If you ask Rutherford resident Nathan Nadler what he has accomplished in his 81 years, he will tell you, proudly, that he "raised two sons and helped found the State of Israel."

As a crew member on the Exodus — the ill-fated ship that brought some 4,500 Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1947 only to have the British navy seize the passengers and send them back to Germany — Nadler, then 20, participated in what today is considered an almost legendary piece of Jewish history.

"The Exodus was responsible for the United Nations recommending that Palestine be divided into Jewish and Arab areas," Nadler told The Jewish Standard, pointing out that the captain of the ship, Ike Aronowitz, is still alive.

After the British navy sent the passengers of the ship to a former concentration camp outside of Hamburg, he said, the U.N. commission charged with investigating the issue visited the camp, subsequently making its recommendation in favor of partition.

Nadler first became aware of the plight of concentration camp survivors in 1945, when he served in the U.S. Army.

"I spoke Yiddish," he said. "I met the survivors in the camps. They had nowhere to go. No one would take them."

After he returned to the United States, he wanted to go back and help the survivors. He joined various Zionist organizations, but none of them could help him do this. Finally, he said, he was steered to a group in Philadelphia headed by a priest, John Stanley Brauel.

"He was a righteous Christian," said Nadler, describing his own reaction on boarding the "old dilapidated ferryboat" then called the President Warfield, only to be greeted by a man wearing a large cross. "I said to myself in Yiddish, ‘I thought this was a Jewish ship,’" he said. Brauel is buried in Jerusalem.

Also part of the crew, which included five professional seamen, were "a lot of yeshiva boys," he said. The ship had set sail several days before but had been caught in a storm and almost sank. It was time to try again.

Nadler recalled sailing to the Azores and then to France and Italy to refuel. In Italy, the boat — meant for 300 people — was refitted to carry 5,000. In France, the crew identified a harbor that could hold the refugees to be brought in from France, Italy, Germany, and Poland.

As truckloads of Jews arrived and boarded the ship, he said, the Italians made it difficult for them to get a tugboat to take the boat out again through the breakwaters. Finally, with the intervention of a sympathetic member of the Italian Parliament, the ship was able to sail.

In the Standard’s tribute issue marking Israel’s 50th birthday, Nadler pointed out that while women who were nine months pregnant were not supposed to go on the voyage, "two babies were born at sea. One mother died and was buried at sea, and the other mother nursed both babies." He subsequently met one of the two infants, identifying her by the fake birth certificate issued on the ship.

According to Nadler, passengers remained on the boat for two weeks before being attacked by the British, who loaded them onto three prison ships. He still blames then-British Prime Minister Ernest Bevin for this action.

Nadler has visited Israel five times since the founding of the state. "There’s a reunion [shortly]," he said, but noted that he wouldn’t be attending because of the high cost.

Nadler will be honored tonight by Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Valley in Woodcliff Lake during kabbalat Shabbat services.