The Oslo Children Square

The story

The Oslo Children Square is in the Ramot neighborhood, close to the elementary school named after President Herzog, and it commemorates those who perished in the Oslo children disaster. On 20 November 1949 two DC-3 aircraft of the Aero Holland company took off from the airfield near Tunis, carrying Jewish children from Tunisia on their way to convalescence in Norway before their immigration to Israel. One aircraft arrived safely; the second landed in Brussels to repair the radio set, continued to Oslo, met heavy fog on the approach to landing and crashed near Hurum, about thirty-nine kilometers south of the city. Twenty-seven of the children perished, and with them four of the crew and three escorts of the group. The background of the journey is a story of immigration: Tunisia was then a French protectorate with about one hundred thousand Jews in it, and with the establishment of the state emissaries of Youth Aliyah came to Tunis; with the consent of the French authorities and with the consent of the parents children were chosen, most of them from poor families, to immigrate to Israel. In 1949 an agreement was signed between the Joint and the Norwegian welfare ministry, according to which two hundred places would be made available in a convalescent center that was vacated for Jewish children from North Africa, in order to strengthen them before the flight to the country; the first group, about two hundred children from Morocco, arrived in April of that year, and the group from Tunisia was to come after it. From the aircraft one child survived, Yitzhak Elal, eleven years old, who was found after three days; he immigrated to Israel, changed his name to Yitzhak El Al, settled in the moshav Yanuv and raised a family, and died on 14 February 1987. Following the disaster the chairman of the Norwegian Labour Party, Haakon Lie, initiated a fundraising campaign for the founding of a moshav in Israel, and Norway sent timber for the building of huts in the moshav Yanuv. Monuments in memory of the children stand at Hurum, at Yanuv, at Netivot, at Netanya and at Petah Tikva, and this is the square of Beersheba. Since 2010 the disaster has been marked on 4 Iyar, in the state ceremony for the fallen of the clandestine immigration and the immigration.

• Commemoration
• Beersheba