Remigration and exchange relationships within the Jewish Diaspora reinforced the self-image of the Jewish community in Germany after 1945. Yet how did these phenomena influence local Jewish community life in divided Germany? The article traces processes of secularization and revitalization of tradition under the influence of remigration within the Jewish communities of Dresden and Würzburg. Taking the political framework during the Cold War into account, the article then examines how transnational networks and spaces influenced life within these respective communities.

This essay examines Eastern European Jewish livelihoods in western Germany during the first years after the Holocaust. It charts the different paths Jewish displaced persons (DPs) took into the world of work, including the Allied economy, the black market and the German economy. Over time, entrepreneurial activity in the formal Germany economy would become the main means of making a living. In the period covered here, however, the consequences of Nazi-era persecution converged with the postwar remnants of a racialized economic order to strongly disadvantage Jewish foreigners seeking to “set up shop.”

After the Second World War, the Polish People’s Republic directed hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust mainly to those areas that were newly assigned to the Polish state due to its westward shift: Lower Silesia and Farther Pomerania, where vibrant centers of Jewish settle- ment emerged. In the face of antisemitism, though, which was repeatedly activated in internal party disputes and was tolerated and sanctioned by broad swaths of society, much of the Jewish population emigrated or was expelled until 1968. The article analyzes the situation in 1944/45, traces these waves of migration, looks at the political framework, and discusses the underlying push and pull factors for migration.

Before 1933 Frankfurt am Main was considered Germany’s most ‘Jewish’ city. After 1945 a new Jewish community was established. However, if it was to have a lasting future, it needed constant immigration. This article describes the particular situation in Frankfurt, where the US army established its European headquarters. Utilizing the Frankfurt example, it demonstrates that ‘Displaced Persons’ were integrated into the Jewish community without difficulty but that internal problems remained for a long time. The later immigration of Jews from Israel from the 1950s, too, helped to stabilize Jewish life and, at the same time, made it more complicated.

About 230,000 Polish Jews survived the German occupation, the war, and the Holocaust in the unoccupied interior of the Soviet Union. This article utilizes numerous ego-documents to trace the paths of the refugees and those deported to Soviet labor camps. Although the survival of both groups in a foreign land was never guaranteed, their stay in the Soviet Union proved to be life-saving in retrospect – a fact that long received little attention from the public and academia. The article ends by describing the long road from exile back to Poland and on to the camps for Displaced Persons in occupied postwar Germany.

In 1947, the President of the Berlin Jewish Community Siegmund Weltlinger constituted the Working Group Churches and Religious Communities in Greater Berlin (AKR). To strengthen the Jewish position within that body, he initiated the sub-group ‘Non-Christian Religions’, uniting Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. The contribution looks back on their earlier co-operation, inquires what of it could be revived and what was silenced, tracing the cooperation that enfolded in the post-war period.