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Group portrait of Jewish DPs in Deggendorf, Germany, who pose beneath a Zionist banner which reads “Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] for the Nation Israel”, in Hebrew and English.
This unique moment in history created an opportunity for the Jews in Europe and across the world to demand some sort of reparation from the international community. Avinoam J. Patt is a leading Jewish historian and has wrote extensively on the Jewish experience in the Postwar era. In one of his books, “We Are Here”: New Approach to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, he discusses how, following the war, European Jews started coming together in communities to prepare for the new agrarian way of life that they expected to lead in a nation that they would someday call their own (99). To me, this shows that the Zionists movements of the period were culminating into a force that could act on the rhetoric they had been producing for decades. For perhaps the first time, the Jews as a population could create a body of themselves cohesive enough to exert pressure on the international community; this was certainly influenced by the “shaping [of] a collective national identity among Jewish DPs” that didn’t necessarily exist prior to the war (Patt, 101).
Cohen, a leading historian on the Postwar era and author of the book In War’s Wake, agrees in large part with Patt’s estimation of the “Jewish ethnological nationality” that was produced during and after the war (129). For example, it stands to reason that once a group which once identified as both German and Jewish was forced to relinquish their German identity, they would shun that former part of their identity linked to a nation that would not claim them and, indeed, brutalized them. This shift in the identity of Jews across the world as (possibly) breaking their ties with their nation of residence and certainly reaffirming their ties to their Jewish heritage had an undeniable affect on the level of support for the formation of Israel.
There is also something unique about the Jewish DP population following the war: they were predominantly young people (Patt, 101). In thinking about DPs after WWII, I tend to think in terms of families whose homes were destroyed but who, for the most part, had living relatives and members of their community to turn to for help. In the case of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the fact that they were mostly children and young adults puts their plight in a very different context because it means that the majority of them were orphaned and left to fend for themselves. Still, they were often seen as the last hope of preserving the Jewish people and one Jewish leader, Samuel Gringauz, said, “[these young people] are the agents of our revenge which aught to be a proud assertion to continue life. You must readily show the world and all our enemies that despite everything we are here to stay” (Part, 108).
This combined hope for the creation of the state of Israel and the belief in the Jewish youth is what led me to chose the photograph at the beginning of my post. This group of smiling young adults grouped under a banner proclaiming the need for the Jewish state gets precisely to the heart of the issue. The Jewish people who survived the Holocaust wanted nothing more than to be able to come together as one and rebuild their people and they saw Israel as a means to this end.
Sources:
Photo- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1108782
For more on Patt and the discussion of the formation of Israel from the Jewish perspective: http://www.hartford.edu/a_and_s/greenberg/faculty/patt.aspx
For more on Cohen and his insight into the Postwar world see his book In War’s Wake
I also recommend Hannah Arendt and her work, “We Refugees,” on her experience as a Jewish refugee and the identity of the Jewish collective. It can be found here: https://www-leland.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/files/pdf/hannah_arendt_we_refugees.pdf
I think this is a very well written blog. Do you think that the formation of Israel would have been as successful had the demographics of post war Jewish Europe not been so young. How would this have affected the development of Israel?
You make a great point about how the articles emphasize the new Jewish nationality that was made following the war. I agree that for the German Jews, the loss of their German identity was huge shock and changed their lives dramatically. It makes perfect sense that they would see the creation of Israel as a great solution for their problems.
Was there a different side or opinion to this story? Were older Jews as on board with the creation of Israel as much as the younger Jews? We know that many Muslim and Arabic countries protested the creation of Israel. I think it would have been interesting to see how Jews confronted other groups and their own people on how much Israel meant to them.