Le travail social dans les organisations juives françaises après la Shoah : création made in France ou importation américaine ?

Abstract

This article analyses the transformation of social work in Jewish circles in post-World War II France and asks how American Jewish organizations influenced this process. Our inquiry will focus especially on the role of the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which reestablished its French presence in December 1944, and thereafter sought to reform social work practices in the French Jewish organizations it subsidized. The JDC initially worked closely with these organizations by imposing new standards and providing staff trainings. Yet in 1949, it increased its involvement by opening the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, which offered a one-year program based on the American social work curriculum to students from Europe, North Africa and Israel. The efforts of the JDC to reform French Jewish welfare coincided with a larger French movement to institutionalize the social work profession, providing an additional catalyst for reform. I argue that the transformation of French Jewish social work can be best understood as the outcome of interaction within the Jewish world, but also between the Jewish world and the larger French and American national contexts.