Anglo-Jewish Humanitarianism and the Jewish Relief Unit, 1943–1950

Abstract

Abstract The Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) was an Anglo-Jewish humanitarian agency of 213 members that operated across Europe during 1945/50, particularly in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany. JRU staff cared for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) who lingered in United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) assembly centres such as Belsen before their eventual departure for the United States or the new state of Israel. The JRU has remained a somewhat understudied body relative to other Jewish organizations active in DP camps and this article, based on personnel files and field reports archived at London’s Wiener Library and the London Metropolitan Archives, centres JRU aid workers as valuable objects of study in their own right, in line with increased historiographical interest in the backgrounds and world-views of postwar UNRRA operatives. Through an emphasis on materials related to and produced by individual JRU staff members and on the intimate and everyday character of their work, this article suggests that the JRU work among Jewish DPs in Germany was more substantive and consequential than has often been appreciated. More broadly, the work of the JRU is suggestive of the significance of humanitarian relief and reconstruction to postwar Jewish revival in Germany.