Recovering a Voice: West European Jewry After the Holocaust [Hardcover]

A multi-national thematic approach allows Weinberg to demonstrate how Europe's postwar Jewish communities, aided by international Jewish organizations, utilized unprecedented means to meet unprecedented challenges.This multi-national study focuses on the efforts by the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to reconstruct their lives after World War II. These efforts have largely been ignored, perhaps because the emphasis on assisting survivors in displaced persons camps and on developing Israel as the center of Jewish life after the Holocaust diverted attention from the struggle by Jews in Western Europe to recover their voice and sense of purpose. The book sets the record straight, presenting the challenges that the Jews in the three communities faced, both in the national context and in the world Jewish arena, and examining how they dealt with them. The book begins by reviewing the actions taken by international Jewish agencies and local leaders to revive Jewish communities in the three countries materially and institutionally, remodeling them as efficient, self-sustaining, and assertive bodies that could meet new challenges. With the creation of the State of Israel, Jews who stayed in Western Europe had to defend their decision to do so while nevertheless showing public support for the new nation.There was also a felt need to respond quickly and effectively to any sign of anti-semitism.

In addition, tensions arose between Jews and non-Jews concerning wartime collaboration in deportations, and the need to memorialize Jewish victims of Nazism. The Cold War offered challenges of its own: the perceived need to exclude communist elements from communal affairs was countered by a resistance to pressures from American Jewish leaders to sever links with Jews in Eastern Europe. Yet, beneath the show of assertiveness, Jewish life was fragile, not only because of the physical depletion of the population and of its leadership, but because the Holocaust had shakelã…