Loading matza in Munich for transportation to the DP camps in Germany and Austria, 1949.
Photo: JDC Archives

With the rise of Hitler to power in Germany and the passage of the restrictive Nuremberg laws, JDC quickly made funds available to local German Jewish organizations to provide both relief and emigration assistance, and it supported numerous vocational and agricultural retraining programs. Through the concerted efforts of JDC and the European organizations with which it worked, some 110,000 Jews were enabled to leave Germany between 1933 and 1939, and 80,000 more migrated overseas with JDC aid thereafter. In other European countries, JDC aided tens of thousands of refugees in transit, helping them whenever possible to reach safe havens in Palestine, in Shanghai — where it organized a relief program for over 20,000, and in the Western Hemisphere — where JDC supported refugee settlements in the Dominican Republic and in Bolivia.

After the outbreak of World War II, JDC continued to help many thousands of Jews to escape from Europe, and it maintained thousands of others in hiding throughout the war. Packages were shipped from Teheran to Polish and Ukrainian Jews who'd fled to Central Asia, supplies were parachuted into Yugoslavia, and funds were gotten to the Polish Jewish underground. Until the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, JDC's Polish office worked to try and stem the tide of death in the ghettos. From 1942 on, JDC used a variety of means to continue to channel aid to Jews living in desperate conditions behind what were now enemy lines.

JDC entered the liberated areas of Europe in 1944 on the heels of the Allied forces, thus beginning the mammoth relief and reconstruction effort that is a hallmark of its history. As always, JDC saw itself as the embodiment of whatever American Jewry was willing to do to meet Jewish needs overseas. In the post-Holocaust era, that willingness — nay eagerness — to aid those who had survived the Nazi horrors constituted an unprecedented chapter in the annals of philanthropy. It enabled JDC to expend over $300 million between 1945 and 1950 for a massive program of assistance.

Thousands of tons of food, medicines, and other supplies were shipped to Europe, and an army of professionals was soon mobilized to help. Doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, and administrators - many of these men and women were themselves Holocaust survivors, and all worked tirelessly to serve the needs of the 700,000 people each month - half of all the Jews in Europe living west of the Soviet Union - who depended on JDC for aid in 1946 and 1947.

These numbers included the tens of thousands of Jews who soon crowded the displaced persons (DP) camps and centers in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Their numbers rose from 75,000 late in 1945 to 230,000 in 1947, as the survivors were joined by Jews streaming westward from Russia and Central Asia, and then from Poland, Hungary, and Romania.

In addition to providing supplementary food, clothing, medicines, and other essential items — which quickly came to include layettes and baby food for newborns — JDC constructed a web of essential services, including critically needed health care and rehabilitation programs, educational and vocational training efforts, personal counseling, help with religious needs, cultural programs, a tracing service, and emigration assistance.

At the same time, JDC was working to stave off hunger and cold for the tens of thousands of Jews who remained in Eastern Europe and for thousands of others living in the West outside the DP camps, in communities that were just beginning to struggle back to life. In 1946, some 120,000 Jews in Hungary, 65,000 in Poland, and nearly half the 380,000 Jews then living in Romania were solely dependent on JDC for food and other basic needs. By 1947, JDC was supporting 380 medical facilities across the continent, including hospitals, convalescent homes, and maternity wards. It was sending in a continuous flow of medical supplies, while its flying squads of doctors and nurses raced to prevent epidemics in the overcrowded DP camps.

The children, of course, were especially precious; of the 182,000 Jewish children estimated in 1947 to be living in JDC areas of operation, 137,000 were receiving some form of JDC aid. The numbers assisted included virtually every Jewish DP child in Germany, Austria, and Italy (some 41,650 in all), with JDC providing nutritious food, medical care, educational programs, and health-building recreational opportunities that included summer camps.

An increasing portion of the JDC budget soon came to be devoted to moving Jewish refugees out of Europe; from 1947 on, over 600,000 were helped to emigrate and find havens in the U.S., Palestine, Canada, and other countries. JDC provided significant financial and logistical support to the Bricha and Aliya Bet immigration efforts, which brought some 115,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine before May 1948. And when the British opened detention camps on Cyprus for illegal immigrants, JDC was there to assist the detainees.

Polish-Jewish orphans arriving in Dablyce, Czechoslovakia, after being evacuated from Poland by JDC. JDC cared for and resettled thousands of children whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust. These boys are waiting to be fitted for their first pair of shoes in many months.
Photo: JDC Archives

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