Abstract This article examines how three Kindertransport refugees negotiated notions of identity and belonging throughout their lives. By focusing on the unpublished testimony of Ruth Balint and the diary-memoir narratives of Edith Bown-Jacobowitz and Elisabeth Orsten, this research highlights the complexities of identity formation in the face of exile and displacement. The findings show that belonging transcended national frameworks, manifesting itself in multifaceted attachments to places, communities, religious practices, and social connections that evolved continuously over time. The comparative methodology of analysing both contemporary diary entries and retrospective memoirs written by the same individual highlights processes of memory and identity construction, while also illuminating discrepancies that emerge through temporal distance and changing perspectives. The testimonies demonstrate that Kindertransport refugees were not passive recipients of rescue, but active agents who renegotiated hybrid identities throughout their lifetimes, often developing various attachments. This research contributes to Kindertransport scholarship by revealing how the trauma of displacement manifested itself not just through geographical relocation but as psychological fractures that influenced identity formation well beyond the immediate refugee experience, creating what many experienced as a perpetual cultural limbo that challenges conventional narratives of successful integration or assimilation.

Abstract This essay makes the case for re-evaluating the concept of the Jewish public sphere by using the German trade journal Der Confectionair (1886–1936) as its point of departure. Der Confectionair—renamed Der Konfektionär during the First World War—was the most widely circulated German-language publication for the textile industry during the Imperial period and the pre-eminent journal for the trade on the European continent in the interwar period. While functioning first and foremost as a mouthpiece and communal forum for German commercial clothiers, the paper also addressed issues specific to Jewish business owners and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and issues that were thought to be of interest to women readers, and perhaps Jewish women readers in particular, on the other. This essay draws on public sphere theory alongside intersectionality and uses ‘Jewishness’ as an analytic lens to understand how German-Jewish public and communal discourse operated outside of the designated Jewish public sphere of the Jewish press and explicitly Jewish organizations. In line with recent studies in central and eastern European Jewish history, it seeks to move beyond the binary of ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ for understanding the development of Jewish public culture and political communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, the essay forms an empirical contribution to the theoretical debate surrounding public spheres by homing in on their co-constructed nature.

Abstract This article examines the contribution of German-Jewish women to rebuilding Jewish community life in Berlin following the Second World War. In 1948, five years before the re-establishment of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB), Berlin’s Jewish women had organized themselves into a local Frauengruppe. This women’s group provided crucial support to the community’s needy, but unlike before the war, no longer championed demands for equal representation in the community. This article argues that the women’s inclination to pursue charitable work conforming to traditional gender norms—leaving community administration to their husbands—stemmed from their desire to recreate familiar pre-war conditions. Due to persecution under National Socialism, gender roles had become inverted, so that focusing on ‘feminine’ charitable work and empowering male leadership provided a sense of the ways of the past that helped to foster a feeling of return to pre-war normality.

Abstract This article aims to demonstrate the continuity between the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens in pre-National Socialist Germany and the Association of Jewish Refugees in Britain after its foundation in 1941. That continuity was reflected most obviously in the personnel of both organizations, such as Eva G. Reichmann and Alfred Wiener, as well as in their institutional structures and the agencies that they created for the benefit of their members. It also points to the cultural continuity of the values espoused by the Jews of Germany when transferred to Britain.

Abstract Three forces influenced the identity of early modern German rabbinic culture: emigration, print, and immigration. Roughly speaking, these factors made their marks consecutively and cumulatively rather than simultaneously. Each affected other early modern Jewish communities, but the focus here is their progressive effect on German rabbinic culture. This article argues that emigration drained much of the human and cultural capital from the German-speaking lands, leaving German Jewry without strong local rabbinic leadership. In the sixteenth century, print exposed German Jews to different ideas about rabbinic culture and challenged local ways. While some sixteenth-century German rabbis responded, they failed to print their ideas, which limited their distribution and influence. Instead, the printed works of Polish rabbinic scholars became reference works for German Jews. Finally, the immigration of Jews from eastern Europe in the seventeenth century brought people who did things differently into German communities and altered some distinctive German-Jewish ritual practices.