From Destruction to Rebirth: Jewish Displaced Persons After the Shoah

On April 15, 2015, YIVO sponsored a special Yom HaShoah program featuring Professor Avinoam J. Patt of the University of Hartford, who spoke about the era immediately following the Holocaust, the 1940s, when thousands of Jewish survivors (known as the She’erit Hapletah, or “Surviving Remnant”) were trying to build new lives for themselves, even as they remained in limbo, in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.

By 1947, 250,000 survivors lived in displaced persons camps in Germany. Professor Patt, with the aid of photographs and artifacts from YIVO’s Archives and Library, detailed the ways in which they created a remarkably dynamic society that included a flourishing press, theater, Zionist youth movements, athletic clubs, historical commissions, yeshivas, and a fiercely independent political system.

The program included a memorial ceremony with the onstage participation of survivors and children of survivors.

Avinoam J. Patt is the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University. He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press) and co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish displaced persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press). He is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM, and is co-author of the source volume Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press). He has also published numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles on various topics related to Jewish life and culture before, during, and after the Holocaust. He is co-editor of the recently published anthology of recent American Jewish fiction, The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (with Mark Shechner and Victoria Aarons; Wayne State University Press in January 2015).

Watch the video.