Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Research Articles

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the reconstruction of destroyed Jewish homes in Lithuania, 1921–1924

ABSTRACT This article presents the reconstruction of housing for Jewish Lithuanian refugees returning home after World War I. The refugees found their original homes ‘completely destroyed’ or ‘partially destroyed,’ which were the formal categories used by the government. Between 1921 and 1924, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) worked with the refugees and the Lithuanian government to rebuild communities, and also collaborated with the local Jewish National Council (JNC) in providing financial and organizational support for reconstruction. This was a tenuous relationship based on JDC and JNC differences and oft-changing government housing policies. This article analyzes the rebuilding of two cities: Šiauliai (completely destroyed) and Panevėžys (partially destroyed).

Everyday Justice: Legal Aid for Jewish Displaced Persons, Germany, 1945–1950

Abstract Welfare workers volunteering with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a Jewish welfare organization, delivered crucial legal assistance to Holocaust survivors gathered in displaced persons (DP) camps in the American Zone of occupied Germany; however, today their story is largely forgotten. Their legal aid program embodied a unique relationship between social work and law. JDC relief workers developed a legal consciousness in response to the many injustices they witnessed in the DP camps, which allowed them to identify the gap between the basic support provided by relief programs, and the actual needs of the DPs. From this awareness they gradually developed a program of legal welfare, assisted Jews in their daily interactions with Americans and Germans, provided them with legal instruction and education, and protected them when conflicts arose. These JDC volunteers were fueled by a sense of moral responsibility and compassion for the Jewish DPs, who were forced to live in a foreign and often hostile environment. Remarkably, this story has largely been neglected in Holocaust scholarship, though the archives have yielded hundreds of reports by JDC welfare workers, as well as the papers of Oskar Mintzer, a key figure in the creation of the JDC’s legal aid program. The JDC was at the forefront of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and this aspect of its work represents a forgotten milestone in the development of a more holistic approach to refugee assistance and support. This study offers a starting point for further research in order to better understand humanitarian aid for asylum seekers, DPs, and refugees in the twenty-first century.

International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick

Reviewed by: International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick Jessica Cooperman Jaclyn Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 404 pp. Hardback $39.99. ISBN: 9781108495028 Jaclyn Granick's compelling new book, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War, powerfully reminds its readers of the enormous impact of World War I, not only on the lives of millions of Jews across Europe and in Palestine, but on the philanthropic, social, and political structures of the Jewish world. Granick's book focuses on the devastating turmoil unleashed by World War I and examines the efforts of American Jews to stabilize and sustain the lives of Jews trapped in the "shatterzone" between the crumbling Russian, Austrian, German, and Ottoman empires. Through her thought-provoking exploration of the dynamics of Jewish humanitarian work, Granick offers reader a complex picture of American Jewish identity and its intertwined commitments to American Progressive ideals and diasporic Jewish community. The book is primarily an account of the work done by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Poland, Ukraine, Soviet Russia, and Palestine during and immediately following World War I. At numerous points, however, Granick considers how the goals and efforts of JDC intersected with and diverged from those of other American relief organizations, such as the American Red Cross and the American Relief Administration, and other Jewish organizations, including HIAS and Hadassah. Granick opens with an examination of how the JDC and its various partners maneuvered to send money and financial assistance to Jewish "war sufferers" during the period of American neutrality. She poignantly describes the immense challenge of moving funds to people in need in the midst of a global crisis—and the added complexities created by the United States's entry into the war in April 1917. As American policies made it increasingly difficult to send aid, JDC leaders found ways to partner with European Jewish organizations on both sides of the battle lines to bring money and life-saving resources to East European Jews in desperate need of help. In the chapters that follow, Granick thematically explores the staggering demands faced by the JDC during the chaotic years after the war. While civilian populations across Eastern Europe suffered through the devastation and destabilization the war left behind, Jews lived in particularly precarious circumstances, becoming, Granick argues, "the war's paradigmatic [End Page 249] refugees" (111). Antisemitism lead both to wide-scale popular violence and to neglect from newly formed national governments that saw Jews as a "foreign element." In Ukraine, for example, pogroms led to approximately 200,000 Jewish deaths between 1917–1920 (92), and widespread famine left hundreds of thousands of Jewish children and adults facing imminent starvation and almost totally dependent on the JDC and the American Relief Administration for food (105). Granick offers detailed accounts of the strategies that Jewish agencies adopted as they struggled to feed the hungry, house refugees and orphans, tend to the sick, educate children, and establish stable Jewish economic systems in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Many of the people behind this massive humanitarian effort are familiar figures in American Jewish history. As Granick describes, established leaders like Cyrus Adler, Judah Magnes, Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, and Felix Warburg, saw the establishment of the JDC as part of their widespread involvement in Jewish institutional life. Granick, however, also highlights the efforts of less well-lauded figures—particularly professional social workers like Boris Bogen, Jacob Billikopf, Frank Rosenblatt, and others—who led the JDC's strategic efforts and on-the-ground programs. And while the leadership of Jewish organizations remained dominated by men in the interwar period, Granick spotlights the work of women, like Harriet Lowenstein, who established the JDC's European headquarters in 1919, and Jesse Bogen, Boris's daughter, who accompanied her father in his travels and eventually led the JDC's efforts to promote the "financial adoption" of Jewish children in Europe by Jewish women in the United States (210). While meticulous details of the material, financial, and medical aid provided by the JDC and other agencies lie at the heart of Granick's...

International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick

Reviewed by: International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick Carole Fink (bio) International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. By Jaclyn Granick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiv + 404 pp. Jaclyn Granick's meticulous and compelling monograph is an important contribution to contemporary Jewish history and to the international history of World War I and the postwar era. Adding substantially to Zosa Szajkowski's earlier studies, Granick, drawing on her extensive archival research, not only places the overseas work led by American Jews in a very large diplomatic, political, social, and economic framework but also elucidates its challenges, accomplishments, and uniqueness. At the center of Granick's narrative is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Created in November 1914 by a union of Orthodox and Reform American Jews, the JDC by 1931 had expended more than $80 million (equivalent to well over $1 billion in today's currency) on its philanthropic work in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Deftly tracing the organization's wartime origins and activities, its postwar projects, and its ties with Jewish and non-Jewish NGOs and with US, foreign, and international officials, Granick depicts the JDC's American leadership and its US and local field workers along with its recurring deliberations and debates over its goals and priorities. Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, and charts, the book contains a helpful table of acronyms and abbreviations and is supplemented by an impressive bibliography. Granick's introduction explains the complex national and international environment of the JDC's birth and its unprecedented initiatives "to protect, rebuild, and remake Jewish life abroad" (22). Chapter One details the challenges of dispatching aid to Jewish war sufferers in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean before and after April 1917, which included intensive domestic fundraising, reliance on existing overseas Jewish charitable networks, and close [End Page 210] cooperation with US government officials, along with its intelligence and financial collaboration with other groups, including newly arrived Jewish immigrants in the US. Moving on to the postwar period, Chapter 2 details the JDC's entry into international politics resulting from its ambitious and arduous campaigns to provide food relief in Poland and Ukraine. Chapter Three examines the JDC's reluctant involvement in the burgeoning refugee problem in which Jews were among the major victims, a fraught and costly undertaking complicated by its competition with rival NGOs, America's rejection of the League of Nations, and the US's sweeping immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924 as well as by the swell of antisemitism in Europe and the US. After replacing its foreign missions with thematic divisions, the American-led and funded JDC moved from emergency relief to preserving and uplifting the lives of millions of needy Jews left abroad. Chapters Four, Five, and Six contain richly detailed accounts of the JDC's involvement in three complex and difficult programs: expanding and sustaining medical facilities in Eastern Europe and Palestine; attempting to uplift the next Jewish generation by aiding orphaned and needy children by building technical-training institutions and creating a job-ready population; and forming the basis of financial support and economic development within targeted Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and Soviet Ukraine. Granick demonstrates convincingly that in the 1920s the JDC, working through local communities—but also relying on US influence and non-Jewish local and state bureaucrats and NGOs—despite its mounting internal and external critics and rivals and its hesitations and setbacks created a unique model of welfare building and international development. Although the organization's decision-making apparatus and its policy shifts and turns were occasionally impenetrable, Granick largely succeeds in explaining how distant benefactors operated under often crisis situations. This critical, wide-ranging analysis enables us to think anew about Jewish international humanitarianism during a pivotal decade and to revise our understanding of its reach and effectiveness. Granick's epilogue goes even further: although gravely shaken by the economic and political crises between 1929 and 1945, Jewish international humanitarianism has not only survived but also expanded well into the twenty-first century. And the JDC, defying its critics' charges of an elitist project, a global Jewish conspiracy, and an arm of...

ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ ПОЛЬСЬКО-АМЕРИКАНСЬКОГО КОМІТЕТУ ДОПОМОГИ ДІТЯМ ТА АМЕРИКАНСЬКОЇ АДМІНІСТРАЦІЇ ДОПОМОГИ (АРА) НА ТЕРИТОРІЇ ПОЛЬСЬКОЇ РЕСПУБЛІКИ У МІЖВОЄННИЙ ПЕРІОД

The end of the First World War was a consequence of a whole range of significant problems in the countries of Eastern Europe. These include the general poverty of the population, the decline of the rural industry and industrial production, the general political crisis that increased the popularity of radical communist movements, the change of geopolitical formation in Europe. The main factor that led to the destruction of the imperialist system was World War the first. On the ruins of empires, new independent countries are emerging, including the restored Republic of Poland or the Second Commonwealth. The whole list of problems that often reinforced each other was extremely difficult to overcome solely with the country inner capabilities and reserves. In fact, the period of the 20-30s of the twentieth century becomes the era of the expansion of the international philanthropic organizations activities, among which an important role was taken by American subsidiary organizations. These include the American Relief Administration (ARA), the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and some religious organizations such as the American Mennonites and others. Quite often these organizations were united, sometimes acting separately, or transferring the relay activity from one to another. The involvement of American philanthropic organizations in dealing with the needy countries of Eastern Europe has become possible due to a number of factors. The following of them are the departure from the policy of isolationism, the rapid increase in the US labor productivity, the crisis of overproduction, the formation within the American society of a humanists and philanthropists layer, mainly among the richest and the most influential entrepreneurs (Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Jacob Schiff, Herbert Hoover, etc.), who, having earned enormous wealth, created non-governmental charitable foundations with the aim of financing the philanthropic projects. Thus the activity of Herbert Hoover American humanitarian organization (the American Relief Administration (ARA)) which was started in 1919 in the US changed the general economic and social situation. Its main purpose was to provide food for Polish children needs. ARA launched a whole network of dining-rooms throughout Poland.

A Difficult Return: Aspects of the Rebuilding of the Jewish Communities in Greece, 1945–1947

The Holocaust claimed the lives of over 85% of Greece’s Jews, a percentage among the highest in the continent. As with most of their coreligionists in liberated Europe, in the wake of the Holocaust, Greek Jews found themselves in dire straits. Looking through early 1945 reports, which the Athens-based Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (CBJCG) sent to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Jewish Agency appealing for immediate assistance, one is inundated with images of embitterment and desperation. Of some 4,800 Jews in Athens alone, a figure that did not include survivors of the death camps who had yet to return, it was claimed that 85% were completely short of any kind of means to live on, 10% needed partial assistance, and only 5% were entirely financially independent. Severe food shortages, sleeping rough, and the ongoing civil war in the streets of the capital in the winter of 1944–45 had led to a considerable number of deaths. Worryingly, it was also asserted that “owing to their misery” many Jews had attempted to commit suicide.

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century by Matilda Rabinowitz, with commentary and original drawings by Robbin Légère Henderson

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century by Matilda Rabinowitz, with commentary and original drawings by Robbin Légère Henderson

Rebuilding the community: the Federation of Jewish Communities and American Jewish humanitarian aid in Yugoslavia, 1944–1952

This article recounts the implications of American Jewish aid for rebuilding the Jewish communities of Yugoslavia in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. By focusing on the founding and the activities of the Autonomous Relief Committee (ARC), which channelled aid provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the article argues that it was the power that ARC assumed, of deciding on funding priorities and being in close proximity to the new Yugoslav communist regime, that allowed it to shape the outlook of post-Holocaust Jewishness in Yugoslavia. The article is based primarily on previously unexamined sources from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia and JDC, and sheds new light on the dynamic period of negotiation of the new normative Jewish identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

“Every Jew is a Zionist, and every Zionist is a spy!” The story of Jewish social assistance networks in Communist Czechoslovakia

This article explores some of the major operations of the Czechoslovak secret police (State Security Forces, StB) against individuals involved in organising Jewish social assistance networks during the 1950s, as documented by fragments of case files preserved in the Security Services Archive in Prague. While there is much focus on victims of the Prague show trial of the so-called “Conspiracy Centre,” all of whom were members of the top echelons of the Communist Party, the individuals who tried to revive Jewish life and secure the well-being of the needy in a country swept by anti-Jewish sentiment raked up by that trial remain largely unknown. In this work, we learn who these people were and what they did, and how the Communist regime punished them for their involvement. As an original contribution, the article details the search for safe methods of delivering humanitarian aid to Czechoslovak Holocaust survivors after the expulsion of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in 1950, from the initial attempts to use Israeli channels to the gradual legalisation of JDC aid under Swiss cover organisations.

Helping the helpers: an international training program for professionals providing social services for hiv‐positive children and their families in Southern Kazakhstan

AbstractOver one hundred children and some of their parents were infected with HIV in state hospitals in the Chimkent region in Southern Kazakhstan. After this tragedy, the Regional Department of Public Health organized social services for these families and asked the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to provide them with training and supervision. Twelve seminars were conducted for the social workers in Chimkent over an 18‐month period. The JDC team also met with the local medical staff as well as with governmental and nongovernmental organizations to assess their needs and provide organizational support for the social services. This article presents an analysis of the psychosocial challenges associated with the mass HIV infection episode in Kazakhstan. The analysis is based on Hofstede's (2001) theory of cultural values, theories on cross‐cultural interaction (Cushner & Brislin, 1995), and principles of multicultural social work (Potocky‐Tripodi, 2002). The training program is described, and its results are discussed. General principles and practical recommendations for planning and implementing cross‐cultural international humanitarian programs in the field of HIV are suggested. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Jewish philanthropy and Jewish credit cooperatives in Eastern Europe and Palestine up to 1939: A transnational phenomenon?

At the end of the nineteenth century, and more pronouncedly between the two World Wars, Jews in Eastern Europe created wide networks of credit cooperatives, which at their peak supported about a third of the non-Soviet Jewish population in Eastern Europe. The establishment and continuous management of these cooperatives were greatly assisted by the two major Jewish philanthropic organizations of the period, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). These organizations acted as charitable institutions but also as third-sector organizations which aspired both to assist and to socially engineer East European Jewish society. In British Mandate Palestine a Zionist branch of the movement was established, which was, however, free from the influences of these philanthropic organizations. The article describes and analyzes this little-researched phenomenon while seeking to place it within the theoretical frameworks of philanthropy and transnationalism. It concludes with an observational comparison between the political context in which Jewish credit cooperatives were created, namely East European ethnic regimes, and the Israeli ethnic democracy.

The Mindanao Plan: Political Obstacles to Jewish Refugee Settlement

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was established in the waning hours of the failed 1938 Evian Conference. Its purpose was to con- tact various governments to explore their willingness to accept European Jewish refugees for settlement. The Philippine Islands, a United States Commonwealth, responded to the committee's inquiry with a proposal to allow ten thousand Jewish refugees to immigrate as agricultural settlers. Negotiations to settle Jewish refugees on the large island of progressed over the next three years, but the Mindanao ultimately failed because its architects underestimated the extent of local opposition and the complexity of land acquisition in the Philippines. The United States' entry into the war in December 1941 ended all further efforts on the settlement project. This article examines Philippine President Manuel Quezon's key role in this process, as well as the often skeptical positions of U.S. State Department officials and the surprisingly supportive stance of Paul McNutt, the U.S. High Commissioner for the Philippines. In the months that followed the Evian Conference, the Philippine Islands, an American Commonwealth at the time, submitted a proposal to accept Jewish refugees as agricultural settlers on Island in the Philippine Archipelago. The story of this proposal, which represented the earliest evidence that the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria had been taken seriously by a government outside the Western Hemisphere, has come to light only recently. Materials related to the Jewish refugee settlement in the Philippines and the Plan were found at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the National Archives, where they had been little used for nearly sixty years. 3

Long-Term Care Policy for the Elderly in the Zaporozhye Region of Ukraine

In this paper, we review the status of social policy for the elderly in Ukraine since the fall of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. We specifically address the problem of “rebuilding” an income and services policy for the at-risk elderly after the unraveling of the system that existed prior to the fall of Communism. Also, we address some existing problems faced by the elderly in the health care system. Within this context, we present a case study of the current status of long-term care policy for the elderly in one province of Ukraine, the eastern province of Zaporozhye, encompassing the industrial city of Zaporozhye on the Dnieper River. This case study particularly pays attention to current attempts to promote a social development process of long-term care services for the elderly. It examines recent developments with respect to public sector organizations and voluntary sector organizations that are trying to provide necessary services to the needy elderly. With respect to the voluntary sector, the paper pays particular attention to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) model of a largely externally funded NGO that provides comprehensive and integrated social supports, while emphasizing local empowerment and the use of volunteers, for the needy Jewish population in the province of Zaporozhye. Based on our findings, we make some proposals regarding the improvement of income and services policy with respect to the elderly in Zaporozhye and Ukraine.

The Contribution to Industrial Social Work of Jewish Support for Displaced Persons in the Aftermath of World War II

Abstract In the aftermath of World War II, American casework practices were introduced to social work efforts in Western Europe by social workers employed by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and by the U.S. Army Occupation force. The casework practices taught to European social workers at the Paul Baerwald School for the technical training of social workers in Paris operated by the JDC revolutionized European social work and inaugurated modern industrial social work in Europe. Work with displaced persons by Jewish social workers in North America also had profound impact on occupational social work in the USA and Canada.