Remembering and Rebuilding: The World Jewish Congress in the Shadow of the Holocaust

In this essay I expand on the role of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the 1940s and 1950s. Its mode of operation during the two decades that followed World War II was markedly different from those that characterized other sections of American Jewry. What set the WJC apart from other Jewish organizations was that its leaders sought not merely to institutionalize the relationship between Israel and American Jewry, but involved themselves in the Jewish world as a whole and in Europe in particular, where they vigorously worked to rehabilitate the post-Holocaust Jewish diaspora and to assist those survivors who wished to do so to reintegrate themselves into Europe.