28 04 2004 - Yossi Harel, commander of Exodus, died

April 28, 2008
Between 1945 and 1948, this man of bravery, audacity and conscience, will have saved the life with more than 24 000 clandestine immigrants.
He is deceased in Tel Aviv Friday April 26, 2008 at 90.
Born in 1918, the name of Yossi Harel will remain for always associated with extraordinary Exodus ship.
Controlling the great operations of clandestine immigration, it is aboard ship "Knesset of Israel" that its thoughts will go for the Armenian people.

He has just 28 years hold when, in November 1946, coming from Yugoslavia, he skirts the Turkish coasts with his 4000 refugees. One moment of eternity then reminds to him the memory of the Franz Werfeld's book « The Forty Days of Musa Dagh » which he had read being child. Seizing a telescope, Yossi Harel will seek the glorious summit, that which had seen resisting to the Turkish opressor a handle of valiant Armenians. He will see it with far and will then have a thought moved for those by between-them which had left the life in the name of freedom.

The man loved the Armenian people. He estimated himself near to him by the sensitivity which emerged some, brings back his friend of childhood, the writer Yoram Kaniuk.

Jean Eckian