ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Rafah was an elephant ship that led 785 elephants from Yugoslavia to Palestine in December 1946 and drowned in a storm near the Greek island of Cyrna.

History of the ship
The ship was originally called the "MS Athina" when it was acquired by the Institute for a B increase in Greece. It was a coastal ship of 700 to 800 tons. The purchase was adopted in mid-October 1946. It has not yet been transferred to the rodents, damaged and drowned. She was taken from the water, repaired and sailed to Pitrai from there to the port of preparation. Her name was converted to Rafah following the capture of the members of the defense and exile to a detention camp in Rafah in northern Sinai. Its preparations for the cruise, by a Greek local staff, from the ship's escorts and the Mossad to the B instead, lasted about a month and a half. In the ship, Construction was built and raised to accommodation, as preparation for the transfer of 800 elephants to the Land of Israel. In order to escape the British Mandate's soldiers in the Land of Israel, small facilities were installed in order to be identified as a cargo ship. In the ship’s stomach, the Spiels were installed along the stripes and the pages, and each elephant was allocated a meter and a half on 40 cm.

The cruise
On the day of the cruise, there was a large-scale ship, a Greek named Sakhapoulos, along with which six-ten sailors and Greek horns. The lenders, the institute's men for the increase B, were the ship's commander-in-law to the survey, and alongside him David in Umberger-Based, Zvi Tattle, and the "distortion" Avraham Lichovsky. They had two contacts and work tools brought from Italy by the four lenders. The lenders arrived from Italy on the ship of the "Ouz" and rose on the "Fahah", which awaited one of the islands after the ship was prepared for the cruise. The contacts were Italian military shelters of Doctrine. Also, there were self-made transmitters built in Italy, and operated in double waves with one 7000 kg per device as a primary wave, and crystals of 4,000 and 6,000 kilometers.

The 785 elephants were collected in Zagreb, Belgrade, and in the camp in the Okar port in Yugoslavia (present in Croatia). The ship sailed on November 26, 1946, rising over eight hundred elephants: about 200 from Romania, about 200 from Hungary and about thirty from Bulgaria. They had two nuclear movements, 50 elderly and 80 children. The rest are different, and men and women are equal. The local authorities cooperated openly and closely and friendlyly and assisted in the absorption of the elephants before boarding the ship. The upload to the ship’s deck was conducted openly and arranged under the supervision of the authorities during the evening. After they went up, they were appointed among the pelvic elephants, responsible for cleaning and distributing food. They were instructed to stay in the ship’s stomach despite the density, so that the ship would not be discovered.

At the beginning of the journey was the stormy sea, and it was not possible to go to the open sea for five days. In the first three days, the ship ruled as planned. From the fourth day of the cruise, after the ship docked in the port of Greece to supply equipment, in which to sail and get into a storm.

According to the plan, Rafah was supposed to reach the island of "Mike", where she was supposed to meet a boat that would collect some of the Greek crew. The ship sailed between the Dodcanese Islands. Due to the storm in the sea, the great sailed the ship along the coast of the islands, but did not reach Camille.

The ship's footprint
On the morning of 7 December, after seven days of sailing, the storm increased. The captain tried to find shelter in the bay on the shores of the small island "Sirana". He failed in his attempt to dock, and the ship was sinking in the rocks, damaged and water began to penetrate. The team ordered the fortified elephants to jump into the stormy water, in tall waves, in the dark, to save their lives. The babies were thrown into those who had already been in the water.

For about 40 minutes, the elephants tried to get to the beach. Some jumped to the nearby rocks to the shore, and some went to the sea. The connection device is moving from the ship’s gaze