Between Home and Homeland: Youth Aliyah from Nazi Germany

Introduction: Dealing with the Nazis

While the synagogues were burning throughout the Third Reich on November 10, 1938, not all Jewish institutions were targeted for destruction. In a strange turn of events, Gestapo of¤cials could be found protecting some Youth Aliyah training facilities, where Jewish teenagers prepared for emigration from Germany to the land of Israel. On other occasions, despite complaints by local farmers, young Jews enrolled in emigration programs were permitted by government of¤cials to develop agricultural skills for a future life in Palestine by tilling the soil of the Fatherland, the lifeblood of the Aryan nation according to Nazi ideologues. Even as German Jews’ day-to-day movements were restricted and monitored by the Nazi regime, Youth Aliyah’s representatives had signi¤cant freedom of movement to raise funds in Germany and abroad. These examples and the complete early history of Youth Aliyah in this book do not suggest collaboration with Nazis, but rather demonstrate the many challenges confronting Jewish groups engaged in the task of emigration from Germany and the seeming success that certain Zionist institutions enjoyed relative to other Jewish organizations. Youth Aliyah provides a striking example of the strange nature of Jewish life under Nazi rule and the moral, educational, and economic dilemmas that may confront a humanitarian movement during a chaotic era. Since the earliest studies of the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews, the most signi¤cant research has focused on the perpetrators of oppression and mass murder. Recently, however, historical scholarship has attempted to provide insight into victims’ responses to Nazism as well as emphasizing the roles of so-called bystanders. One of the Introduction Dealing with the Nazis most comprehensive approaches is The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, volume 1 of Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews.1 Yet much of the literature about German Jews during this period is based on survivor testimony and memoirs rather than academic inquiry. This book considers one speci¤c reaction to the rise of Nazism, Youth Aliyah, which took Jewish teenagers out of Germany and brought them to Palestine. The organization managed to bring in about ¤ve thousand young immigrants prior to World War II.2 The story of Youth Aliyah touches on important human questions regarding the ways that individuals, families, and communities deal with adversity and how they confront the unknown. Youth Aliyah’s assistance to the German Jewish community during these years has received only minimal attention, often in the form of a single line of text or a footnote, in the relevant scholarly literature.3 The few detailed studies of Youth Aliyah have either focused on the movement ’s signi¤cance for Jewish Palestine and the development of the State of Israel or addressed its pedagogical achievements within the Israeli educational system.4 These analyses perceive Youth Aliyah as a yishuv/Israeli institution. The apparent lack of interest in both its German origins and its role in German Jewish life during the 1930s can be explained as a function of speci¤c Israeli educational/cultural trends. In a country that has been, in so many ways, obsessed with the Holocaust , the experiences of German Jews have never been perceived as part of mainstream culture in Israel. Even as the catastrophe began to unfold in Europe, some Jewish leaders in Palestine viewed the commitment of Germany’s Jews to a foreign culture and identity, and the subsequent Nazi oppression, as vindication of the Zionist idea. Emigrants from Germany to Israel, particularly those who came at a young age, privately proud of their sophisticated cultural heritage, may have felt compelled to repress identi¤cation with that past, as the educational and political structure of the Jewish state looked toward its future. Furthermore, despite the fact that many of these teens were rescued via Youth Aliyah and often found ways to contribute to Israeli society, the survival of these few thousands also served as constant reminder of the slaughtered millions, including their family and friends. Not surprisingly, survival in this fashion leaves its mark, both on the individuals and on the broader community . Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million clearly demonstrates the ambivalence that characterized attitudes toward German Jews who found their way to Palestine and the unique role that the Holocaust continues to play 2 Introduction in Israeli society.5 Perhaps these factors account for the relative lack of material related to the early days of Youth Aliyah and the desire to focus on the movement’s achievements in later...