Jeremiah Halpern

Captain Jeremiah Halpern (; also known as Yirmiyahu Halpern and Yirmiyahu Halperin) (b. Smolensk, Russia, 1901; d. Tel Aviv, Israel, 1962) was a Revisionist Zionist leader in Palestine who first came to prominence when he served as aide de camp to Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s when the latter was head of the Haganah in Jerusalem.

Halpern, a certified ship's captain, was known as Rav Hahovel (captain of the ship) for his role in the development of Jewish seamanship.

Family Jeremiah Halpern was the son of Michael Halpern (Y'hiel Mikhael Halpern; Yekhiel Michal Halperin) descendant of a wealthy rabbinical family from Vilnius, Lithuania, who is now known mainly as the first proponent of a Jewish Legion. Michael emigrated to Palestine from Smolensk in 1885 and was involved in setting up Jewish colonies on land bought from Arabs, in founding the first Hebrew workers' union and in helping to found the Workers of Zion movement and the Jewish self-defense force in 1905.

Jeremiah was brought to Palestine in 1913.

Education and career

Jeremiah Halpern was educated at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv and following his high school education graduated as a captain from the Italian Naval Academy in 1917. In 1919 he graduated from the London School for Captains and Engineers, becoming an apprentice sailor on the Jewish ship Hechalutz in the same year. Halpern assisted in the defence of Jews of the Old City of Jerusalem during the 1920 Palestine riots. On taking up permanent residence in Palestine in 1933 Halpern was associated primarily with the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. He was also in charge of military training for the World Betar movement. and was active in Hillel Kook's Bergson Group.

In the early 1940s Halpern worked with Lord Stabolgi to achieve the objectives of Bergson's Committee for a Jewish Army, a campaign which was endorsed enthusiastically by the Jewish Chronicle, but which antagonised the Zionist establishment because of its association with Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization.

The Training School for Betar Instructors

Halepern established the Training School for Betar Instructors (or Betar 'madricihim,' also often translated as 'youth guides' or 'youth leaders') in Tel Aviv in 1928, serving as its first director. Halpern recruited Abba Ahimeir as an instructor of the nationalist youth and together the pair led the School in an increasingly radical direction in which military training was viewed as a means of establishing the military wing of a national liberation movement.

Under the leadership of Halpern (and later of Ahimeir) the 24 cadets took the lead in organising demonstrative activities outside Betar, which notably included taking the initiative in the march to the Western Wall in August 1929. marched to the Western Wall proclaiming "The Wall is ours".

Two days later, in raised tensions caused by a 2000-strong Muslim counter-demonstration after Friday prayers the day before, a Jewish youth, Avraham Mizrahi, was killed and an Arab youth picked at random was stabbed in retaliation. Subsequently, the violence escalated into rioting throughout Palestine.

The demonstration by Revisionist youth of 15 August was later identified as the proximal cause of the riots by the Shaw Commission.

The Brit HaHayal

Halpern was world commander of the Brit HaHayal, a Revisionist association of Jewish reservists in the Polish Army that grew into a world organisation with regional military and political training schools for members.

By 1939 Brit HaHayal had 25,000 members worldwide. The titular head was the Italian maritime scientist Nicola Fusco but Jeremiah Halpern ran the School and was its driving force. The School trained cadets from all over Europe, Palestine and South Africa and produced some of the future commanders of the Israeli Navy.

World War II

At the outbreak of World War II Halpern was sent to negotiate with the Canadian Admiralty for the establishment of a Jewish Naval School to train members of a special Jewish unit for the British Army.

Commemoration Halpern's contribution to Hebrew seamanship is commemorated by a research scholarship offered by the University of Haifa's Department of Maritime Civilizations.

In addition to the scholarship the Halpern Foundation funded a research boat, the RV Halpern (launched September, 2005), for faculty members and students of the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa.