Historic aliyah records, including documents listing the Exodus immigrant ship and other vessels from the pre-state period, were uncovered during renovation work at the Aliyah and Integration Ministry’s Tel Aviv offices, outgoing director-general Adv. Avichai Kahana said in a farewell speech on Wednesday. In the speech, Kahana said workers found “lists of immigrants,” “lists of ships,” and “clandestine aliyah summaries” from 1945, some handwritten and some typed.

Documents and photographs reviewed by The Jerusalem Post show that the material spans several years and reflects more than one phase of Jewish immigration to Israel. The papers include typed ship lists from 1946 and 1947, a July 1950 log of air arrivals, and a later alphabetical index of ships that brought immigrants between May 15, 1948, and May 1, 1968.

One of the clearest pages lists immigrant ships from 1946 and 1947 alongside dates and passenger totals. Among the entries visible in the documents are Theodor Herzl, dated July 31, 1946, with 2,678 immigrants; Knesset Israel, dated November 26, 1946, with 1,350; Haim Arlosoroff, dated February 27, 1947, with 1,348; and Exodus, dated July 18, 1947, with 4,554. Other ship names visible on the pages include Tel Hai, Dov Hoz, Henrietta Szold, Yehuda Halevi, and Shivat Zion.

Another page is titled “Air arrivals, July 1950” and records family arrivals by date and country of origin. Countries visible on that page include France, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Turkey. A separate typed index, arranged alphabetically by ship name, tracks vessels that brought immigrants over the first two decades of statehood, listing date ranges, number of voyages, and total immigrant figures.

Taken together, the records show the shift from clandestine aliyah during the British Mandate to the organized intake system of the early Israeli state. The pre-1948 pages document ships associated with the struggle to bring Jews to the country despite British immigration restrictions. The later pages show the bureaucracy of a young state receiving families by air and sea and recording the flow in regular administrative form.

Kahana used the discovery to draw a direct line between those older records and the ministry’s current work. “It is a person. It is a family. It is a world,” he said of the lists handled by the ministry, before adding that when he stood before the 1945 records, he realized that “even then, behind every line was a world.”