Joint Distribution Committee Research Articles

“The Kirzhnits’s Plan.” A Project of Jewish Resettlement to Siberia during the Civil War Era

The memorandum “Siberia as a Center for Jewish Immigration” was written in 1919 at the request of F. Rosenblatt, the representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Siberia. The author of the document, Avrom Kirzhnits, was a well-known journalist, bibliographer, and historian of the labor movement. The memorandum provides a detailed historical survey of projects for the resettlement of Jews to Siberia from the beginning of the 19th century. It also presents a variety of socio-political polemics around the topic of Jewish migration from the Pale of Jewish Settlement to beyond the Urals, including those surrounding the “Brutskus plan” proposed in August 1915. An introductory essay to the document presents the biography of Avrom Kirzhnits and explains the historical context in which the document appeared. The subsequent fate of the “Kirzhnits plan” and its author demonstrate a certain continuity between the idea to create a “center for Jewish immigration” in Siberia and the later Soviet project for the establishment of Jewish autonomy in Birobidzhan.

Arrival in Shanghai: A Sanctuary for Jewish Refugees (1933-1941)

Between 1933 and 1941, approximately 30,000 Jewish refugees arrived on the coast of Shanghai. While some of them passed through to other countries for sanctuary, most of them stayed in Shanghai until the war ended. These refugees represented the Third Wave of Jewish migration into Shanghai. In the light of the Sino-Japanese war, the governing authorities in Shanghai tried to stem the influx of Jewish refugees. Despite this pressure, the Jewish refugees managed to not only enter Shanghai but quickly create thriving communities in the Tilanqiao area. This paper argues that they were able to do this because of extensive help provided by already established Jewish communities in Shanghai and overseas organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee. The support provided by these entities is often underplayed in the official historical reports of this time. Using documentary evidence and refugee memoirs, this paper will argue that in the absence of this help from the Jewish communities and overseas organizations, the Jewish refugees would not have been able to enter Shanghai, escape Nazi persecution and thrive in the way that they did.

A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas (review)

Reviewed by: A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas Kathy Peiss Elisabeth Gallas. A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. Translated by Alex Skinner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 416 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000252 A Mortuary of Books is a significant new study of the rescue and restitution of looted Jewish books in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Elisabeth Gallas builds on a rich and growing scholarship that explores the response of Allied policymakers, the American military government, and Jewish organizations to cultural devastation. A revised version of her 2013 book, translated from the German, A Mortuary of Books examines the Jewish groups that came together after the war to make a compelling legal and moral claim upon heirless looted books. At the same time, Gallas uncovers the profound meaning of these books for the Jewish intellectuals and scholars who worked tirelessly to save them. She begins with the establishment of the Offenbach Archival Depot, the key American military installation for the salvage of looted and displaced books, supervised by the army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section. Gallas focuses, however, on Jewish organizing and lobbying efforts in the United States, Great Britain, and Palestine, an effort that began during the war. Although the groups did not always see eye to eye, in the end they formed Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), which the US government recognized in 1949 as the legal successor agency to handle orphaned and unidentifiable Jewish books. In three years, they distributed nearly 500,000 volumes and between 8,000 and 10,000 ritual objects. Together the United States and Israel received the bulk of these works, with the remainder allotted to Great Britain and other countries with Jewish populations. Only a small number went to Germany and none to Eastern Europe. Gallas highlights the innovative legal arguments used by JCR and its predecessors. Following long-standing policy, the Allies recognized only nation-states in restitution cases; they had no precedent to follow in the case of European Jews, whose communities had been destroyed and property stolen in Germany and German-occupied countries. Jewish legal experts argued that the restoration of Jewish heritage and communal life could not occur within the existing national framework for restitution. They argued instead for the recognition of a transnational Jewish collectivity as a legal, political, and cultural entity. The struggle over Jewish books was a formative, if largely unrecognized, moment in the evolution of ideas about transitional and restorative justice. An unusual coalition of Jewish scholars and intellectuals led this effort, which helps explain why there was such intense, even obsessive attention to books at a time of dire need among surviving European Jews. They included Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt, as leaders of the JCR; Gershom Scholem, who collected for the Hebrew University and collaborated with Arendt; and Lucy Dawidowicz, representing the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and laboring to identify YIVO books at Offenbach. Gallas eloquently [End Page 460] traces how their deep belief in the need to rescue Jewish cultural heritage shaped their immediate postwar aims and long-term intellectual work. The rescuers perceived books not only in material but also symbolic terms. Animating books with human qualities, they likened looted volumes to the murder of European Jews. "Saving these books," Rabbi Herbert Friedman of the United Jewish Appeal observed, "amounted to saving the People of the Book" (56). The books simultaneously memorialized the Jewish past and served as a spiritual and cultural foundation for the living. They represented historical continuity and rupture, not only as a matter of time, but also place. This is apparent in the shifting meaning of the term "reconstruction," which initially referred to the restoration of European Jewish culture, but by 1946 signified a Zionist and diasporic vision of the Jewish future. Yet the transnational Jewish collectivity was a construction, held together despite tensions over who should receive the books. JCR's American leaders believed US institutions should be a major beneficiary, given the nation's large Jewish population and the military's role in preserving them. Scholem and Judah L...

Rebuilding Jewish Communities after the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Relief Programme in Postwar Greece

In the postwar chaos of the Greek Civil War, the Greek state was practically absent in the effort to rebuild the country’s Jewish communities and provide for their particular, post-Holocaust needs. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee came to fill this gap. The JDC organised and handled the assistance from American Jews to their coreligionists in Greece, both at the level of distributing humanitarian aid and of reconstituting community life. The JDC played a significant role in reshaping the communal life of postwar Greek Jewry along American lines. This article is mostly focused on the immediate postwar years, when JDC officials sought to establish a network to help Greek Jews cover their most immediate and elementary needs.

Being Leftist and Jewish in Greece during the Civil War and its Aftermath: Constraints and Choices

After the end of the Second World War, and as a result of the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946–1949), former resistance members went through a period of generalised, severe persecution. In this context, Jews who had survived the Shoah by taking part in the resistance in some way or by going into hiding under the protection of the resistance forces had to denounce their former comrades or communist rescuers. How did Greek Jews who had been influenced by leftist ideology respond to the politics of the civil war and its aftermath? How were their responses affected by the attitudes of the Greek state, Jewish community and State of Israel towards them? Following the traces left mainly in a) the archives of the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Jewish communities of Athens and Salonica, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; b) the Greek Jewish press of the period; c) personal accounts, essays and literature, I will attempt to explore the multiplicity of responses of leftist Greek Jews to the political and personal dilemmas of the post-Shoah period. I argue that despite different postwar (and prewar) political attitudes and experiences, leftist Greek Jews expressed two main tendencies: a tight relationship with the country’s Jewish communities and, at the same time, a strong tendency to leave for other countries, mainly Israel.

As the Old Homeland Unravels: Hungarian-American Jews’ Reactions to the White Terror in Hungary, 1919–24

In his office on 1 Union Square West in New York City, Samuel Buchler, president of the Federation of Hungarian Jews in America, sat at his desk and looked at the trees turning red, yellow, and brown in the park below the window. It was September 1924, and Buchler had just read the news from Hungary. After years of anti-Jewish violence—the white terror, passively condoned by the postwar regime—the Hungarian government had decided to honor Felix M. Warburg, president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or Joint), with a Red Cross Decoration. The honor came directly from Admiral Miklós Horthy, regent of Hungary, who wanted to acknowledge the role the JDC had played in “mitigating misery in Hungary.” It was clear that the JDC had aided millions of Jewish war victims across the devastated landscapes of East Central Europe, including Hungary. But Buchler was skeptical. Since its founding in 1916, the Federation of Hungarian Jews had tried to ameliorate the fate of Hungarian Jews across the ocean, who in quick succession had felt the tremors of war, terror, revolution, social exclusion, and institutional antisemitism. It was ironic that the government Buchler held responsible for much of the anti-Jewish violence and agitation was now hoping to be on good terms with the most famous Jew in the realm of international humanitarianism. For Buchler and the Federation of Hungarian Jews, this was cause for concern.

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

The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland

This article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland by focusing on the establishment and activity of the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szkola Pielegniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie). Founded in 1923 and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the school’s staff believed that they could shape the attitudes and behaviors of Polish Jewish women and use them as a conduit to advance their vision for a Polish state committed to the protection of Jews and their equality before the law. Drawing upon the voices of JDC officials, local Jewish health activists, Polish government officials, and young Jewish women in the Second Polish Republic, the article highlights the multiple and frequently conflicting ways in which gender figured in their political imagination. It also sheds light on the efforts of American Jewish humanitarian activists and Polish Jewish women alike—much like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America—to reframe traditional gendered expectations for women in order to expand their range of professional choices and the roles they could play in public life. The final section of this article recounts the school’s decline and compares its fate to a Jewish nursing school initiative in the city of Vilna. In doing so, it assesses the limits of the Joint Distribution Committee’s interethnic bridge-building initiatives in interwar Poland.

Motta, Giuseppe The Great War against Eastern European Jewry, 1914–1920 (review)

REVIEWS 581 war did not have sufficiently deep roots to sustain Russia through the turmoil of revolutions and a civil war that drove wedges deep into Russian society. The Soviet regime largely ignored the direct experience of the First World War, subsuming it into the October Revolution, and failing to construct memorials to the soldiers who had died fighting for Russia. As Stockdale suggests, the new regime used some of the generic qualities identified during the war — love of the motherland and the like — in its own construction of a Soviet identity but the war itself, however, remained as a ghostly presence hidden behind Bolshevik ideas of patriotism and citizenship. School of History Peter Waldron University of East Anglia Motta, Giuseppe. The Great War against Eastern European Jewry, 1914–1920. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017. 270 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. £61.99. Giuseppe Motta’s book examines the dynamics and consequences of violence inflicted on the Jews of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires during and after the Great War. Based largely on secondary sources and the documents of the Joint Distribution Committee, it focuses on the pitiful situation of Russian and Polish Jews in wartime and during the revolutionary turmoil, which lasted until the early 1920s. Throughout this turbulent period, Jewish communities were targeted by the belligerent armies and insurgent bands, in part due to traditional religious and socio-economic antagonisms, but also on account of an alleged worldwide ‘Judeo-communist’ conspiracy. As a result, robberies, expulsions and pogroms claimed thousands of victims, turning tens of thousands of Jews into refugees and unwanted migrants. The book’s strengths lie in its rich historiographic foundation and abundance in factual details. Well-written and free of academic jargon, it should inspire interest not only amongst scholars, but also general readers. The author methodically describes the evolution of anti-Jewish prejudices from the nineteenth century to the deportations by the Russian army in World War One, when the existing negative stereotypes of Jews were reinforced by a ‘spyfever ’, which permeated all war-zones. Motta also shows that in the wake of the state-collapse in Russia and Austro-Hungary in 1917–18, anti-Jewish violence became much more widespread and extreme, often acquiring the form of punitive expeditions (p. 81). Nor did the end of the Russian civil wars bring relief to the beleaguered Jews, as various insurgencies continued to claim their victims (p. 167). SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 582 The situation of Russian and Ukrainian Jews in 1914–20 has been wellcharted , but the book’s most original elements are its detailed descriptions of the activities of the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Russian Jewish Aid Society to the Victims of War (EVOPO), which attempted to alleviate the plight of Jews by sending funds and acting through diplomatic channels (pp. 41, 57), and the travails of Jewish refugees in the Far East. TheGreatWarconstitutesagoodoverviewofoneofthemosttragicperiodsin Jewish history, but its main flaw is its lack of any sort of conceptual framework (possibly because its main target is a general audience). Consequently, all the chapterstelltheirownparticularstory,whichcompelsthereadertosurmisethe correlations between them and the author’s principal objectives. Accordingly, without some form of analytical apparatus, the book’s title appears misleading, for its geographic scope in fact covers the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire and Galicia and Bukovina within Austro-Hungary. The reader is thus left to guess, while other important territories of East European Jewry such as Hungary, Romania or western Poland are not covered. Also, since World War One witnessed the large-scale persecution of non-Jewish ethno-cultural or national groups — such as the Germans in Russia, the Rusyns in AustroHungary and the Armenians in Turkey — the book would have benefited from placing the plight of Jews in a broader historical context, briefly highlighting the commonalities and differences of these cases. Numerous inconsistencies in name-and-locality spelling demonstrate the difficulties of dealing with regions with frequently changing borders. The author disregards any convention (perhaps an explanation or a chart of alternative names would have been helpful), using Polish, Russian, English and Ukrainian spellings randomly — for example, Chernihiv in Ukrainian, but Ekaterinoslav in Russian, although both places are located...

The Response of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to the Crisis of Soviet Jewish Émigré Dropouts (Noshrim) in the 1970s

The JDC is an American Jewish organization that assists overseas Jewish communities in distress. It is responsible to “American Jewry” and those organizations that fund it. Bauer (1974, 19) argued that the JDC has been guided by its founding “pledge of impartiality – it steers clear of political involvements” and takes pride in being “probably the only really non-partisan organization in Jewish life.” This paper examines the role of the JDC in caring for Soviet émigrés who left on visas for Israel but chose to resettle elsewhere. They were known as “dropouts” (Noshrim in Hebrew). It also deals with the JDC policy toward recently settled Russian Jews who left Israel to resettle elsewhere. In its work with Soviet Jewish emigres did the JDC serve the interests of the Israeli government, its donors and or the emigres? Did the JDC abide by its pledge of impartiality? Did the JDC try to force them to resettle in Israel against their wishes? The paper focuses on the spring of 1976 when the number of dropouts outnumbered those resettling in Israel. This led to a joint committee of Israelis and American Jews to coordinate a response. The ‘freedom of choice’ debate ensued; should Soviet Jews resettle in Israel or have the freedom to choose where to resettle? The findings here are based on archival records in the JDC, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the CJF (Jewish federations) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The author also conducted interviews and reviewed secondary sources. The paper should contribute to a better understanding of the JDC and its past ties to Israel and the American Jewish community.

The Survival of Yidishkeyt : The Impact of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on Jewish Education in Poland, 1945–1989

The Survival of <i>Yidishkeyt</i> : <i>The Impact of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on Jewish Education in Poland, 1945–1989</i>

Rebecca Bergman: An International Nurse Leader (1919-2015)

Glazer, Ehrenfeld and Flanagan write to introduce a renowned nurse leader in Israel, Rebecca (Becky) Bergman, relatively unknown to nurses in the United States and elsewhere. Becky made a lasting impact on the nursing profession and her story will undoubtedly inspire nurses at any and every stage of their professional career. Her journey as a nurse leader demonstrates leadership, risk-taking and creativity, effective communication, inspiration and a clear vision to change the trajectory of the nursing profession in Israel and around the world. As the first nurse to be awarded the Israel prize (the nation’s highest honor), she broke down international, interdisciplinary and interprofessional barriers by accomplishing several feats including: becoming a World Health Organization (WHO) Consultant, Vice President for the International Council of Nurses (ICN), Chief Nurse for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, establishing Israel’s first academic nursing program and supervising more than 5,000 beds at four hospitals.

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.

Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Leo Jung by Maxine Jacobson

Reviewed by: Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Leo Jung by Maxine Jacobson Adam S. Ferziger (bio) Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Leo Jung. By Maxine Jacobson. Brighton, MA., Academic Studies Press, 2016. x + 250 pp. Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung was among the most respected and influential figures in the twentieth-century American Orthodox rabbinate. An alumnus of the Rabbiner Seminar in Berlin and numerous European universities, he served for over sixty years at Manhattan's prestigious The Jewish Center, the pioneering Orthodox "shul with a pool" whose founding rabbi was Mordecai M. Kaplan. He was a key player in the nascent Yeshiva College (today Yeshiva University, YU), the Orthodox Union (OU) which transformed American kashrut supervision, the Rabbinical Council of America, and the non-sectarian Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), among others. He was also a prolific author and editor who produced some of the first works of Orthodox historiography, ritual instruction, and popular religious thought in the English language, and his presentations on contemporary religion and ethics were featured on regular national radio broadcasts. One of his most eminent devotees was the author Herman Wouk, whose This is My God (1959) was penned under Jung's mentorship. Maxine Jacobson combed the treasure trove of primary materials stored in the Jung Collection at the Yeshiva University Archives as well as his many publications, and conducted multiple interviews with those who knew him. The result is a copiously documented historical work that places Jung's literary and public activities as a framework for [End Page 316] presenting the evolution of Orthodoxy from a "threatened entity" to a vibrant modern Jewish religious trend that could appeal to second and third generation American Jews (1). The introduction seeks to define "Modern Orthodoxy," portraying the synthesis of loyalty to traditional rabbinic interpretation, openness to general knowledge, and identification with American social and political norms that was emblematic of this stream, including what it drew from its nineteenth century European predecessors such as Samson Raphael Hirsch and Esriel Hildesheimer, along with its distinctive qualities. For Jung, "Orthodox Judaism" was to be "part of the cosmopolitan society and modern culture," and his aim was to make it "appealing to the American psyche" and "acceptable to Jews 'outside the ghetto'" (25). The core of the volume is four chapters that address the events of each distinct decade in Jung's career up through the end of the 1950s, when he was appointed Rabbi Emeritus. From the 1920s, Jung and his cohorts began the process of differentiating their brand of Judaism from the "old school" traditionalists affiliated with the Agudath Harabbonim on the one hand, and the burgeoning Conservative movement predicated on Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) graduates and United Synagogue member congregations on the other. In both cases, only during the 1950s did the boundaries become fully discernible. Before that time, JTS was also perceived by many as a "modern Orthodox" institution whose graduates were fit to serve in Orthodox synagogues, so much so that serious merger negotiations were held between Yeshiva and JTS during the late 1920s. Jung was personally involved in the discussions. Three themes that were already central to Jung's efforts in the 1920s remained at the foundation of his activities throughout his career: the necessity of a decorous and dignified prayer service that would attend to the aesthetic of Americanizing Jews; his belief that "the material successes of Jews in America come at the expense of moral and spiritual failure;" and the importance of demonstrating the rationale behind traditional Jewish practices such as kashrut and family purity laws (57). An area of Jewish adjudication that emphasized his commitment to ethical imperatives was the agunah, the "anchored" wife who was legally prevented from remarrying. Jung supported a solution developed in the 1950s by Eliezer Berkovits, but it did not receive the imprimatur of most Orthodox authorities. For Jung the halakhah was foundational to Judaism, but most of his congregants were "nonobservant Orthodox" and he did not focus his preaching on encouraging more scrupulous religious conduct. According to Jacobson, Jung's version of Modern Orthodoxy was replaced during the 1960s by a more theological and legally-oriented worldview that [End...

President Truman and the Jewish DPs, 1945–46: The Untold Story

President Truman and the Jewish DPs, 1945–46: The Untold Story Mel Schiff (bio) Accounts of how the administration of President Harry S. Truman treated Jewish displaced persons (DPs) at the close of World War II allude to “operational support” of the clandestine Jewish exodus from Europe to British Mandate Palestine. While the recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 is a well-known legacy of Truman’s, did he participate in the formation years of modern Israel prior to that time? And, particularly, did he support what became known as the 20th-century Jewish exodus from Europe to British Mandate Palestine? If so, why has this not been part of the American history dialogue of the post-World War II and Holocaust eras? For decades, Americans have heard their presidents, and even presidential candidates, support the State of Israel with ubiquitous phrases such as calling Israel “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “America’s ally” and noting that Israel’s population has turned deserts into farmland and developed high tech industries. Regardless of international and domestic setbacks, the expected phrases pour forth consistently from the major political parties. Is this phenomenon simply a quest for political advantage, or is there a historic, raison d’etre underlying the American connection to Israel? When he was a presidential candidate in 1960, John F. Kennedy stated that “Israel was not created in order for it to disappear—Israel will endure and flourish.”1 Twenty-two years later, President Ronald Reagan remarked, “Back in 1948, when Israel was founded, pundits claimed the new country could never survive.”2 Rather than refer to Truman’s “recognition of the State of Israel in 1948,” which is usually the touchstone of American support for Israel, they utilized the words “created” and “founded,” which naturally preceded Truman’s historic recognition. Truman’s behind-the-scene role is still not yet part of the American recollection of mid-20th-century history because Truman wanted it to be [End Page 327] kept secret for many years, as this paper notes, and all of the participating entities, governmental and civilian, cooperated in that effort. Soon after Truman became president, his humanitarian concern for the people who had suffered most under the Nazi regime led him to become not only a primary motivator and facilitator in the major rehabilitation programs for Jewish displaced persons, but also, most significantly, a moving force in the clandestine exodus of thousands of Jews from Europe to British Mandate Palestine during several years prior to 1948. Search and Uncover: “The Untold Story” Revealed Truman’s actions regarding the Jewish DPs has remained a truly untold story, primarily because of a cryptic statement that appears in both of Truman’s memoirs: “For reasons of national security and out of consideration for some people still alive, I have omitted certain material. Some of this material cannot be made available for many years, perhaps for many generations.”3 Documents now available shed light on Truman’s actions and their rationale. The implementation of Truman’s policy supported Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the American Zone of Austria, in cooperating with refugee aid organizations. Those organizations included the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint, or the JDC); the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); and agents of the clandestine Mossad LeAliyah Bet, defined as “the Committee for Illegal Immigration.”4 While all participated to improve the lives of thousands of Jewish DPs encamped in Austria’s American Zone, they also partnered with the United States in underground operations to facilitate the transit of Jews through Austria in their quest to reach British Palestine. [End Page 328] The Jewish Non-repatriables Millions of refugees were spread throughout Europe when, on May 5, 1945, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower directed all DPs to remain in place and await orders.5 The U.S. military then commenced a massive program to repatriate those who wished to return to their native countries, if those nations approved. Eisenhower had been newly designated the Combined Displaced Persons Executive in the wake of the July 14, 1945 termination of the Supreme Headquarters American Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). He realized by September of that...

Signposts: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society and World War I

Signposts: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society and World War I Hasia R. Diner (bio) Max J. Kohler and Simon Wolf, “Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States: American Contributions Toward their Removal, With Particular Reference to the Congress of Berlin,” 24 (January 1, 1916), pp. 1–153. Max J. Kohler, “Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna (1814–1815) and the Aix-La-Chapelle (1818)” 26 (January 1, 1918), pp. 33–125. World War I, the plight of the Jews caught in the conflict’s cross-fire, and the intervention of America and its Jews to ameliorate their condition served as the backdrop for Max J. Kohler’s two articles, which appeared in the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society during the middle years of the 1910s. The first of these empirically dense and deeply researched pieces came out in January 1916, as the United States staunchly proclaimed its neutrality, electing a president later that year who would make staying out of the war a key campaign promise. The second of Kohler’s pieces, also like the first, long, meticulous, and accompanied by primary sources, appeared a half year after Woodrow Wilson and the United States Congress brought the nation into the war. Wilson justified that dramatic about-face to humanitarianism and to a broad, nearly messianic vision of the world to emerge from the bloody protracted conflict, to be based on the protection of minorities, enduring peace, and global reconciliation. The articles also reflected a specific American and American Jewish context. Readers of the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, as well as the smaller number who had heard these papers delivered orally at the Society’s annual meetings, would have known that as early as 1914, just months after the hostilities broke out, American Jews had geared into action to do what they could for those millions of Jews impacted by the war. Their involvement began almost immediately after the assassination in Sarajevo and the explosion of hostilities on a global scale. In August of that year Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire witnessed the plight of the Jews of Palestine who, cut off from the rest of the world because of the war, faced starvation. Morgenthau dispatched a telegram to banker-philanthropist [End Page 209] Jacob Schiff in New York on August 31, 1914, bringing to his attention their wretched conditions. This telegram catalyzed the formation of several American Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Relief Committee, the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War, and the People’s Relief Committee, which banded together later that year to form the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known in short as the Joint. By 1915 the Joint, as well as other American Jewish organizations and the Jewish press, both English and Yiddish, publicized to the American Jewish public the vast suffering of Jews and the brutal dislocation of Jewish life in the Czarist Empire. For much of the period of time when Kohler and his co-writer Simon Wolf researched and wrote these two articles, which together ran up to more than 250 pages including hefty appendices of primary documents, the United States, because of its non-belligerent status and its geographic isolation suffered none of the disruption caused by the war. Even after America’s declaration of war and its soldiers went “over there,” the Atlantic provided Americans with a safe space, removed from the ravages of the conflict. As such the Jews of the United States constituted the only sizable Jewish population in the world living in a land not marred by trenches, not in the path of armies on the move, not in danger of invasion. Even England endured, from 1915 on, aerial bombing. The small Jewish population centers in South Africa, Australia, and the various countries of South and Central America had little clout and more importantly, lived in nations with no particular influence in the outcome of world events. This meant that the Jews of the United States experienced the war in profound safety, a matter which heightened their sense of responsibility for those Jews who faced grave, indeed life threatening hardship. This...

Reflections through a Soviet Window

This paper probes the crossroads between the realities of life and the ambitions of the early Soviet regime in one corner of its vast countryside. As a test case, I explore the meeting of organized agrarianization of Jews from the former Pale of Settlement with the mechanisms of Soviet power in the geographical and national peripheries of what was seen until recently as a monolithic, centralized state. Barring the last four years before Operation Barbarossa, a non-governmental, non-denominational American-Jewish philanthropy (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee [Joint or Agro-Joint]) funded and administered much of this resettlement project in southern Ukraine and Crimea. As shall be seen, the arrival of an effective foreign organization not only shaped the lives of its client-colonists, but the very character of Soviet rural authority through the emergence of hybrid models of governance in the countryside.

On the Jewish Black-Market in Germany, April 1950

When I came to Germany in the fall of 1948 what I knew of the so-called D.P. camps was what I had learned from the Jewish newspapers and from the publicity of the United Jewish Appeal. I thought of their inmates more or less the way I had seen them represented on posters: emaciated little girls stretching their bony arms through barbed wire, men walking around in torn rags, all of them depending for their very physical existence on the loaves of bread which American Jews were sending them through the American Joint Distribution Committee. I am a Jew and a rabbi, and as such I think that I had kept up with Jewish developments in Europe as much as the next man and as the information which was given us in America made possible. On the second day I spent in Germany I drove in company with one of the chief leaders of Jewry in the British zone of occupation to the notorious former concentration camp and present D.P. camp Bergen-Belsen. Under the Nazis this had been among the very worst of murderous institutions, and even after its liberation by British troops in 1945 many thousands of its former inmates had still died due to their fatally weakened state of health and mind which had just been able to bear with them through their trial but completely failed when it was over.

“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.

Waging relief: the politics and logistics of American Jewish war relief in Europe and the Near East (1914–1918)

This article examines the work of private American Jewish associations during the First World War. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in particular created complex, dynamic international networks in order to find information about suffering Jews on both sides of the Eastern Front and in Palestine and to channel funds for their relief during the war. It forged alliances with officials in the US State Department, foreign governments, Jewish organizations operating in the war zones, and relied on familial banking ties and their own commissioners who travelled throughout the war-ravaged regions to render humanitarian assistance. This article demonstrates the complexity of maintaining these aid networks and also the challenges American Jewish relief organizations encountered while attempting to maintain multi-governmental sanction for their aid services in the volatile sphere of wartime diplomacy.