1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910777831703321

Autore

Gay Ruth

Titolo

Safe among the Germans [[electronic resource] ] : liberated Jews after World War II / / Ruth Gay

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, : Yale University Press, c2002

ISBN

1-281-73132-3

9786611731328

0-300-13312-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource (xiv, 347 p.) ) : ill., facsims., ports

Disciplina

943/.004924

Soggetti

Holocaust survivors - Germany

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) - Influence

Jews - Germany - History - 1945-1990

Jews, East European - Germany - History - 20th century

Jewish refugees - Germany - History - 20th century

Germany Ethnic relations

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographic references (p. 309-330) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction -- ONE. Where They Came From -- TWO. Return to the World -- THREE. -- FOUR. Jews Again in Berlin -- FIVE. -- SIX. New Generations in Germany -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book tells the little-known story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany. By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in Germany: 8,000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two postwar Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly



overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first postwar decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the Lubavitcher at one end to Reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a "remnant" community has become a dynamic new center of Jewish life.