Category:Holocaust Refugee Children, Palestine (subject)

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Holocaust Refugee Children, Palestine (see Holocaust Children Studies)

Overview

Groups of children managed to emigrated to Palestine during the Nazi era. Some of them arrived with their families or relatives, many were unaccompanied thanks to the efforts of Youth Aliyah.

The largest group of Holocaust Refugee Children were the so-called Tehran Children, who arrived in Palestine in 1943 mostly from Poland thru the Soviet Union and Iran.

Youth Aliyah

In 1932 Recha Freier, a rabbi's wife in Berlin, conceived the idea of taking Jewish young people doomed to idleness in Germany and bringing them up in Palestine. She contacted the Histadrut, which proposed absorbing them in kibbutzim. The first group of 12 young people was sent out in October 1932 to the Ben Shemen youth village, and on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler became chancellor, the Juedische Jugendhilfe organization was founded, with the cooperation of Jewish youth movements in Germany, to carry on the work.

In the same year the 18th Zionist Congress in Prague decided on the establishment of a department for the settlement of German Jews and the leadership of the department's Youth Aliyah office was entrusted to Henrietta Szold, with the assistance, in matters of finance, of Georg Landauer. In February 1934 the first large group of young people, numbering 60, arrived at the kibbutz En-Harod. A few months later the first religious group was sent to Kevuẓat Rodges, near Petaḥ Tikvah. By the middle of 1935, 600 had been accommodated in 11 kibbutzim, four agricultural schools, and two vocational training centers. In 1935 Hans Beyth, a youth movement leader, became Henrietta Szold's chief assistant and at the end of the year Hadassah undertook the responsibility for financial support of Youth Aliyah. After the Nazi conquest of Austria and Czechoslovakia its work was extended to cover these countries. The need for the rescue of Jewish children from Europe became even more obvious and urgent after the burning of the synagogues and the drastic anti-Jewish measures in Germany in November 1938. By the outbreak of World War ii more than 5,000 had been brought to Palestine – two-thirds from Germany, one-fifth from Austria, and the rest from other countries. For lack of immigration certificates, another 15,000 were sent to Western European countries, especially Britain.

The Youth Aliyah school in Berlin was founded in 1936 by the Jewish community to accommodate the increasing numbers of young people who wanted to join the Hehalutz Zionist youth movement in order to train for immigration to Palestine. Though Jewish youth groups were banned by the Nazis in 1936, the Youth Aliyah school was tolerated for several more years because it prepared Jews for emigration. In May 1939 Jizchak Schwersenz became its director. When the Nazis prohibited Jewish emigration in October 1941, they closed the Youth Aliyah school.

In the early years of World War ii (1940–42) it was almost impossible to bring children from Europe and in 1941 Youth Aliyah began to undertake the care of young people already in Palestine. In the same year the first children arrived from Oriental countries (mainly Syria), about 1,000 of them crossing the Palestine frontier illegally. In 1943, 800 children from Poland, who had reached Persia via the Soviet Union and were accommodated in a refugee camp in Teheran, were taken to Palestine; see Tehran Children. There was a heated controversy in the yishuv over the education of these children, most of whom were orphans, religious circles demanding that they be given a specifically religious upbringing. The Jewish Agency finally ruled that those over 14 should choose for themselves and younger children should be brought up according to the way of life of their parents.

Refugee Children in Israel (1933-1945)

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Pages in category "Holocaust Refugee Children, Palestine (subject)"

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