The Israeli cargo ship Yuvali pushed off from Eilat in the spring of 1977 on a standard journey to Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
“Sailing was good, and there was nice, calm weather,” recalled Frane Fingust, the ship’s chief engineer.
In East Asia, the vessel slid around the Strait of Mallaca and entered the South China Sea. Just past breakfast on June 10 of that year, along Vietnam’s coast, the Yuvali’s crew spotted a fishing boat displaying SOS banners reading “FOOD” and “WATER.”
The Yuvali negotiated a hard-to-execute turn as crewmembers quickly gathered rice, vegetables, fruit, powdered milk and jugs of water. As the Yuvali pulled alongside the small boat, Fingust could see a woman clutching her baby. A few at a time, other desperate passengers joined the woman on deck, 66 people in all.
The occupants were Vietnamese refugees fleeing communist rule in their postwar homeland.
Fingust described seeing the handmade signs on the rickety fishing boat. That was, he said, “the moment that our captain decided to take [the refugees] on our ship and give them any assistance they might need. You can imagine our surprise! How was it possible to accommodate 66 people inside that small fishing boat, nine meters [30 feet] long? They must have been sitting one on the other.”
The refugees were helped onboard the Yuvali, and the ship continued on to Taiwan. The Yuvali’s crew was assured that from Taiwan the Vietnamese would be flown to new lives in Israel — and so they were.
Fingust, 75 and retired from a 45-year career working aboard cargo ships, wishes to reconnect both with the former refugees and his Yuvali crewmates. Fingust, who divides his time now between his native Split, Croatia, and British Columbia, doesn’t know the names of any of the Vietnamese refugees. He recalls, however, names of some of his Yuvali mates: Avram Erez, Efraim Markowitz, Uri Isner, Avram Kohen, Alex Munch and Alex Weisfeld.
Nguyen Tuan was 18 when he fled Saigon with his parents, two sisters and brother-in-law. After four or five days at sea, they had seen several ships pass without stopping. Hope was nearly lost. Then the Yuvali arrived.
“If we had [waited] another day, we would have been finished,” Nguyen Tuan, now 53, said last week from Israel. “We didn’t know [the Yuvali] was an Israeli ship. We saw that it went ahead. We were so happy when we saw it come back.”
The Vietnamese were initially refused entry at Hong Kong and Taiwan. Nguyen Tuan subsequently learned that the ship’s captain spoke with Israeli authorities, who secured Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s approval to provide refuge and Israeli citizenship to the 66. With the refugees bearing Israeli papers, Taiwan relented. After a few days in Taiwan, the group flew to Israel.
Yehuda Avner, who served then as an adviser to Begin, was dispatched to welcome the Vietnamese at Ben-Gurion Airport. “I said to them in English, ‘I’m here on behalf of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and on behalf of the government of Israel. You are welcome. You are not strangers in our midst.’ I used those exact words,” said Avner. “I thought [they looked] rather confused. They were happy, but we had no language in common. What did they know of Israel?”
The incident remains one of the Jewish state’s proudest moments. On June 20, 1977, Begin announced his decision in a speech to the Knesset. All told, the Yuvali and other ships rescued 179 Vietnamese “boat people” who were granted citizenship and settled in Israel. According to Haifa’s National Maritime Museum, Begin soon thereafter sent a letter to the Yuvali’s owners.
“Please accept the government’s and my personal thanks for your part in this human enterprise,” Begin wrote. “Jewish people, who knew persecutions and know, probably better then any other nation, the meaning of being a refugee, could not stay indifferent to the suffering of those unfortunates.”
Nguyen Than became a chef and works in a restaurant in Petach Tikvah, near his Ramat Gan home. Recently he married a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine.
He does not remember Fingust, but he would like to meet the Yuvali crewmembers who saved him and his countrymen more than three decades ago. Only four or five Vietnamese families from the Yuvali remain in Israel, most in the Tel Aviv area, he said. The others, including members of Nguyen Than’s family, moved to North America and Europe.
“I love this country because if not for Israel, maybe I would be dead on the sea,” Nguyen Than said after a late night of work at the restaurant.
“The prime minister of Israel brought us here, and I never forgot it. When I came to Israel, it was clearly very hard, but it was OK. I love Israel like I love Vietnam.”
“Seeking Kin” is an ongoing jta feature by Hillel Kuttler that helps unite long-lost relatives and friends. Please e-mail Kuttler at [email protected] if you were rescued by the Yuvali or worked on the ship at that time. “Seeking Kin” is sponsored by Bryna Shuchat and Joshua Landes and family in loving memory of their mother and grandmother, Miriam Shuchat, a lifelong uniter of the Jewish people.