by dan pine
staff writer
Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint were easy on the eyes. But “Exodus,” the famous 1960 film they starred in, played fast and loose with the facts.
Documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Rodgers understood that when she first met an aging former sailor of the Exodus in 1990. Once he told her the truth about the ill-fated Jewish refugee ship and its roundabout 1947 journey, she knew she had to make a film.
Rodgers’ 1996 film “Exodus 1947” will screen July 9 at the Contra Costa Jewish Community Center in Walnut Creek, followed by a question-and-answer session. The Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay is presenting the event.
Potential backers were skeptical when Rodgers began planning the film in the 1990s. “People said, ‘Yeah, I know the story from the [Leon Uris] novel and the movie.’ I said, ‘No, they’re fiction,’” Rodgers said.
The true story begins after World War II, when thousands of Holocaust survivors languished in Europe’s displaced person camps. Although it was illegal to smuggle Jews into British Mandatory Palestine, Jewish activists in Baltimore, working with the Haganah (a militant Zionist group in Palestine), defied the British rules.
They raised money to buy a decommissioned ferry, hire a young crew, rescue 4,500 Jews (the ship was designed to hold only 400) and take them to freedom in Palestine.
In 1947 the ship, renamed Exodus, slipped into a southern French port, picked up the refugees and steamed for Haifa. But the British, trying to appease Arab interests, made sure the boat never arrived.
“British planes and warships were tailing them the whole way,” Rodgers said. “They rammed and boarded the ship, squeezing it from both sides. The Jews fought back with tins of beef and potatoes.”
Terrified passengers were transferred to British prison ships, which returned to France where the French refused to take them. Ultimately, passengers were driven off the ship at club-point and transported back to displaced persons camps.
The world was so outraged, and brought so much pressure to bear on British, that two months later the United Nations partitioned Palestine, and the state of Israel was born.
“Americans don’t really understand how Israel came into existence,” says Rodgers about why she wanted to tell the story. “They think Jews just stole the land. This [film] focuses on the window of history between the end of World War II and beginning of Israel.”
The Los Angeles native grew up in an active Reform household and became strongly attached to Israel. After graduating from Columbia University, she returned to L.A. to pursue acting and filmmaking.
At 22, making the Exodus film project may have been an act of chutzpah. “In retrospect, though, it’s good it took five years to make,” she said. “The story sunk into our bones.”
According to Rodgers, even Otto Preminger, director of the 1960 film, wished he had more knowledge of the truth. “Supposedly, when he was in Israel to shoot the film and met the men who had been on the ship, he said, ‘If I had known this story, I would have shot this.’”
“Exodus 1947” screens 7:30 p.m. Monday, July 9 at the Contra Costa JCC, 2071 Tice Valley Blvd., Walnut Creek. Tickets: $10. For information, contact Riva Gambert at (510) 839-2900.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California