Politics

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 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 Jewish Committee Munich was the local organization of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the US Zone, responsible for Munich. Although first suggested in October 1945, this municipal body was not established until January 1946. The Jewish self-administrative organization represented the interests of up to 8,000 DPs in Munich and was committed to providing the necessary financial and material support. Toward the end of 1950, the committee was dissolved.

The Poale Zion (Heb. workers of Zion) organization, founded by Eastern European Jews in 1907, combined the concepts of Zionism and socialism. Differences of opinion in how to achieve these goals led to a split into Social Democratic and Communist factions. Poale Zion was instrumental in setting up agricultural settlements in Palestine / Israel.

The Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet Leisrael, KKL) was founded in 1901 at the 5th Zionist Congress in Basel. The aim of the fund was to collect donations worldwide to support the Jewish settlement movement in what was then Palestine. After the founding of the State of Israel, the KKL focused its work on the cultivation and reforestation of the country.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine (Heb. Sochnut) was founded in 1922 as the official body of the Jewish population living in what was then Palestine. It represented their interests before the governing authorities of the British Mandate and the League of Nations. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the organization changed its name and, as the Jewish Agency for Israel, increasingly promoted immigration and the integration of new migrants.

From October 1946, Dr. Phillip Auerbach was “State Comissioner for racial, religious and political victims of National Socialism” in Bavaria. He saw himself as an “advocate for Jewish DPs,” accelerated the rehabilitation of Nazi victims, the legal prosecution of Nazi perpetrators and supported thousands of DPs in their efforts to emigrate. In 1952, he committed suicide after a show trial-like conviction for embezzlement and fraud. In 1954, he was rehabilitated by an investigative committee of the Bavarian Parliament.

Salomon Adler-Rudel (also Shalom Adler-Rudel), who was born on June 23, 1894 in Czernowitz in the former Österreich-Hungary, was a social politician and pioneer of Jewish social work in Germany, Österreich, Great Britain and Israel.

Even at a young age, Salomon was politically active. From 1915 to 1918 he was secretary general of Poale Zion, a Zionist-socialist movement in Europe, Palestine, and North and South America.

The Jewish Museum Berlin, opened in 2001, is located at Lindenstraße 9-14 in Kreuzberg. The baroque Kollegienhaus, once the seat of the Kgl. Kammergericht (Lindenstraße 14), housed the "Berlin Museum" (est. 1962) until 1995. On the fallow land south of Hollmannstrasse (Nos. 19-27), the spectacular extension by Daniel Libeskind was built from 1992/93. The course of Lindenstrasse to the south, towards Neuenburger Strasse, had already been significantly altered during new construction after 1961.

In the post-war period seat of the Berlin branch of the "Jewish Agency for Palestine".