Recovering a Voice: West European Jewish Communities after the Holocaust by David Weinberg (review)

Recovering a Voice is a meticulously detailed analysis of the reconstruction of Jewish life in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands between 1945 and the early 1960s. In six chapters, David Weinberg shows how the foundations were laid for Jews to remain in Europe after the Holocaust. The strength of the book lies in its nuanced analysis of similarities and differences among the French, Belgian, and Dutch Jewish communities as they grappled with their postwar reconstruction.

Chapters one ("Return, Relief, and Rehabilitation") and two ("Restructuring European Jewish Communities: Hopes and Realities") look at the role of international and American Jewish relief organizations and their interactions with local leaders as they worked to lay the foundation for future Jewish life. Local authorities often resisted when British and American relief organizations demanded that they initiate a professional bureaucracy and centralize fundraising. The communities faced many challenges as they struggled to rebuild materially and institutionally. The Nazis and local authorities had confiscated approximately 70,000 apartments formerly occupied by Jews in the three countries, two-thirds of them in France (p. 40). Returning survivors found their homes occupied by people who had gained ownership during the war, or by squatters who had taken up residence because of the postwar housing shortage. New owners rarely relinquished the apartments readily, arguing disingenuously that they had secured the dwellings "in good faith" and should not be penalized for having been duped. In Paris returnees and wartime occupants frequently came to blows, and in many cases the new homeowners banded together to defend their rights.

State-appointed social workers also clashed with local and international Jewish leaders regarding policies over Jewish children, especially "hidden children" whose parents had left them with Christian families either secretly or in haste. In France and Belgium, with some notable exceptions, surviving parents recovered their children with few problems. However, dozens of Jewish children had been baptized, and Jewish authorities were shocked and dismayed that many did not want to leave their adoptive families; some even greeted them with antisemitic slurs. In the Netherlands, the struggle over the fate of hidden children was the most prolonged and bitter—professional and political pressures thwarted the Jewish community's demand for their return. Dutch social workers convinced many survivors that their children would be better off in their foster homes, and strict time limits were enforced, leaving parents a narrow window to claim their children before the latter were turned over to government authorities.

In France, surviving Jews faced difficulty with indemnification, as authorities rejected claims by Jews who had changed their names to avoid persecution, or could no longer prove they had been the owners of their prewar assets and properties. Restitution was slow, courts often rejected petitions because of survivors' inability to produce death certificates for their relatives, and hundreds of claimants died before their property was returned.

While there was mass migration from Eastern Europe to Palestine between May 1945 and June 1948, only a few thousand Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands joined this exodus. Chapter three, "The Challenge of the Jewish State," shows how those who stayed in Western Europe were confronted with the dilemma of how to support the nascent state in ways that complemented their governments' foreign policy and patriotism. But once the State of Israel was established, it offered Jews in Western Europe and elsewhere new ways of affirming their identity after the Holocaust.

Chapter four, "Antisemitism and the Historical Memory of the Second World War," is a fascinating discussion of postwar antisemitism and memorialization. In particular, Weinberg looks at Holocaust denial, antisemitism within the Catholic Church, and antisemitic attitudes in mainstream journals and newspapers, which occasionally inspired antisemitic tirades and violence. Even though the national presses and political figures created a taboo against overt manifestations of antisemitism, public attitudes and expressions were difficult to expunge. As late as 1951, De Nederlandsche Bank—the largest financial institution in the...