Ezra Lowinger Albums

EXODUS ALBUMS DISCOVERED!

Yaakov Waiman, committee member of Exodus 1947, recently met with Genya Markon, Israel representative of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, to discuss his mother’s experiences on the ship. Waiman also gave her a list of contacts including that of Ezra Lowinger, 95-year-old survivor of the Exodus, who lives in Jerusalem. Born in Transylvania in 1925, Lowinger graduated from a Jewish gymnasium. His father, Yitzhak (b. 1895 Budapest) was sent to forced labor in 1942 and did not survive. Lowinger was sent to the BOR copper mine in German occupied Serbia. He managed to escape after a year and joined the partisans in Croatia. His mother Ilona (b.1898, Drohobych, Poland) survived in a Glass safe house in Budapest, where, thanks to Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, as many as 3,000 Jews escaped deportation and murder.

After the war’s end, Lowinger made his way back to Budapest and in 1946 reached Germany where he continued working with Hashomer Hatzair. He led a group of children and teenagers on the infamous voyage of the Exodus. Prior to their departure, Lowinger bought a camera with the intention of documenting this historic trip. 74 years later, two photo albums in his possession preserve images from this journey. Some depict youngsters boarding the trains to Marseille, on the deck of the ship, and in the Displaced Persons camps, where the Exodus immigrants arrived after the British-Mandate authorities forced the refugees back to Germany -