Abigail Weinbrand participated in a demonstration in Haifa against the British immigration policy, which prevented Holocaust survivors and refugees from immigrating to the Land of Israel. Abigail was the Technion’s first casualty in the struggle for immigration to the Land of Israel and was 19 years old when she died.
At the end of July 1946, a small ship left the port of La Ciotat in France on its way to the Land of Israel; on board were 758 refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, including 40 pregnant women and dozens of patients in need of medical treatment. The name of the ship, Turkish in origin, was changed to “Yagur” to mark the “Black Sabbath” events that took place about a month before the ship’s departure, during which the British located a large cache of weapons in Kibbutz Yagur and arrested many people. On August 11, 1946, after 12 days of sailing, the ship was spotted by a British patrol plane and towed to the port of Haifa.
The next day, at 4 p.m., a member of the Aliya Bet organization wrote a telegram, “there is a great bustle in Haifa. The news is that an empty ship approached the port to take on the olim (immigrants). The captain of one ship said to our guy, thinking that he was English, that his ship had been hired to take olim to Cyprus. There are rumors in the port that a five-day curfew will be announced.”
On August 13, when it became known that the British intended to deport the immigrants, many thousands of the city’s residents violated the curfew and went out into the streets en masse to protest the deportation, something that had no precedent in all the years of the immigration struggle.
In the late afternoon, Aliya Bet personnel reported that “the demonstrations encountered the army. The army sprayed cold oil (in the style of Yagur) and used teargas. The crowd resisted arrest. A small group of protesters, residents of Kiryat Eliyahu, arrived at the western gate of the port and were dispersed by the army. In another place, a tank ran over three people and injured them. In the city below, protesting residents came near the main headquarters and were dispersed with the use of clubs. Two were wounded in the head. On Tabor Street, the army opened fire and wounded eight, three of them seriously, including one woman. The curfew was completely violated… The authorities continue to transfer the illegal immigrants to prepared cargo ships. A third immigration ship was brought into the port at 11:00 after cannon shots were fired at it from a warship approaching the territorial waters.”
Two days later the serious event was described in the Davar newspaper: “On the bitter day, when it became known that the illegal immigrants were to be deported from the shores of the homeland, the residents of the neighborhood were shocked and all the Jews began flocking to reach Mount Carmel, the heart of the Jewish settlement in Haifa, and indeed, despite the curfew and the danger involved, they broke through and reached Zevulun Street, with Abigail walking at the front, encouraged by her mother. Suddenly shots rang out, right into the crowd of demonstrators, and a bullet struck the young heart of Abigail, the warm Jewish heart of a beautiful, heartbroken daughter of Israel.
Her mother, who was equipped with a first aid kit… immediately rushed to render aid to her bleeding daughter, but to no avail. On the way to the hospital, Abigail breathed her last, and the pure soul was only 19 years old. Beside her fell Zevik Carmi, a kibbutz agricultural apprentice, his parents’ only son; he too was among the first from Neve Sha’anan. He came to spend his vacation days at home and joined the protesters. “Even a boy like me mustn’t shirk,” he said. He was only 14-and-a- half-years-old when he was killed.