Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (review)

In Finding Home and Homeland, Avinoam Patt asks why so many young Jews formed Zionist groups soon after liberation. He studies the large youth segment of the Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) population to determine what Zionism meant to these survivors, and how deeply influenced they were by the ideology.

Finding Home and Homeland is organized into three parts. Part One focuses on Jewish survivors in postwar Germany in 1945 and on young survivors in postwar Poland. Part Two explores Jewish DPs in kibbutzim in postwar Germany between 1945 and 1947, as well as the agricultural training they received there. Part Three focuses on aliyah and the demands of citizenship.

In his study, Patt draws on a variety of sources to infer the reasons for the DPs' actions: records from DP social, cultural, and political organizations; DP camp newspapers; and diaries, letters, and testimonies. He demonstrates that Zionism was central to the formation of a postwar DP identity, particularly for those who found themselves in Germany, and that its appeal broadened as it seemed increasingly to offer the best answers to young Jews' most pressing problems. For example, most young DPs soon realized that they had no family remaining and were largely on their own. As recent survivors of trauma and tragedy, they preferred to put their lives back together in a supportive environment in the company of fellow survivors. The early kibbutzim organized by camp survivors in Germany and the Zionist youth movements in Poland provided the warmth, camaraderie, shelter, and security they yearned for after the war. Patt argues that the Zionist ideological aspects of the kibbutz were secondary; by joining a kibbutz, DPs had access to education in Jewish and Zionist history. Zionism functioned for them therapeutically and productively by providing work and a sense of family—in short, a structure that empowered them to embrace a new national identity.

Patt describes how Zionist youth movement leaders organized a sizable number of young Jews in DP camps in Germany, preparing them for life in British Mandate Palestine. By the end of 1945, Zionist youth movement leaders had filled a power vacuum and developed a viable plan for keeping young survivors productively occupied. For example, in the Landsberg Displaced Persons camp outside Munich there were two types of kibbutzim: one created by survivors of concentration camps in Germany, and another from kibbutzim established earlier in Poland and transplanted to the DP camps. Patt points out that most scholarly works on youth in postwar Germany fail to account for variations among kibbutzim or the reasons why young Jews joined them. He argues that, contrary to the findings of earlier research, most young Jews joined kibbutzim for practical and material reasons rather than ideological ones. He also shows how the Jewish youth who joined kibbutzim after the war differed from Zionist youth who had joined the movement before the war. After the war, young survivors had few viable options available to them. They desperately sought companionship and a way to make up for the years lost during the catastrophe. By 1947 there were close to 300 kibbutzim in the American zone of occupation, with a total of more than 15,000 members.

The poor conditions in the DP camps motivated some survivors to move to farms to establish agricultural settlements. The fresh air and the readily available produce seemed the perfect antidotes to the conditions in the DP camps, which were characterized by crime, black market activity, poor hygienic conditions, disease, and general demoralization. A sizable population of Jewish DP youth was willing to make the move to the countryside, and Zionist activists realized that establishing such farms could have political value. Moreover, the high visibility of the kibbutzim in the DP camps convinced UNRRA and American authorities of the need to establish even more agricultural settlements. During the course of 1946, many Jewish agencies—with a variety of rationales and...