Qualla: Hurum Air Disaster

Hurum Air Disaster: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit אבישי טייכר משתמש:Avi1111, CC BY-SA 2.5. Twenty-eight children, most of them between 8 and 12 years old, boarded a Douglas DC-3 near Tunis on 20 November 1949. They were Jewish children from poor families, selected through the Youth Aliyah program with their parents' consent, on their way to a new country that had existed for barely a year. Norway was supposed to be a waypoint -- a transit through a sanitarium where they would rest before continuing to Israel. None of them knew that the mountains southwest of Oslo were hidden in fog that afternoon.

Read more: Hurum Air Disaster on Qualla

Image: אבישי טייכר משתמש:Avi1111 | CC BY-SA 2.5

Hurum Air Disaster: A Route Through the Cold

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. The arrangement was unusual. In 1949, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had signed an agreement with the Norwegian Ministry of Welfare to make 200 places in a tuberculosis sanitarium available for Jewish children from North Africa who were in the process of immigra...

Read more: Hurum Air Disaster on Qualla

Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Hurum Air Disaster: Sixty Meters Past the Trees

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. As the DC-3 descended toward Fornebu Airport, Oslo's main airfield at the time, the pilot encountered dense fog over the mountainous terrain of Hurum, a peninsula jutting into the Oslofjord southwest of the capital. Flying too low, one of the plane's wings clipped a tree. The air...

Read more: Hurum Air Disaster on Qualla

Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Hurum Air Disaster: A Nation's Response

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danny-w, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hurum crash was the second-deadliest air disaster in Norwegian history at the time, exceeded only by the 35 deaths in the 1947 Kvitbjorn disaster. Public sympathy was immediate and deep. Hakon Lie, the secretary of the Norwegian Labor Party, launched a fundraising campaign to...

Read more: Hurum Air Disaster on Qualla

Image: Danny-w | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hurum Air Disaster: Memorials Across Two Continents

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit שילה אסנפי, CC BY 2.5. At the crash site on the Hurum mountainside, a memorial stands behind a symbolic fence decorated with Stars of David. Pieces of the wreckage remain at the site, rusting quietly among the trees. In Israel, the village of Yanuv holds its own memorial to the children, funded by frie...

Read more: Hurum Air Disaster on Qualla

Image: שילה אסנפי | CC BY 2.5