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Author: JDC Archives

Painting Depicts JDC Founders

This 1929 painting, based on a photograph taken of the Executive Committee in a meeting on July 10, 1918, is one of the few artifacts of this magnitude that JDC has from the 1920s. In the throes of the calamitous World War I, the men and women depicted in this image responded to pleas from Jews an ocean away by providing life-saving aid and sustenance to their brethren in Palestine and Eastern Europe. Representing the spectrum of Jews in America, the American Jewish Relief Committee (mostly German Jews); the (Orthodox) Central Committee for the Relief of Jews; and the...

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Helen Cytryn and the Joint: A Photo Identification 70 Years in the Making

When Helen Cytryn flipped through the newly published volume I Live. Send Help., the last thing she expected to see was a photo of her late husband. Yet there he was in an agricultural camp, a World War II refugee husking corn like a true farmer. Living out the war years with ten thousand other Jewish immigrants in Bolivia, he had a difficult, multi-leg journey before reaching the farm in the Bolivian mountains. Traveling in 1939 from his Poland home, he journeyed via Germany to France and then journeyed by ship to Chile, where he trekked through the Andes...

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New Book Published on the American Jewish Presence in Post-World War II France

  Laura Hobson Faures new book, Un Plan Marshall Juif: La prsence juive amricaine en France aprs la Shoah, 1944-1954 (A Jewish Marshall Plan: The American Jewish Presence in Postwar France, 1944-1945) sheds light on a largely neglected chapter of research into French Jewish reconstruction efforts in the aftermath of World War II. Her book, which was published in French last year by Armand Colin, focuses on the encounters between representatives of American Jewish relief organizations and French Jewry in postwar France. Hobson Faure began researching Un Plan Marshall Juif, in 2003, for her doctoral dissertation in Modern history...

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A Symbol for the Continuity of Jewish Life

  In the aftermath of World War II (WWII) and the Holocaust, JDCs far-reaching efforts to rebuild and sustain European Jewry touched upon every aspect of Jewish religious, communal, and cultural life. This commitment to revitalizing Jewish life included the production and dispatch of over 100 chuppot (Jewish wedding canopies), along with numerous other religious and ritual materials such as matzot, haggadot, and tallitot (prayer shawls), to Displaced Persons camps in the U.S. Zone. These canopies remained in production from the end of WWII in 1945 through late 1949. This chuppah is blue and white with gold fringe and...

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BBC Publishes Two Major Features on the Survivors of the St. Louis

  The BBC published two major featureson survivors of the S.S. St. Louis, the ship carrying German Jewish refugees that was turned away from Cuba and the U.S. in 1939. The print and audio features highlight JDC’s role in aiding the refugees to find safe haven. The 75th anniversary of the beginning of the voyage was on May 15, 2014. When the 907 refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were denied permission to land in Havana, Cuba in May 1939 despite having accredited landing documents, JDC became involved in negotiations with the Cuban government. These discussions unfortunately failed, as did efforts...

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