Migration, gender and family: A bottom-up perspective on migration, return migration and nation-building in 1950s Poland and Israel

Migration was a central aspect of post-war East Central European Jewish experience. Despite its massive proportions, however, this emigration - like others on a similar scale - was also an individual experience. Many studies of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe refer to this phenomenon as a one-way process ending with successful integration into the newly adopted country. Family and gendered discourse being essential to this task, this article will analyse the individual discourse of post-war Jewish East-European migration through the lens of gender and nation-building discourses. Viewing ‘Zionist elements’ as ‘unproductive elements’, the Polish link between Zionism and capitalism allowed the state to accept Jewish applications to emigrate on a twofold basis: they were both inassimilable and socioeconomically undesirable. The Polish authorities, especially the Polish Security Service, labelled Jewish men wanting to return as traitors, monitoring and treating many of them as foreign agents.