,000 immigrants. Several days later they were stopped by British warships and forced to anchor at Famagusta, Cyprus. 
  
  About his experience on the ships, Schulman once said: 
  “The Exodus might have been the most famous of all the Aliya Bet ships, but the Pan ships brought the largest number of refugees from Europe at one time.”  
  Schulman spent six weeks in a British internment camp on Cyprus before being smuggled out by the Haganah in January 1948 on the Jewish passenger liner the Kedmah under the alias of one of the immigrants approved by the monthly British quota to Mandatory Palestine. 
  The Exodus was popularized in the 1958 bestseller of the same name by Leon Uris, and later made into a Hollywood film based on the book starring Paul Newman.
caption: Sam Schulman aboard the SS Exodus, 1947.
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