Jewish Museum Munich

On November 10, 1947, a first remembrance ceremony for the victims of the Shoah and the official unveiling of the memorial stone took place at the New Jewish Cemetery in the presence of notable representatives of the City of Munich and the Board of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, as well as hundreds of members of the Jewish community.

Ernest Landau, a Viennese journalist liberated from one of the Death Marches near Tutzing on Lake Starnberg, founded what was then the only German-language Jewish weekly newspaper, the “Neue Welt. Eine Wochenschrift der befreiten Juden” (New World: A Weekly of the Liberated Jews) in fall 1947. With a circulation of around 4,000, the paper was aimed to be a news and information bulletin for Jewish communities in Bavaria. After just one year, the Neue Welt had to cease publication due to a lack of a German readership.

In April 1946, the Jewish Committee Munich opened the first kosher kitchen in the city in Victor-Scheffel-Strasse. As up to 8,000 Jews were living in Munich, what it could produce was not enough by any means. Additional kitchens were opened so that, at times, five such canteens existed in the municipal area: in Möhlstrasse, Frauenstrasse, and Zweibrückenstrasse, as well as in Hauptstrasse, as it was then called, in the suburb of Feldmoching.

The approach taken by the strictly Orthodox association Agudas Yisroel (also Agudat Yisrael, “Union of Israel”), founded in Poland in 1912, was that it would not be the political movement of Zionism that would lead the “Jewish people to salvation,” but only the strict observance of the commandments in the Torah. After the Shoah, the organization relativized this position and participated in building up the Jewish national community, while strongly maintaining that halakhah, the Jewish religious law, should decide the affairs of the State of Israel.

Hashomer Hatzair (Heb. the Young Guard) is a left-Zionist youth movement founded in Galicia in 1913 which significantly influenced the kibbutz movement and sent young men and women to Palestine as chaluzim (Heb. pioneers) shortly after World War II. Members of the association participated as partisans and ghetto fighters in the resistance against the Nazi regime. After 1945, Hashomer Hazair smuggled thousands of Jewish children and youths from Eastern Europe to DP camps. From fall 1947 until January 1949, the movement published the Yiddish-language newspaper Oyf der vakh (Yid.

The newspaper Nizoz (Heb. the Spark) was an underground newspaper founded in Kaunas (Lithuania) by the Zionist youth organization Brit Zion (Heb. Zions’ Covenant). After the liquidation of the ghetto, the protagonists were deported to Kaufering concentration camp where they produced another seven issues under life-endangering conditions before the camp was liberated. After the Shoah, the newspaper was then able to be puhlished as a legal Hebrew newspaper in Munich from July 1945 until April 1948.

The Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the American Zone revealed the high degree of self-organization among the Sh’erit ha-Pletah between 1945 and 1950. The newly created committee set up its office in Munich, first in the Deutsches Museum, then in Siebertstrasse. Its aim was to draw public attention to the distress plight of Jewish survivors in DP camps in order to put pressure on Britain to allow the immigration of DPs into Palestine.

The American army rabbi Abraham Klausner (1915–2007) arrived at Dachau concentration camp in May 1945 shortly after it had been liberated and began to work for the interests of Jewish former concentration camp prisoners. By as early as June 21, 1945, he had compiled the first printed search lists with the heading Sh'erit ha-Pletah (The Surviving Remnant) which were then published by the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria. They included the names of several thousand survivors.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC / Joint) was founded in 1914 as a Jewish-American welfare organization with the aim of providing economic support to Jews in Eastern Europe and Palestine. During World War II the organization helped Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. After the Shoah, the Joint initiated an extensive aid program for survivors in the German, Austrian, and Italian DP camps. In addition, the Joint organized and financed emigration to Israel and other countries overseas.

ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training) ran rehabilitation programs for DPs after World War II. After the founding of the State of Israel these were supplemented by training programs in Israel itself. Between 1946 and 1949 the organization trained more than 22,000 Jewish DPs between the ages of 18 and 55 at ist vocational training centers. A wide variety of different skilled trades could be learned at the centers: from tailoring and mechanics to photography. Today, ORT is a worldwide vocational training network which is specifically geared to Jewish students.