Jewish Agency

Jewish Agency, the official organization for forming a Palestinian national home for the Jews which worked with the British, the mandatory authorities in Palestine. It was really a quasi-government for the Jews and its president from 1935, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), worked with an executive of eight who functioned virtually as cabinet ministers. When a chief of staff was appointed for the Haganah in 1939 he reported to Ben-Gurion.

The Agency was sceptical of early reports of the extermination of the Jews in Europe (see Final Solution). But at the end of 1942, when the facts became incontrovertible, it made them public, appealed to the Allied powers to try and stop the killings—which resulted in the Bermuda conference—and contributed financially to a series of largely fruitless rescue attempts, the best known of which was the deal to exchange Hungarian Jews proposed by Eichmann in 1944 (see also Brand). During the course of the war the Agency's emissaries in neutral countries, particularly Turkey, helped arrange the flight of some thousands of Jews to Palestine, sometimes with tragic consequences (see Patria and Struma).