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211 Conclusion Like many Holocaust survivors, Bundists tried to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and rebuild new ones wherever they could in the decades following the war, a task that they undertook with gusto. Like other Jews who faced the arduous challenge of moving past their trauma to deal with the day-to-day concerns of reestablishing normality in their lives, Bundists did their best to come to terms with their loss and refocus their energies on ensuring Jewish continuity. In the new Jewish world order, however, the Bund could no longer be as it had once been, and Bundists set about tailoring their movement to account for their postwar circumstances. Bundists grappled with the question of whether their movement could be anything other than a Polish Jewish political movement, bound to a particular time and space. To adapt, its members remained faithful to the principles of doykayt, which called on Bundists to foster Jewish life wherever they lived, whether in smaller or larger Jewish communities. This meant, however, that the Bund could not survive as a singular, united party as it had before. In Russia and Poland, although disagreements and debate had been an important feature in the party’s daily life, the Bund ultimately maintained a remarkably united front. For many Jewish workers, the Polish Bund provided a sense of hope that they could escape the ghetto and build a more just world. It gave them a family, a social milieu. Many grew up in its youth movements, were educated in its reading circles, played sport for its sports clubs, participated in its organized self-defense groups, and benefited directly from its union activism. Although this world was destroyed during the war, Bundists’ attachment to the Bund was not. It was no surprise, then, that thousands of surviving Bundists, many of whom had lost their families, found comfort in their other family, the Bund. 212 T HE INT ER NAT IONA L JE W ISH L A BOR BUND Given the new circumstances, it was impossible for the Bund to be centralized and united as it had once been. In many cases, local circumstances dictated the direction of each Bundist organization. The groups’ organizational and philosophical approaches depended on the local political environment and on the nature of the local Jewish community. Although the surviving interwar leaders tried to create an administrative and ideological center in New York, the reality was that this attempted center could exercise little authority over local organizations. Even on broader Jewish questions and global politics, the World Coordinating Committee had limited powers and could only hope to influence groups in other cities. Still, it played an important role in the lives of the movement. It was the body through which Bundist transnational communication was facilitated. It published a journal that carried party debates, commentary, and reports from local organizations , and was distributed around the world. It conducted world conferences every decade until the 1990s. It conducted fundraising and assisted local organizations financially. Members of the Coordinating Committee—not only from the United States but also from Canada, Israel, Mexico, and Australia —traveled as emissaries to other cities. Their visits energized local movements, strengthened transnational networks, and provided a bridge to the past, as former comrades reunited, often for the first time in decades. Still, the committee’s desire to be a cultural, spiritual, political center—as Israel was to Zionists—was hampered by the realities that Bundists faced in their various locations. Bundists in these locations were trying to achieve similar outcomes, trying to rebuild Jewish life based on the structures that they had known in Poland before the war. For most, reared in Bundist children’s camps, schools, youth movements, and unions, the Polish Bund and its wide-ranging network of institutions provided the model for all rebuilding efforts. Many Bundist communities around the world therefore established similar institutions . Libraries, for example, became a focal point for the Bundists’ activities . In Melbourne, Paris, and Israel, the Yiddish libraries became like homes for refugees seeking family. Melbourne’s Kadimah, the Medem Bibliothèque in Paris, and Brith Avoda in Tel Aviv, served as a place to meet, to debate, to celebrate, to commemorate. These were places for Bundists to catch up on the world news from many Jewish perspectives, with their vast collections of Yiddish books, newspapers, and journals. Such libraries, whether explicitly Bundist, like those in Israel and France, or Yiddish libraries in which Bundists carried...

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