Marvin Weiss:
WWII and the USS Northland
Story contributed by the Weiss Family
Blog by Michael Ackermann
Off the coast of Palestine, on an October morning in 1947, a little ship packed with more than 2,600 Holocaust survivors was zigzagging across a calm sea with six British destroyers on its heels. Deep in the bottom of the ship, a young American from the Bronx was crouched beside a smoking steering motor, trying to keep it alive. Above him, a line of refugees stood on the stairs, passing orders down from the bridge one shout at a time. Right. Left. Right.
His name was Marvin Weiss. He was a young Navy veteran with an electrician's training, and he was not supposed to be there at all.
When we try to uncover the story of someone's past, we are usually left picking through scraps, a date here, a place there. Rarely are we handed a life written by the person who lived it. Marvin Weiss left his family exactly that: a memoir, full of humor and detail, written for his grandchildren. This story is only a small piece of it, and it is told as much as possible in his own words.
Marvin Weiss as a young man.
Marvin was the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania, and he grew up in the Bronx. He served two years in the Navy, where he trained as an electrician. When he came home, he set his heart on engineering school. So did everyone else.
"There were millions of GIs with the same idea, and I could not get in. After a year of trying, I decided to wait and try again later. I volunteered to work on a refugee ship that would try to break the British blockade that was preventing Jewish refugees of the Holocaust from getting into Palestine."
It was 1947. Two years after the war, a quarter of a million Jewish survivors were still living in displaced persons camps across Europe. Many wanted only one thing: to reach the Land of Israel. But Britain, which governed Palestine, allowed in only a tiny number each month. So the Jewish underground army in Palestine, the Haganah, ran its own secret immigration operation, called Aliyah Bet. It bought old ships, crewed them with volunteers, packed them with refugees, and tried to slip them past the Royal Navy. Many of those volunteers were young American Jews, veterans like Marvin.
His ship had a history of her own. The Northland was built in 1927 in Newport News, Virginia, as a United States Coast Guard cutter designed to break Arctic ice. During World War II she patrolled the frozen coast of Greenland. After the war she was taken out of service, and in 1947 a company called the Weston Trading Company bought her for $50,000. The company was a front for the Haganah.
"This is the story of my trip on the USS Northland, a Coast Guard icebreaker, later renamed 'The Jewish State,' 'Medinat Yehudim' in Hebrew. I was classified as an electrician because of my navy training so from their point of view they had covered that base. I was in charge of everything electrical on the ship. The rest of the crew was equally sparse. The main problem was the diesel engines that kept on blowing their cylinder head gaskets. Fortunately, we had enough spare parts and didn't run out of gaskets. The Coast Guard must have known about the problem otherwise why would we have had dozens of the copper gaskets aboard?"
The new name came from Theodor Herzl's famous book Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, the book that launched modern Zionism. The Northland crossed the Atlantic with a sister ship, the former gunboat Paducah, soon to be called Geula, Redemption. The crossing was rough, but, Marvin wrote, "by the time we entered the Mediterranean Sea we were an experienced crew." In Marseilles, the men looked forward to a little rest. Within hours, the British had figured out what the ship was for. It was time to go.
The Northland at sea.
"So out we went into the Mediterranean, heading back to the Atlantic. Where were we going? They would not tell us. Security was tight. Only the Israelis were in on the secrets. But while we were in the Mediterranean, a British destroyer shadowed us, or a British airplane hovered over us."
A British patrol plane overhead, photographed from the ship.
By "the Israelis," Marvin meant the Haganah men from Palestine who ran the operation. There was no State of Israel yet. The ship found shelter in Bayonne, on the Atlantic coast of France, and for three months the crew rebuilt her to carry people.
"How do you get over 2,600 passengers on a little ship like the Northland? Every available space below deck; holds, storerooms, etc., were fitted with wooden shelves, six feet deep and three feet apart. Every passenger was allotted an 18-inch space on a shelf for him or her and all their baggage."
The Northland was 217 feet long. Eighteen inches is about the width of a person's shoulders.
"At the end of the summer in 1947 we sailed out of Bayonne and reentered the Mediterranean. We stopped at no ports and sailed directly to the Dardanelles and into the Black Sea. Things happened rapidly after that. We docked in a Bulgarian port named Burgas and were not allowed to go ashore. That evening the passengers started to arrive by bus and truck. Our passengers had survived the Holocaust in Siberia. They were mostly Eastern European Jews who had managed to escape the invading German armies as they swept west. There appeared to be a lot of intact families, but it turned out later that most of these families were not the original ones. Most of the survivors were individuals who had formed into new families while in Siberia."
Most of the 2,664 passengers came from Romania, the country Marvin's own parents had left a generation before. Many of them had survived the war by fleeing east into the Soviet Union.
"Packing them down into the ship into their wooden shelves took place in the dark of night as rapidly as possible. It must have been a traumatic experience for them, but they had been prepared for it and were quite cooperative. The operation went smoothly, and we sailed the next morning September 26, 1947."
The trip to Palestine took seven days, and the sea was kind to them. Marvin spoke Yiddish, and that turned out to matter a great deal.
"Those of us that spoke Yiddish were able to 'join' a family and become 'members' of it. We were encouraged to do this. I had a nice intact family with a husband, a wife, two small kids and a teenage girl. When I had time for them, I enjoyed their company. In the turmoil later and because of my illness I lost contact with them and never was able to recover it."
"In addition to this family, I had a wonderful boy of about 11 that attached himself to me and followed me around wherever I was, helping me as best he could. He had a great deal of energy and was a perfect little gentleman. I lost contact with him also and it is my great regret that I don't know what happened to him. He was very talented, and I am sure he was successful in life."
Two men play checkers on the deck, beside a spare propeller.
Then the coast of Palestine came into view, and so did the Royal Navy.
"When we reached the shores of Palestine there were six destroyers waiting for us, one of which had a big drawbridge intended for boarding. There ensued a six-hour game of tag during which we zigged and zagged leading them on a merry chase. We were much more maneuverable than they. They did not want to ram us but in the course of the rumpus we did ram one of them making a small hole in the side of one of the destroyers. Fortunately, the sea was unusually calm, and the hole was above the waterline, so the ship did not sink. There was some tear gas thrown but no gunfire. It was the practice of the Haganah refugee ships to carry no arms of any kind. So, it was a kind of impasse."
"Unfortunately, I only saw the beginning of the chase. After we had been dodging about half an hour, I got an emergency call about a problem with the steering engine that operated the rudder. The motor was smoking and extremely hot. I took a look and yes, the constant turning back and forth was overheating the motor. What to do?"
"There was a mechanism for turning the rudder by hand, but it took two strong men to do it and was slow and difficult. We needed to set up a way to communicate from the bridge to the room in the bottom of the boat where the steering engine was. I made an emergency announcement asking for volunteers and would you believe, I got a dozen men all of whom claimed to be electrical engineers. I deployed six of them to constitute a human telephone line to yell instructions from the bridge. All they had to yell was 'rechts,' right, or 'links,' left. The rest of them I detailed to keep putting wet towels on the hot motor and keep a fan blowing on it. It turned out that the motor did not burn out and lasted the whole time of the rat race."
A dozen refugees, every one of them claiming to be an electrical engineer. A human telephone line of survivors, shouting right and left down through the decks. Wet towels on a smoking motor. It held.
"Eventually the British did succeed in boarding us. There was very little violence. When they were fanning out to every part of the ship, we managed to remove all the control handles from everything and throw them overboard so that the British could not operate the ship. They had to attach a cable to us and tow us into Haifa harbor. The crew all dispersed among the passengers and became anonymous. Those of us that knew Yiddish had an easy time. The others relied on being silent. The British did not identify any of the crew."
The Jewish State in Haifa harbor, October 3, 1947. In Marvin's words: "You can see the British soldiers on the bridge with their white helmets. I am somewhere in this picture."
"There we were, parked at a dock in Haifa harbor under guard. The British were prepared for us. They had a passenger ship ready to take us to Cyprus, to the detention camps. The British sent some bundles of food on board, mostly bread, and some containers of drinking water and announced that we would be transferred to Cyprus the next day."
"The next morning there was a gangplank to the dock ready for us to disembark and get onto the passenger ship. When it came my turn, I had a funny feeling that the British watching me walk down the gangplank would be able to see by the way that I walked that I was an American. Nonsense of course. But that's what I thought and to disguise myself I tried to walk in a heavy exaggerated tread that I thought looked like the walk of a Hungarian peasant. The British soldiers seeing me walk that way called out 'Hey Tarzan.' I had a terrible time holding back from laughing and not letting on that I understood."
So Marvin Weiss, a Navy veteran from the Bronx, went to a British detention camp on Cyprus as just another refugee. The camps held tens of thousands of Jews who had tried to reach Palestine. Life there was crowded and uncertain, but Marvin found ways to pass the time, with baseball games and friendly gatherings, while he waited for his turn to enter.
Most of the crew. Marvin is third from left in the top row.
Illness kept him from leaving with the first group. By the time he finally reached the land he had worked so hard to bring others to, the country was on the edge of war. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to divide Palestine, and fighting broke out almost at once. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared, and the War of Independence began in full. Marvin spent those months caught between the chaos around him and his own long struggle with illness. He joined the fight, found distant relatives, and saw the birth of a nation.
The ship he had sailed on became part of that nation too. After independence, the old Northland, the Jewish State, joined the new Israeli Navy as the INS Eilat, one of its very first ships.
Eventually Marvin came home to the United States. He went on to become an engineer who saw the world as pieces of a puzzle, and over the years he patented a long list of inventions. Where most people live one life, Marvin lived several. He chose to share them with the people he loved most. His memoir carries a simple dedication: "Dedicated to my grandchildren, Avery, Danielle, Marlena, Rachel, and Zachary who like my stories."
Somewhere out there, perhaps, a boy of eleven grew up and lived a good life, never knowing that the young American electrician who let him tag along on the Jewish State thought of him for the rest of his own.
May his memory be a blessing.
Works Cited
"Casting of the Helm from the Haganah Ship 'Medinat Ha'Yehudim.'" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn14227. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
Hill, Chuck. "USCGC Northland, Flagship of the Infant Israeli Navy." Chuck Hill's CG Blog, 16 Apr. 2021, chuckhillscgblog.net/2021/04/16/uscgc-northland-flagship-of-the-infant-israeli-navy/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
Kaplansky, Eddy. "Israel Navy's First Warship: The Former U.S. Coast Guard Cutter 'Northland.'" World Machal, www.machal.org.il/navy/israel-navys-first-warship/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
"Medinat HaYehudim." Paul Silverstone, Aliyah Bet ship database, paulsilverstone.com/ship/medinat-hayehudim/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
Silverstone, Paul H. "USS Paducah: Illegal Immigrant Ship." Naval History, vol. 3, no. 2, Apr. 1989, www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1989/april/uss-paducah-illegal-immigrant-ship.
"The Voyage of 'Medinat Ha'Yehudim' [The Jewish State]." Palyam, palyam.org/English/Hahapala/hf/hf_Medinat_Hayehudim.pdf. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
Weiss, Marvin. Unpublished memoir. Courtesy of the Weiss Family.
