Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945-1955

Seán Hand, Steven T. Katz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479869145
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the Holocaust, little work has focused on what happened to Europe’s Jewish communities after the war ended. And unlike many other European nations in which the majority of the Jewish population perished, France had a significant post‑war Jewish community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 offers new insight on key aspects of French Jewish life in the decades following the end of World War II.

How Jews had been treated during the war continued to influence both Jewish and non-Jewish society in the post-war years. The volume examines the ways in which moral and political issues of responsibility combined with the urgent problems and practicalities of restoration, and it illustrates how national imperatives, international dynamics, and a changed self-perception all profoundly helped to shape the fortunes of postwar French Judaism.Comprehensive and informed, this volume offers a rich variety of perspectives on Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.

With contributions from leading scholars, including Edward Kaplan, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Jay Winter, the book establishes multiple connections between such different areas of concern as the running of orphanages, the establishment of new social and political organisations, the restoration of teaching and religious facilities, and the development of intellectual responses to the Holocaust. Comprehensive and informed, this volume will be invaluable to readers working in Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.

1

The Revival of French Jewry in Post-Holocaust France

Challenges and Opportunities

David Weinberg

In February 1945, six months after the liberation of Paris, a Jewish writer in the French capital described the situation of his fellow Jewish survivors: “We are like the inhabitants of a city that has been devastated by an earthquake; we survey the ruins and do what comes naturally; we utilize that which is still usable in order to organize emergency relief.”¹ The comparison of the condition of French Jewry in the immediate postwar period with the aftermath of a natural disaster seemed a particularly apt one, at least in the first months after liberation. The community had lost nearly one-third of its prewar population of 300,000, including 20,000 children, to the ravages of the Final Solution. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France during the war, the overwhelming majority were east European Jews, and only about 3,500 returned to their homes. The largest and most important French Jewish settlement, that in Paris, which before the war had been a dynamic and at times volatile mixture of over 200,000 native Frenchmen and east European immigrants, was seriously weakened by the loss of approximately 70,000 members. Throughout the country, Jews agonized over the disappearance of hundreds of small communities and the reduction of many others to a mere handful of families.

Included among the murdered thousands was the cream of French Jewry’s prewar religious and lay leadership. Of the sixty rabbis who in 1939 were members of the Consistoire central—Judaism’s major religious body in France—twenty-three were deported to death camps and two were shot. Influential lay leaders such as Raoul-Raymond Lambert, a central figure in Jewish affairs during the war and a former editor of L’Univers israélite, the quasi-official newspaper of prewar French Jewry; Jacques Helbronner, president of the Consistoire central; and Léonce Bernheim, a socialist activist and noted prewar Zionist spokesman, met their deaths during the Nazi occupation. Other community leaders had fled from Nazism and were never to return to France. In addition, many committed young men and women who had served in Jewish resistance groups and who had been expected to assume leadership roles in the community after the war concluded that there was little future for Jews in France and chose to immigrate to Palestine.

And yet, compared with other European Jewish communities, the situation of French Jewry after liberation was far from hopeless. French Jews were in a unique position: they had experienced the Holocaust, but thanks in large part to being protected by their fellow citizens, they survived in large enough numbers to reassert themselves after the war. It is estimated that there were 180,000 Jews in France in 1946—160,000 residents and 20,000 refugees from central and eastern Europe. The continuous influx of refugees fleeing displaced persons camps—there were over 35,000 in the first three years after the war—meant that France would soon become the second most populous Jewish community outside of the Soviet Union on the European continent and following subsequent emigration from the Soviet Union would become the largest European community.

It was not only the size of the French community that made it so central in postwar European Jewish life. In ways that may have not been immediately apparent in the first few years after 1945, the active compliance of the wartime Vichy regime in the persecution of its Jewish citizens contributed to the restructuring of the community by breaking the historical reliance of French Jewish organizations on the state.² For the first time since the Napoleonic era and the creation of the quasi-governmental Consistoire, the Jews of France had an opportunity to reshape their institutions and policies in order to create a self-sustaining and independent community. At the same time, the fact that Jews had been active in the anti-Nazi resistance reinforced the community’s belief that it had earned a rightful place in postwar national reconstruction. Sharing in the excitement and enthusiasm generated by the creation of the Fourth Republic, French Jewry looked hopefully to the future.³

Not surprisingly, therefore, French Jewish organizations that arose out of the Resistance, such as the Conseil représentatif des israélites de France (Representative Council of Jews of France, or CRIF), were quick to claim leading roles in European Jewish affairs. These claims were strongly supported by international organizations as well as by local activists on the Continent who sought to replicate policies and activities initiated by postwar French Jewish leaders in their own communities.⁴ Nor was it coincidental that the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency, and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) established their European offices in Paris after the war. The French capital also hosted major conferences of Zionists, left-wing Jewish movements, and Jewish relief agencies in the postwar period.

Before any plans for reconstruction could be implemented, however, the French community had to address the immediate material needs of survivors. While local philanthropic agencies struggled to provide assistance to the tens of thousands of returnees from camps and those emerging from hiding, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)—or “the Joint,” as it was known in Europe—assumed the major financial burden. In 1944, the Joint spent more than $1.5 million in France on relief. A year later, the figure had increased to nearly $2 million. By 1947 it stood at nearly $6 million, after which it slowly declined.

The impact of the Joint and other international agencies on the lives of the Jews of France would go far beyond the provision of food, shelter, and clothing. As international Jewish agencies gradually realized that the overwhelming majority of survivors in France were intent on reconstructing their lives in their former homeland rather than on migrating to Palestine or elsewhere, they took a keen interest in reshaping the nature and purpose of communal life. In their view, the challenges confronting the Jews in France and in western Europe in general after 1945 demanded innovative responses and broad global and regional strategies that were beyond the capabilities of the local philanthropic and religious organizations that had survived the war. In particular, the lingering social and economic problems brought about by the Holocaust meant that traditional community policies and procedures, which had been based on notions of ethnically and socioeconomically constructed polities, loyalty to specific organizations, and philanthropy, were gradually losing their relevance.⁵

Of the many external Jewish agencies that played a role in aiding in the reconstruction of the French Jewish community after 1945, three stand out. Originally established in 1914 to assist the yishuv or Jewish settlement in Palestine, the JDC was primarily responsible for material aid to European survivors of the Holocaust and for their organized exodus to Israel. As it became increasingly clear that most French Jews had no intention of leaving, the Joint assisted in creating a self-sustaining community in France by transforming the nature of communal fund-raising and the delivery of social services. Beginning in the 1950s, the relief agency also worked closely with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany distributing reparations money to assist in the religious, educational, and cultural revival of the Jews in France and other communities and to aid individual survivors. Less visible was the AJC, which was mainly concerned with the defense of French Jewry’s legal and political rights and with the struggle against anti-Semitism. Supported largely by wealthier and more assimilated Jews in the United States, the AJC generally opposed migration to Palestine and encouraged Jews in France and other western European countries to integrate into their own societies. Strongly influenced by Zionist ideology and committed to the democratization of Jewish life, the WJC sought to reintroduce European Jewry into the world Jewish polity. In contrast to the Joint and the AJC, which generally engaged in “quiet diplomacy” in their dealings with government leaders, the WJC insisted that overt political action be an integral part of the activity of French Jewry.⁶ In attempting to reinforce notions of Jewish peoplehood and national consciousness among Jews throughout the globe, the WJC also took an active role in assisting French Jews in expanding their educational and cultural programming.

Israeli institutions such as the Jewish Agency also had a visible presence in the community after 1945, most notably in expediting the migration of both native-born Jews and refugees to Palestine and later in the development of financial and political support for Israel. However, with the exception of cultural and educational work, and in particular the exporting of Israeli-trained educators and the promotion of Zionist ideas, these groups took little interest in the reconstitution of French Jewish communal life.⁷

The involvement of American and international Jewish organizations in the reconstruction of French Jewry—and the relatively fluid and open postwar environment that seemed to favor dramatic changes in communal structure—would lead to the creation of four new types of local institutions: a central fund-raising organization that ran coordinated campaigns and that was responsible for the maintenance of communal activities and for the financial support of the State of Israel; social service agencies administered by skilled professionals that provided basic and long-range social, economic, and psychological services for an increasingly diverse community; a federated political organization that defended Jewish interests before government authorities and voiced communal concerns in the public arena; and broad-based cultural and educational organizations that enabled adults and children who had been isolated from Jewish life during the war to reconnect with their heritage.⁸ In addition, the Joint introduced long-range planning and professionalism into communal procedures and administration. Both innovations were meant to replace ad hoc decision making and the reliance upon volunteers drawn from the community’s elite to deal with immediate needs. The reconfiguration of at least certain aspects of communal life was already evident by the early 1950s as the community stabilized and American and British Jewish relief organizations increasingly diverted their funds and attention to the new Jewish state.

In the immediate postwar period, the fact that French Jews remained dependent upon world and American organizations for assistance and advice meant that decisions over their fate were often made in boardrooms in New York rather than in Paris. Yet the relationship between foreign Jewish agencies and French Jews in the period directly after 1945 was hardly one of munificent and sage donors and advisors on the one hand, and needy and passive recipients on the other. From the inception of their relief campaigns, the JDC and other international Jewish organizations encouraged limited initiatives on the part of the French community itself, if only because they recognized that they could not sustain financial and administrative support indefinitely. At the same time, despite their weakened condition in the immediate postwar period, Jews in France refused to play the role of the “joyous pauper.” Though grateful for the aid they received, communal leaders of established organizations resented the efforts by outside agencies to tread on their traditional charitable and social welfare activities. For their part, young Jewish activists in France were angered by the tendency of external organizations to take credit for innovative programs and procedures that had actually originated within local communities either before or shortly after the war. They also were frustrated by the failure of the Joint and the World Jewish Congress to give them representation on committees and agencies that provided financial and other assistance to European Jewry. And old and new leadership alike were deeply offended by the occasional patronizing and condescending attitudes expressed toward survivors by world Jewish leaders and their local representatives. European Jews were more than merely victims of Nazi oppression, French communal leaders and intellectuals contended; in contrast to the “upstart” and unsophisticated American Jewish community, the Jews of Europe and of France in particular were heirs to a rich and vital heritage spanning hundreds of years. In the immediate postwar period, such attitudes could be dismissed as a defensive posture that betrayed a lack of self-confidence. Yet the reaction was not without significance for the future revival of French Jewry. In ways that neither Americans nor Europeans fully understood at the time, the intervention of outside forces in French Jewish life after 1945 would fuel an emerging self-consciousness and assertiveness.

The recovery of French Jewry after 1945 can be seen most clearly in its response to a series of distinct challenges that can only be briefly examined in this short chapter. The first and most daunting challenge was that of relief and rehabilitation. International organizations and French Jewish leaders understood that they would have to significantly restructure the community in order to ensure its survival. The efforts to meet immediate needs were largely completed by the end of the 1940s. Some issues—such as the recovery of spoliated property, assets, and businesses; the return of children hidden in non-Jewish homes; the tracing of lost relatives; and demands for compensation for acts of brutality and murder committed by the Vichy government—were met with tepid responses from government officials during the first decade after the war. The transformation of communal institutions and polices, which was far more successful, took far longer, and its history extends well beyond the period being examined here. In the first two decades after the war, local leadership often sharply resisted the demands made by external agencies that they create a professional bureaucracy and initiate coordinated and centralized fund-raising. Those that welcomed the changes generally had little previous experience in community administration and labored under extremely trying circumstances.

Three additional challenges, imposed from without, defined French Jewish life in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The first external challenge was the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. For the first time in their modern history, Jews could choose whether or not to live in the Diaspora. There were hundreds of survivors in France who were convinced that the Holocaust had brought an end to organized life in Europe and migrated to Palestine as soon as they could. Those who insisted upon remaining in France rather than making aliyah (that is, settling in Israel) were forced to defend their decision to continue to live among their fellow Frenchmen, some of whom had participated either directly or indirectly in the carrying out of the Final Solution. This debate provided the first indications of a dramatic change in collective behavior and attitudes, including a greater assertiveness in the public arena and a new form of Jewish identification that rested upon spiritual and emotional ties with Israel mingled with deep concerns about the issue of “dual loyalty.”

Another challenge was anti-Semitism. Many observers in France had assumed that the defeat of Nazism would spell the end of anti-Jewish propaganda and violence. Though the postwar French government expressly banned overt hate propaganda, neofascist gangs maintained a presence on the streets of Paris and Lyon, occasionally ransacking Jewish-owned businesses, attacking individual Jews, and scrawling anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of the metro. Influenced by Jewish resistance efforts during the Holocaust and later by the military triumphs of the yishuv and the new Jewish state, French Jewish activists insisted upon a more aggressive and assertive response as embodied in the activities of the CRIF. As in the case of the restructuring of communal institutions, they drew upon strategies and programs suggested by outside Jewish organizations, most notably the American Jewish Committee. Unwilling to blindly follow the lead of the latter, however, French Jews also developed their own perspectives on several significant issues relating to their physical safety, which were often in opposition to those of American Jewry. This was especially true in the case of their near-unanimous support of the campaigns against German rearmament and for the aggressive prosecution of war criminals.

Tensions between French Jews and their fellow citizens in the immediate postwar period were not always overt, however. Jews living in the aftermath of the Holocaust could not ignore the striking differences between the way that they and the general populace understood the Nazi occupation and its legacy. However painful, most French viewed their experiences during World War II and under the Vichy regime in particular as aberrations, which were either to be forgotten or to be wished away with exaggerated narratives of collective resistance to Nazi occupation. For survivors in contrast, the war was a searing memory that raised serious questions concerning the viability of their individual and collective future on the European continent. The tensions between French Jews and the larger society were manifested in debates over issues such as the treatment of Jewish deportees and the memorialization of the Jewish victims of Nazism.

A final external challenge was the Cold War, which split the Jews of Europe into two camps. For the Jews in France in particular, Soviet and American threats of unleashing nuclear missiles raised the prospect of a posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler over his ideological and “racial” enemies. Divisions also reached into the community itself; Communism had gained new visibility and respect among those Jews in France who had participated in wartime resistance and in the struggle against neo-Nazism in the postwar period, and among postwar refugees from eastern Europe. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the divisions between Communists and anti- or non-Communists threatened to undo the fragile unity that leaders had worked so hard to create after 1945.

Yet the French Jewish community was not totally paralyzed by the Cold War. Despite the formidable obstacles, mainstream communal leaders sought to steer a middle path between the demands of local political militants and those of American Jewish officials. While eliminating or at least diminishing the influence of schismatic Communist elements from communal affairs, community leaders—often with the aid of those Communists who had remained within the communal fold—forcefully resisted pressures from the AJC and elements in the Joint to break off all contact with their coreligionists behind the Iron Curtain. Forty years after the end of World War II, such efforts would ease the reintegration of post-Communist Jewish communities into European Jewry as a whole.

Having overcome or at least accommodated themselves to external threats to their survival, the Jews of France in the early 1950s increasingly returned to inte...