11 Facts About Yoel Palgi

Yoel Palgi was a Palmach parachutist who was dropped by Britain into Yugoslavia during the Second World War to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust and RAF pilots captured by the Germans.

Yoel Palgi had joined the Palmach, the strike force of Haganah and underground army of the Jewish community in Palestine, in 1942.

Yoel Palgi's group were flown to Bari where they met up with Enzo Sereni.

Yoel Palgi had known Palgi from childhood since they had both grown up in Cluj, and advised him the best way to obtain immunity was to turn himself into the Gestapo and inform them he was acting on behalf of the Jewish Agency, and had come to negotiate with them to that end.

Yoel Palgi was tortured to the point that he tried to commit suicide: his interrogators revived him, so that they could continue their torture to extract information he refused to divulge.

Yoel Palgi later bribed a Hungarian guard to allow him to speak with her directly.

En route, Yoel Palgi leapt from the train that was transporting them, and managed to make his way back to Budapest where he joined members of the pioneering Zionist underground.

Yoel Palgi did manage to arrange for Hannah Szenes' mother to be secreted out and settled in Palestine.

In February 1948, on the eve of the Arab-Israeli War, Yoel Palgi, accompanied by Boris Senior, was dispatched by the Haganah on a mission to South Africa to buy aircraft for the fledgling Yishuv fleet Sherut Ha'avir, forerunner of what was to become, within months, the Israeli Air Force.

Yoel Palgi was cross-examined by Shmuel Tamir, and his hero's image was tarnished as he struggled, stuttering, to explain the apparent contradictions between his post-war book on the events, and his recollections in the testimony he deposed.

Yoel Palgi was a co-founder of El Al and its deputy director from 1949 until 1960.