Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum

The museum sits below the road, and the Ministry of Defence's own page is blunt about how to reach it: from 204 Allenby Road you go down the flight of steps called Ma'ale HaDakar to get to the entrance. The compound has a second frontage on HaHagana Avenue at number 65, which is where the yard gates are. There is no visitor car park inside, so arriving drivers park on Allenby Road, and anyone who needs a vehicle brought in has to ring ahead and have the gates opened.

The commonest mistake here is the one made a few doors away. The National Maritime Museum is a different institution at 198 Allenby Road with a far broader subject, and the ministry's own page confirms as much by listing it among the neighbouring attractions, alongside Elijah's Cave, the cable car, the Bat Galim promenade and the Stella Maris lookout and church.

Published opening hours do not agree, which is worth knowing before a long walk down the steps. The Ministry of Defence gives Sunday to Thursday, 09:00 to 16:00, closed on Fridays and the eves of festivals. Haifa municipality and the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites both publish 10:00 to 16:00 for the same days, and the municipality adds that Friday is available only to booked groups of thirty or more and that Saturday is closed. Guiding is in Hebrew and English, and group tours are by prior arrangement in every version.

Prices, at least, come from one place. The ministry publishes ₪20 for an adult, ₪15 for youth aged 5 to 18, students, senior citizens and army pensioners, ₪10 for holders of National Insurance and hostile-action disability certificates, and free entry for bereaved families.

She began as LCT 147, a Mark 2 tank landing craft built by Stockton Construction at Thornaby-on-Tees, launched on 23 September 1941 and commissioned that December. She took part in the North Africa campaign, and between March and May 1943 was rebuilt at Portsmouth Dockyard as a landing craft rocket, LCT(2)(R) 147. She was paid off from British service in May 1945. The museum's own account of this stretch does not line up with the reference record: it puts her transfer to the Mediterranean in June 1943 and has her at Operation Torch, which was fought in November 1942. Nobody has reconciled the two, so take the sequence and not the months.

The Italian branch of the Mossad LeAliyah Bet bought her in March 1946. To keep the British from looking closely she was registered to a Swedish couple named Kronstro, and inside the organisation she carried the code name The Invader. Over the summer of 1947 a local yard fitted bunks into a hull designed to put tanks onto a beach, and stowed tinned food and enough water for the estimated length of the passage. She loaded from an open shore on the Gulf of Gaeta north of Naples, a spot English-language accounts give as Formia.

She sailed on 17 September 1947 with 434 Holocaust survivors aboard. She was caught on the way in, her passengers were sent to the camps on Cyprus, and the ship herself was tied up against the breakwater in Haifa harbour and left there. The name was the point. She put to sea a few weeks after the British seized the Exodus and turned its roughly 4,500 passengers back towards Europe, an event after which the British expected the sailings to stop. Af Al Pi Chen means nonetheless.

The last part of her working life is the part nobody expects. When the navy was formed during the war of 1948 it took whatever floated, and she went on carrying the same name as a training ship in the landing craft unit, then as base ship for Flotilla 11, until she left service in 1958.

The decision to build a museum inside one of the old immigrant ships was taken at the end of the 1950s. Af Al Pi Chen was chosen for an unsentimental reason: by the museum's own count she was the only one left of the 141 ships that had run the blockade. Moving her from a distant mooring was not simple. She was cut into four pieces, lifted to the site by large cranes and joined back together there. So the hull on Allenby Road is genuinely the 1941 hull, and it is also a hull that was sawn apart and rewelded in order to be here at all.

She then stood as a very large piece of scrap for several years. From 1966 a naval officer and Palyam veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Yosef Almog, took the project in hand, had her restored and adapted for visitors, and ran the place for its first twenty-six years after it opened in 1969. English Wikipedia credits the founding to a Colonel Yoske Coral instead. The two accounts have not been reconciled anywhere public, and the museum does not settle it.

The plan is older still, and it originally involved a more famous ship. Haifa municipality resolved in 1951 to found a museum of clandestine immigration and to preserve the Exodus as its centrepiece. That came to nothing, and the ship that took the role was a far less celebrated one.

Inside, the split between relic and reconstruction is easy to see once you look for it. The bunks the immigrants slept in are still below her deck, and the audiovisual presentation on the Haapala runs down there. A section of hull plating from the Patria is a real object with a hard story attached: the French liner was requisitioned by the British in 1940 to deport about 1,900 refugees from Haifa to Mauritius, the Haganah planted a two-kilogram charge meant only to stop her sailing, and she went over and sank in Haifa harbour in under sixteen minutes on 25 November 1940, killing 267 people. The organisation's part in it stayed secret until one of its operatives published an account in 1957. The Cyprus camp interiors, by contrast, are sets, and the map of the smuggling routes is a computer.

• Original: the 1941 hull, cut into four and rejoined on site
• Original: the immigrants' bunks in the hold
• Original: a section of the Patria's hull plating
• Reconstruction: the Cyprus detention camp interiors
• Altered for visitors: entrances cut into the submarine's port side

INS Dakar was the Royal Navy T-class submarine HMS Totem, bought by Israel with two sisters in 1965, rebuilt, and commissioned under her Israeli name at Portsmouth on 10 November 1967. She sailed for Haifa on 9 January 1968 with 69 men aboard, more than her normal complement of sixty, made her last position report east of Crete on the morning of 24 January, and was never heard from again. The wreck was found on 28 May 1999, thirty-one years later, between Crete and Cyprus at some 9,800 feet, close to 3,000 metres. The evidence points to a sudden dive past her maximum depth and a catastrophic hull failure, but the cause has never been established. On 11 October 2000 her bridge and the forward section of her sail were raised and set up as the memorial that now stands here.

Two warships in the yard can be gone aboard, and the ministry says so plainly. INS Mivtach, which it describes as the navy's first missile boat, is one. The other is the submarine INS Gal, and she is the more rewarding of the two: lead boat of a class of three based on the German Type 206 but built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness rather than in Germany, for the political reasons of the day, launched in December 1975 and commissioned in June 1976. She was decommissioned in 2000 and shipped back to Haifa in October 2007, with entrances cut into her port side so that visitors could get inside a hull that was never meant to admit anyone who was not crew.

The rest of the yard is harder-edged: naval guns, captured enemy vessels, attackers' boats, and a weapons container from the Karine A, the freighter seized during the second intifada. Set among them is a memorial wall for the immigrant ships that sank on their way to the coast, and close by stands a monument to the crew of the destroyer INS Eilat. Inside the building there is a memorial corner for the navy's dead, with the casualty files consultable in the library or through a computer terminal, and an archive holding documents, photographs and handmade objects left by immigrants and sailors.

One exhibit is worth flagging as unconfirmed. English Wikipedia says the museum also holds remnants of an Israeli motor torpedo boat and a lifeboat from USS Liberty, the American intelligence ship attacked by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats in June 1967. The museum's own pages say nothing about it either way, and what is actually on show from that episode is not something this page can confirm.

Haapala, the word in the museum's Hebrew name, covers the clandestine movement of Jews to Palestine against British immigration limits between 1920 and 1948. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the total at well over 100,000 people, more than 70,000 of them Holocaust survivors, and says that after the Second World War over ninety per cent of the ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy before they reached the shore. By 1948 the British were holding more than 50,000 Jewish refugees in internment camps on Cyprus.

The ship counts are worth reading sceptically wherever they appear on a panel. The museum works from 141 ships. The English-language survey of Aliyah Bet gives 142 voyages by 120 ships, and adds that over 1,600 people drowned at sea. The definitions behind those totals differ, since a sailing is not a ship and an attempt is not an arrival, and nobody has reconciled them.

The argument the building is making is that the two wings are one continuous institution: that the Palyam, the maritime arm of the Palmach, and the Mossad LeAliyah Bet crews who ran the blockade became the Israeli Navy in 1948, so the landing craft and the missile boat belong in the same yard. The case is a reasonable one and it is also a commemorative one, made by the ministry that owns the navy. The museum does not pretend to be neutral about it, and a visitor is free to weigh it.