At 88, her second exodus
After failed bid in '47, Point Breeze woman will finally move to Israel
By Abra Metz-Dworkin

On July 21, Frances Greenberg will realize a dream she has kept close to heart for 61 years. At age 88, she is making final preparations to emigrate from her Point Breeze home to become a citizen of Israel.

She will do so under the premise of aliyah, which guarantees all Jews a "right of return" to Israel and immediate Israeli citizenship upon immigration.

Mrs. Greenberg's move mirrors a journey she attempted in 1947 as a survivor of the Holocaust, when she departed for Palestine on a ship called the Exodus, whose ill-fated trip was depicted in a Leon Uris novel and a 1960 movie.

There have been other journeys. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the then-19-year-old Mrs. Greenberg fled her native country to Siberia, where she lived and worked with family friends. After the war, she returned home, and spent time in her first displaced persons camp.

In 1947, Mrs. Greenberg left the camp in the middle of the night, and traveled by wagon to France. On July 11, at a port near Marseilles -- along with more than 4,500 immigrants, the majority of whom were Holocaust survivors -- she boarded the Exodus, bound for Palestine, where she had extended family.

The Exodus ship was sponsored by Jewish relief agencies, as well as underground immigration efforts organized by the Zionist aliyah movement, which focused on helping European Jews who survived the Holocaust immigrate illegally to Palestine both during and after World War II.

Once ocean-bound, the Exodus was torpedoed and tear-gassed by the British, and several passengers were killed. British forces boarded the ship and passengers were eventually transported back to France.

In protest against their forced return, the Exodus' passengers refused to exit the ship for 24 days. Despite aid from Jewish relief agencies, the passengers and children on the ship endured food shortages, cramped quarters and a heat wave while detained in the French harbor of Port-de-Bouc.

Ultimately, the ship was sent back to British-occupied Hamburg, Germany.Once on German soil, the passengers were sent to camps in former army barracks.

It was there that Mrs. Greenberg met her husband, Isak, and they married in 1948.

Hospitalized due to an intestinal illness she developed on the Exodus, Mrs. Greenberg found herself in the camp's medical facility. "You have struggled enough," Isak told her. "You are coming with me, and we are going to America."

With no surviving family in Europe, in March 1949 the Greenbergs moved to Squirrel Hill, where Mr. Greenberg's sister lived.

The Greenbergs lived temporarily on the third floor of the sister's home. He opened a cleaning and tailoring business called Shady and Forbes Cleaners, and when they had saved enough, the Greenbergs bought a house in Point Breeze, where they raised two children.

"America was very, very good to us," Mrs. Greenberg said.

Yet she always felt an urge to visit Israel, whose shores she had seen from the deck of the Exodus.

Isak knew of his wife's longing to see Israel, and so "after the first $1,000 we saved [from the business]," she said, "I went to Israel with my daughter."

The first visit merely whetted her appetite to return. Mrs. Greenberg, who describes herself as "intellectually curious" and "a news junky," is fluent in at least five languages, including Hebrew.

When her daughter married and moved to Israel to raise a family 36 years ago, Mrs. Greenberg's yearning only grew.

With the death of her husband one year ago, she began to seriously contemplate immigration. The idea of moving close to her daughter and grandchildren in Israel seemed ideal.

"My husband knew that after he died, I would go. I want to be close to family," she said.

Mrs. Greenberg discovered Nefesh B'Nefesh, an Israel-based organization, which organizes flights, citizenship documentation and community placement for American, Canadian and United Kingdom Jews interested in making aliyah through a combination of private and philanthropic contributions and funding from the State of Israel.

In a little more than two weeks, Mrs. Greenberg will depart on a Nefesh B'Nefesh-sponsored plane out of New York, one of more than 2,000 immigrating Jews. After completing government paperwork with Israeli officials in-flight, she will land in Israel with dual American-Israeli citizenship.

Although Nefesh B'Nefesh has helped more than 15,000 Jews immigrate since its founding in 2002, "I must say, once you hit 70-plus [years], it is extremely rare" to find someone of Mrs. Greenberg's age willing and able to uproot herself and move to Israel, said spokesman Charley Levine.

Upon arrival in Israel, Mrs. Greenberg will move into a retirement community roughly 20 minutes from her daughter's home.

Though she laments leavin