I'm a librarian helping a user out with some research. The user is looking to track down a relative who escaped the Holocaust around 1942 by traveling from Odessa to Palestine via Turkey. I'm wondering where the best database/records might be to search that would give us some info on when someone migrated to Palestine. It's believed that the passage from Odessa to Turkey was by boat, so tracking down a ship manifest would be excellent, but I know it may be highly unlikely. Any suggestions on possible starting points?
Thank you so much in advance!
Hi OP, I've approved this post for /r/AskHistorians, and hopefully someone will be able to help you here, but I wanted to suggest that you x-post to /r/genealogy, because this sort of problem is faced by many people tracing their family trees.
Maybe this? https://dbs.bh.org.il
By 1942 most Jewish immigration to Palestine was illegal, but continued. Whether this person migrated legally or illegally, there's a decent chance that they might have been facilitated or otherwise received by what was then known as the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
While this agency still exists as the Jewish Agency for Israel, their archives from this period are apparently housed at the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem.
They have a specific genealogical search section that might be useful: http://www.zionistarchives.org.il/en/familyresearch/Pages/Default.aspx or you could otherwise try to get in touch with them directly.
The Central Zionist Activites Archive holds account books and personal papers regarding more then 650,000 immigrants that came to israel, has an online archieve, and can help search if you contact them via mail. http://www.isragen.org.il/siteFiles/1/212/4753.asp
As someone who escaped the holocaust, it is likely he filled up testimony papers regarding his dead relatives in Yad Vashem, which can be found today on their site. http://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en
Not specific for this question but I would also recommend opening an account on Geni, you can build your family tree and find matching relatives on others trees.(my grandma found her grandma's identity there) https://www.geni.com
In addition, there is a really good archieve with the main papers in palestine through those years. It is worth checking (but the results are better when the key words are in hebrew.) http://web.nli.org.il/sites/JPress/English/Pages/default.aspx
If you want help going over any of those pages and searching in hebrew, I would be thrilled to do so. good luck!