by Manfred Gerstenfeld

This text is the lecture delivered by Manfred Gerstenfeld at the International Symposium “Ego-documents in Dutch Jewish History”, organized by the Center for Research on Dutch Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam and the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute, December 10 and 11, 2017.

Introduction

 

What were the major problems facing many activists in the Jewish youth movements in the Netherlands after the Shoah?¹ In her testimony, Dini Boas-Vedder provided a first impression. During the war, she had been interned in the Westerbork transit camp. From there she was deported on the last transport to Theresienstadt. She reminisced: “When I came back to the Netherlands at the end of June 1945, I was a rather wild girl. I was old for my age, and had difficulty building friendships with my peers.”

Boas-Vedder initially joined the general Scouts movement.

I had lost all of my friends in the war. Afterwards, I was rather lonely. The girls in my class at school were not helpful. They all had their own circles of friends … Finding your place in normal society was difficult. After two-and-a-half years of concentration camp life I was not only undisciplined, but also socially maladapted. I understood that if I wanted to have a reasonably normal life once again, my personality had to be improved. By joining the Dutch Scouts movement, I tried to find a bit of civilization as well as a use for my free time. The Scouts seemed a good place to start because I had to work to get badges, and I also could learn a variety of things that normal children acquire automatically.

Due to her experience with the general Scouts movement, she was asked to become a leader of the Jewish Scouts. Boas-Vedder recalled: “My undertakings for the Jewish Scouts were the first in a long career of Jewish activities.”²

Though research has been carried out on the initial postwar period in the Netherlands,³ the interviews with Boas-Vedder and others who were active in Jewish youth movements in the Netherlands in the years 1945-1960 provide a “view from within,” albeit from the perspective of several decades later. Dutch psychologist Shaul Sohlberg, who has lived in Israel for many years, commented on the collection of interviews conducted for this project. According to him, for several decades after the war, psychologists paid attention mainly to the experiences of adults. “What children had undergone and felt was not heard.”⁴

Our interviews demonstrate that there are important recurring motifs among young Holocaust survivors: a sense of loneliness, the search for belonging, and the feeling of being different and separated from the greater society due to greatly different war experiences. A crucial juncture in adapting to life after the war was trying to become “normal.” In the background, unspoken, was often the need also to build a new identity. The detection of these elements was possible through interviews with former members of youth movements, a type of ego-document, which are the basis of this paper.

From 2014-2019, Wendy Cohen-Wierda conducted approximately seventy interviews, some of which were edited by this author. The interviewees had been active as leaders or members of the reestablished Dutch Jewish youth and student organizations after the end of WWII. Not all these organizations were officially Zionist. In practice, however, Mandatory Palestine – and from 1948, Israel – occupied a central place in their activities. As to the methodology, the specific questions asked during the interviews were omitted from the published study. All published interviews were authorized.

Almost all interviewees had been deeply affected by their war experiences. Most of them had been in hiding. Some had survived in concentration camps, such as Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt. Only a few interviewees had been lucky enough to have lived outside the occupied countries during the war. The decade-and-a-half after the end of the war was characterized by the economic recovery of the Netherlands to a large extent, gradual but comprehensive changes in Dutch society at large, and the end of the Korean War (1953). Thus, the uncertainty about the world’s future faded away, and confidence in the stability of life in the Netherlands grew.

 

Returning to Normality?

 

The return to “normal life” was an important issue. The notion of what this meant in the Dutch postwar reality merits a profound investigation that cannot be elaborated upon here. But several aspects of this challenge did come up in the interviews.

Dutch society in the immediate postwar period was reeling from a largely destroyed economy: There was a keen shortage of commodities, and many national institutions had to be rebuilt. In this context, little attention was paid to the problems of the surviving Jews.⁵ Chanan Kisch, whose family returned from Theresienstadt, illuminated this aspect in his interview: “When we returned, my mother said: ‘We are going to behave normally.’ I did not understand exactly what ‘normally’ meant. She added: ‘The people here have also had a difficult time with the “hunger winter.”’⁶ Kisch added that, in the framework of “normalcy,” they were sent to non-Jewish youth camps.⁷ One important aspect of normalcy was the return to school. Some surviving children no longer had any desire to do so, and those who did return were often placed in classes with pupils who were several years younger. Gila Ban related that after the war, she went to a girls’ high school. There was another Jewish girl in the class. Both were very small in stature, although much older than the other pupils. Initially they sat on a front bench. “We gave all the correct answers the others did not know,” recalled Ban. The girls found this so embarrassing that they moved to sit on a bench in the back of the class.⁸

For Jewish youngsters with problematic situations at home, camps for youth created a temporary normalcy. Jewish children from small towns that before the war had larger Jewish communities came to the camps, and experienced this kind of regularity, too.

A very touchy issue in the context of normalcy was whether one was willing to register on any list or with any organization. Being listed had traumatic associations for the survivors, due to the imposed registration of Jews by the Germans during the occupation, a registration which was an important means in the extremely successful implementation of the “Final Solution” in the Netherlands (about three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust). When Elma Stibbe-van Adelsbergen added her name to a list of youngsters wishing to travel to Switzerland to study, her family members were outraged: “How could you let yourself be put on a list?” They demanded: “Take your name off immediately!” In hindsight, Stibbe-van Adelsbergen admitted that this “was typical of the fear after the war.”⁹

Benjamin Maoz was one of the few Israeli students in the Netherlands who was interested in Dutch Jewry. As a member of the board of the Amsterdam branch of the Dutch Zionist Student Organization (Nederlandse Zionistische Studentenorganisatie, NZSO), he approached a number of American Jewish students who were also studying in the Netherlands. “In Amsterdam alone there were at least forty [such students],” Maoz recalled in his testimony. “We acquired their addresses and wrote to them to ask whether they wanted to become members of the NZSO. However, they were not interested in Zionism, and considered themselves as guests in the Netherlands.”¹⁰ Thus, there was a gap between the Zionist activity of the young survivors and the American Jewish youngsters who had not experienced the Shoah. But there were also young survivors who wanted to distance themselves from “open Jewishness.” Avraham Wijler was active in the Hashalshelet youth movement, which identified with the small (and no longer existing) Poalei Agudat Yisrael (Agudath Israel Laborers) party in Israel. He later became Hashalshelet’s chairman. He was also active in the Delft branch of the NZSO, were he was a board member for two years. On perusing a list of new students there, he detected that “there were students [at the Technical University] whom we knew were Jewish but had registered as having no religion. That was quite normal after the war. One did not dare or want to be known as a Jew.”¹¹

 

The Benefits of the Youth Movements

 

A key question the interviewees were asked was: “What has the youth movement given you?” A sample of answers provide insight into the meaning of the youth movement for the child survivors in the Netherlands.

Jackie Landesman observed that “the youth movement contributed much to my formation as a human being. Bnei Akiva has stayed with me far beyond my schooldays. Due to our shared experiences in that movement, if we meet each other in Israel, we still feel very much connected.”¹²

A similar comparison of the youth movement with school was expressed by Ilana Drukker-Tikotin:

Habonim most probably saved me psychologically. I gained confidence in myself because I was a madricha (female youth leader). I learned more about the history of Zionism with Habonim than in school. Obviously, preparing for the meetings took much time. Anything was better than being at home or in school. It is a wonder that every year, I still graduated to the next class.¹³

The theme of friends for life thanks to youth group activities in the Netherlands that took place some sixty years ago recurred in several interviews. Avraham Wijler’s parents were murdered during the Shoah. He relates that despite the loss of many family members, the youth movement gave him the ability to build a new circle of friends. “I still have strong ties in Israel with many friends of that time,” he declared, and continued:

In the youth movement I learned how to interact with children and young people. You acquire the skills to deal with all kinds of people, organize activities, and work under stress. As a madrich [male counsellor] of a group in youth movement camps, you also learn from practical experiences … To be a madrich brought with it not only responsibility, but also recognition for what you were doing. That was very important, in particular for youngsters who had lost their parents. They now felt a sense of belonging to something. In addition, they were responsible for important tasks. We were children growing up and becoming adults. Sometimes you were reprimanded because you had done something wrong, just as other children received admonishments from interactions between brothers and sisters in a normal family.¹⁴

Ruth Lipschits-de Leeuwe concurred: “The school and Habonim were my life. At home I had nothing.”¹⁵ Rob Heiden Heimer also summarized briefly: “The Jewish youth movement saved me after the war and gave me a new goal in life.”¹⁶

In normal times, the two key environments of a youngster are home and school. Youth movements are potential adjuncts, sometimes important ones. However, as we can see from the quotes, for many of the interviewees, due to postwar realities, Jewish youth movements often became another key environment; for some, even the most important one.¹⁷

 

In Search of Identity

 

A crucial issue concerning those postwar years is identity, especially for those who had survived in hiding. “There were often problems related to the war, some of which were emotional, psychological and physical,” noted psychologist Sohlberg. “The experts often did not realize this.”¹⁸ The identity issue is multifaceted. For those who had been in concentration camps and had kept their Jewish identity during the war, understanding themselves in light of a new reality was complex. How did the surviving youngster view him- or herself? How did the Jewish community, and the greater society view them? When considering this issue, it should be remembered that the Netherlands had not had any Jews in the public domain for a year and eight months (from September 29, 1943, when the last round-up took place, until the end of the war in the Netherlands on May 5, 1945).

 

Names

 

Another important group to be considered were children who – while in hiding – had taken on false identities, different from their earlier, and later, real ones. The false identity consisted of several elements, but first and foremost their name and their religious affiliation. Often, but not always, these two elements were interrelated. Tension between the original and the “new” name became an identity issue, which played a role also later in life. Sohlberg observes that the adoption by children of a fabricated identity while in hiding played a central – and often problematic – role in their lives after the war.

To this, I can personally testify: In hiding I became a non-Jewish child from Rotterdam called Frits van Dijk. Rotterdam as the false place of my origin was chosen because in the short 1940 war against the Dutch, the Germans had bombarded that town and no registry of citizens remained. After the war, I used my real name once again.

One of the interviewees, Margalit Ben Ami (originally Gretha Dotsch), recounted that when she arrived at the age of almost five at the home of the family offering her refuge, she was not allowed to leave her room until she no longer called herself by her real name, rather only by her “hiding name,” Ingrid Maria Theresia Tulleneurs. It took some time until she and her adoptive father came to the agreement that she would say her hiding name aloud, but then her real name in her head only.¹⁹ This was clearly the effort of a small child to keep her identity in a society that in general used to regard people who hid their real identity as suspicious; embracing a false name thus carried with it a negative connotation.

In his interview, Hans Rodrigues Pereira related that on a Friday night in November 1942, when he was eleven years old, he was sent to a family to be hidden. He brought his aging cat with him, and a prayer book in which was inscribed: “To Hans Rodrigues Pereira, from your father.” Upon arrival, his cat had was put down and his host tore out the page in the prayer book on which his name was mentioned, for fear of his true identity being revealed. Obviously, this was traumatic for Pereira: Without the cat and the page with his name, “I had nothing left from home.”²⁰ Conversely, Marthi Hershler-de Wilde and her sister Jolijn kept their first names in hiding. Though this helped keep their identity, in retrospect they understand that this was a dangerous act because on one occasion, when somebody mentioned their names, it disclosed their identity to other Jews in hiding.²¹

Another wartime strategy was applied in the case of Tilly Schuller-Bosman: “With the help of a Catholic priest, a new identity was created for me. He acquired a document with the name Johanna C. Mensing. I decided that the ‘C’ was an abbreviation of Clothilde. I thus could continue to call myself ‘Tilly.’”²²

Sal Israeli (formerly Israels) went into hiding in a location close to where his uncle had worked as secretary of a municipality. His hiding name was Robert Nunnikhoven. When in hiding, he sometimes rode on his bicycle to the municipal building. He would enter it from the back door only to see an announcement on the wall signed by his uncle Sander Israels. After seeing his true family name again, he left: it was an act to keep his real identity.²³

The name saga often did not end for youngsters with the end of the war. Some of the interviewees, when preparing for their Aliya, or upon their arrival in Israel, decided to change their Dutch name into a Hebrew one. This was a quite common practice in Israel, indicating the will to be the New Israeli Jew. It was done voluntarily, yet for some it meant the adoption of a third name and another new identity. The various identities continued to exist to some extent throughout the rest of their lives.

 

Hiding Parents and Real Parents

 

American sociologist Diana Wolf writes in her book, Beyond Anne Frank. Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland, that for many of the hidden children reunited with their biological parents after the war, another issue of identity arose: Their wartime guardians had become “real” parents in their eyes and hearts, and now they had to resettle with their biological parents. Wolf suggests that this was a precursor of the frequent present reality of many divorces, after which contemporary children often navigate between more than two parents.²⁴

In her diary, Carry Ulreich, who was hidden together jointly with her parents, calls her own parents Ma I (mother 1) and Pa I (Father 1), while her “hiding parents” are referred to as Ma II and Pa 11.²⁵

Moreover, some interviewees revealed that they found it difficult to readapt to their original parents. One remarked: “I now had parents who spoke German, whom I didn’t want.”²⁶

Others had become so independent that they did not want to live with parents, who they felt treated them “as children.”²⁷ Many more had no surviving parents, or only one of them. In addition, many Jewish parents were greatly traumatized from their war experiences, which led to an even more complicated reunion with their children.²⁸

 

Attitudes towards Camp Survivors

 

Concerning the issue of how other Jews viewed survivors returning from the concentration camps, Meir Bier said: “After the war, there were people [Jews] who did not understand what we, the survivors, had experienced, and where we had returned from. I remember that they said horrible things to me. When I came back to Holland and arrived at my sister Mirjam’s home in Almelo, there were those who viewed whoever had survived as a kind of criminal. Otherwise, they rationalized, they couldn’t have survived.” Bier surmised that “people probably spoke that way out of disappointment and grief for their relatives who had not returned from the camps.”²⁹

Some of the survivors experienced shocking reactions from the non-Jewish world. Marty Dotan-van Collem related: “Once in the Amsterdam tramway, I was called ‘a moffenhoer’ [whore of the Germans] because my head had been shaven [she had suffered from typhus]. When I told the truth, somebody said to me: ‘It would be better if you walk around with a Star of David on your vest.’”³⁰ Other signs of a lack of understanding of the survivors’ experiences stemmed from the fact that Dutch Jewry had been extremely decimated. Survivors were often faced with critical questions about their experiences, which made them ask themselves: How come I survived and others not?

 

Speaking About “The War”: A Taboo

 

To what extent did survivors keep their “silence” about their recent past? This is a controversial issue in research on the immediate post-Holocaust period. In recent years, several scholars have shown that the “myth of silence” of survivors during those early postwar years was created in earlier research, but that that is not correct as an overall phenomenon.³¹ That may be true, yet from the interviews in this project, it is quite clear that speaking about what happened during the war was indeed a taboo for many in the early years after the war. This was not a specific aspect of those active in the youth movements; it was the same in Jewish schools, and usually in conversations between Jewish youth – this was my experience too, at school and in the Jewish youth movement.

The following anecdote may serve as an illustration: more than sixty years after the war, two United States Holocaust Memorial Museum staff met with survivors in Jerusalem; there I heard for the first time from one of my closest classmates that he had been detained in a concentration camp during the war. This “silence” was part of the legacy of the requirements for survival during the Shoah, and continued way beyond those terrible years. When asked about the loss of family members, Carla Lessing-Heijmans, who was one of the founders of a youth group in The Hague for children aged 10-14 in The Hague, remembered that “Children did not speak about the loss of family members,”³² Similarly. Helen Soesman-Freundlich remarks in her testimony: “I realized later that we never spoke in Habonim about what happened to us during the war.”³³ Ilana Drukker Tikotin says: “It was a strange time after the war, because we couldn’t speak about our experiences during the Holocaust.”³⁴

Often this taboo also persisted in later years. One former youth leader who married a non-Jewish woman mentioned in his interview that his non-Jewish brother-in-law, who was studying psychology at the time, mentioned to a social worker that he had never met a concentration camp survivor. The social worker said: “Your [future] brother-in-law is a survivor.”³⁵

 

Postwar Antisemitism

 

The issue of antisemitism in the Netherlands in the immediate postwar period has been described in the literature. This phenomenon surfaces also in the interviews with the former youth movement members. In the case of Avraham Wijler, during the occupation, only one person in the small village where he was hidden knew he was Jewish, apart from the family who hid him. But “after the war … it became known that I was Jewish. It became more difficult than before. Various people related their prejudices about Jews, both to the people who had hidden me and also to me personally.”³⁶

Meir Bier, who was an orphan, lived in the postwar years in a Jewish youth home in Bussum. He worked part time in a garage repairing tires: “In the garage, I heard antisemitic remarks such as ‘it was a pity that we had returned alive from the camps.’”³⁷

Samuel Bernhard Cohen went after the war to the Lairesse School in Amsterdam. His experience was similar: “When I entered the first grade, I wasn’t received with open arms by the other pupils. Antisemitism was widespread. There was a female teacher who protected me a little, but she was the only one.”³⁸

 

Hierarchy of Suffering

 

A frequently recurring subject was the so-called “hierarchy of suffering.” Robert Cohen related that after the war “he had no right to speak,” because he had been in hiding. People claimed that he had “hardly suffered” compared to those who had been in concentration camps. That changed only when the First Congress of Hidden Children took place in Amsterdam in 1992. “Suddenly also those who had been hidden were allowed to tell their story,” he recalled.³⁹

Ruth Lipschits-de Leeuwe revealed another aspect. “Before summer camp, a meeting of the madrichim took place. Sometimes it was held a day or even an evening before camp began. We checked who was coming. Sometimes the list included children who were difficult to educate or orphans who lived in an institution, i.e., the Bergstichting.⁴⁰ We did not put those two groups together and we also gave each of them special attention. When they did something ugly, we said: ‘Well, he comes from the Bergstichting.’”

 

Hachsharot

 

Hachsharot (Dutch spelling: hachsjarot; institutions that prepared youngsters for immigration to Israel) existed in the Netherlands before WWII, and played an important role in the ethos of the younger Zionist generation. In the postwar period, some Hachsharot were reestablished, and they were crucial in shaping the future of some Jewish youth after the war. There youngsters learned a profession which they could use in Palestine/Israel. The Dutch filmmaker, Renee Sanders, made a movie on the occasion of a reunion after fifty years of one such generation of religious youngsters who had been on Hachshara in ’s-Graveland (a village in the Dutch province of North Holland).

Chaim Dasberg, who belonged to that group and later became a leading psychiatrist in Israel, remarked: “If one looks back, the group created a kind of unique identity even if at the moment its members weren’t aware of it.” He considered this to have been a kind of rehabilitation for the participants.⁴¹

 

Attraction to Christianity

 

Another type of identity issue was faced by a small number of youngsters who had been hiding with Christians. Some had been converted to Christianity, and now considered themselves no longer belonging to the Jewish community (though, according to Jewish law, they were still Jewish); others, though not having converted, were still heavily influenced by the Christian religious environment they had been immersed in for a critical period of their life. Some of these survivors initiated a youth movement called Haderech (The Path). One of its members, Esther Spruit-Duis, who had not converted, reminisced: “I was influenced by Christianity. I thought Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who belonged to the Jewish people and not the reverse – that the Jewish people should come into the Christian Church. That is why I joined Haderech.”⁴²

Another member of Haderech, Nathan Deen, related to the differing motivations that had led the various members to join the movement. In his case, “I did not get much Judaism at home, but everybody became Jewishly-conscious through Haderech.”⁴³ Some of the members would eventually return to Judaism, among them the two founders, Shlomo Ganor (at that time, Sal Wagenaar) and Joop (Jozef) Hes.

 

Reestablishing the Jewish Youth Movements

 

Before the war, there was an umbrella organization of Zionist youth, the Joodse Jeugdfederatie (JJF, the Jewish Youth Federation) in the Netherlands. The JJF had branches under different names in a number of towns throughout the country. In the big cities, there were separate organizations for the religious and the non-religious youth; in Amsterdam, these were Zichron Yaakov for the religious and Hatsair for the non-religious. Most of the members of these organizations who had not emigrated before the occupation, were murdered during the war. The way Jewish youth movements were reestablished after the war was influenced by the small number of surviving youngsters, but some of the prewar structures remained.

The JJF was reestablished at the war’s end, with the major branch in Amsterdam, named ShearYashuv, serving both religious and non-religious youngsters. Even though the branch existed for a relatively short time (three years), various interviewees spoke about its importance for them. “Shear Yashuv was my life after the war,” recalled Rob Heiden Heimer. “It changed my identity.”⁴⁴

An important part of Shear Yashuv was the youth synagogue in the Lekstraat Synagogue building. Ab Rinat (previously Reiner) remembered: “The leadership was in our own hands. Boys and girls did not sit together, but neither were there curtains to separate between us.”⁴⁵ And Marty Dotan-van Collem related: “I joined Shear Yashuv as early as July 1945. We got together every week. Very soon the evening meetings started, where we heard all kinds of stories. We learned Hebrew, we were told about the Land of Israel and the political parties there. I believe we were 10-12 youngsters. In the summer of 1945, we had a weekend in Vogelenzang. We did many nice things such as scouting, playing handball, walking, and cycling. We longed to be somewhere normal. That weekend was organized by the Jewish Brigade, and was socialist-oriented.”⁴⁶ Julia lzaks van der Velde considered the youth synagogue of Shear Yashuv as even more important than the youth movement itself.⁴⁷

Yet, the unity amongst the members of Shear Yashuv did not last. This was greatly due to the fact that Dutch Jewish youth movements had become more dependent – as a result of the war – on support from Palestine/Israel. In 1948, the religious youth broke away from Shear Yashuv and created the Dutch branch of Bnei Akiva, the international religious Zionist youth movement. In 1950, the non-religious followed suit, and created the Dutch branch of the international Zionist socialist movement Habonim.

 

The Impact of the Jewish Brigade

 

For about a year after the end of the war, soldiers of the of British Army’s Jewish Brigade were stationed in some Dutch towns.⁴⁸ They soon became role models for the young (as well as other) Dutch Jewish survivors.⁴⁹ Zeev Bar said with emphasis: “My heroes were the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, who spoke Hebrew. They taught us dances, fighting with sticks, drills, and singing.”⁵⁰ Gila Ban added: “During the war, Arnhem had been destroyed. The Jewish Brigade came to rebuild the bridge over the Rhine. Four members dedicated themselves to our club … they taught us all the Hebrew songs that were common at that time. We were also taught Hebrew.”⁵¹ Mirjam Lapid-Andriesse recalled that after the war, when the JJF was reestablished in Utrecht, a few soldiers of the Jewish Brigade also attended these meetings. They gave the youth Bible lessons, spoke about the Land of Israel, and taught some Hebrew. Perhaps the greatest impression for all those who came into contact with the Jewish Brigade was that the soldiers had a Star of David on their uniform – a huge contrast with the denigrating yellow star Jews had been forced to wear by the German occupiers. Some of the youngsters approached the soldiers just to touch their Star of David.⁵²

 

Attitudes towards the Dutch and the Netherlands

 

For the Holocaust survivors, the attitude towards and relationship with gentile Dutch society was complex. The youth movement camps were islands of independent activity, albeit taking place in the Netherlands. Most symbolic was that the Israeli flag, and not the Dutch one, was raised.⁵³ This did not reflect a principled negative attitude toward the Netherlands. For instance, the Amsterdam Jewish community youth movement Tikwatenoe and the Agudist youth movement Hashalshelet participated in the inauguration of Queen Juliana in the Amsterdam Olympic Stadium in 1948.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, the main aim of the Jewish youth movements was Aliya, immigration to Israel. That was true not only for the outspokenly Zionist movements Habonim and Bnei Akiva, but also for Hashalshelet. As far as the latter was concerned, the best indication is that its founders, the Emanuel brothers, made Aliya, one of them to a kibbutz of Poalei Agudat Yisrael. Almost all Hashalshelet madrichim of my own generation also immigrated to Israel. Another proof of this was that Hashalshelet regularly received shelihim (emissaries from the Land of Israel belonging to ideological movements and their youth branches) from the Israeli Ezra movement. Some interviewees of the various movements were outspoken on the issue of Aliya. Gila Ban commented: “It was self-understood that I wanted to leave. All youngsters wanted to leave. It was an ‘obligatory flight’; one could no longer adapt to [life in] the Netherlands and marry there. One wanted to leave.” She added: “As I see it, it was simply a physical flight. My children want to believe that it was a Zionist ideal. I see it in a far harsher light.”⁵⁵ Gerda Elata had the same feelings: “The youth camps were very emotional for me. I think that this was the case for everybody. You were together with other young Jews, we wanted to go to Israel to build our own land. We sang Hebrew songs, and were told about life in the kibbutz, that kept us busy.”⁵⁶ Ruth Lipschits-de Leeuwe, who made a visit to Israel in 1954 she was then seventeen years old, could not be stopped after her return to the Netherlands: “after my matriculation … l wanted to go to Israel but I wasn’t allowed.”⁵⁷

Even though they did not say so explicitly, it is almost self understood that in a reality so heavily focused on an Israeli future, that what was happening in the Netherlands and what its future was, had a secondary place.

 

The Shelihim

 

Shelihim (shlichim) had appeared in the Netherlands already in the 1930s. In the postwar period, their function would become even more important.⁵⁸ These persons had a huge influence on the hanichim (young members) of both Habonim and Bnei Akiva. One interviewee said that for her, the shaliach was “a demigod.”⁵⁹ The long-term shelihim devoted all their time to the youth movements. This was in contrast to the local youth leaders, who initially often belonged to the hachsharot where they working, or were studying part of full-time. Yet in spite of this contrast, the local youth were self-conscious enough and did not shy away from entering into substantial controversies with the shelihim.

Besides them, there were shelihim who were sent over specifically for summer camps, which were seen by the parent organizations as events of major social, educational, and ideological importance. Occasionally, there were conflicts between these shelihim and local leaders. Elma Stibbe-van Adelsbergen, who was a local leader in Habonim, reports that in one summer camp “the shaliach said that we should influence the children to go to Israel. He explained, ‘Israel badly needs young people. When they come to Israel, especially children without parents will have a home. They will live on a kibbutz and can rebuild their lives.’” Stibbe-Van Adelsbergen asked him: “Should they come even without a profession?” “Yes,” he answered her. “In Israel they will have a new home. They can do what they want and can also – if they want to – get professional training.” She retorted: “You want our kids to go Israel as they are and become soldiers! What happens afterwards is not your responsibility. I see the disasters that will happen when children without a profession go to Israel.” She then added: “You do not send a child without a profession to a foreign country. They do not know the language. How can they find a home there? Children need to first get a profession. Then they can go to Israel, and will also be more valuable to the country.”⁶⁰ There are however also other examples of conflicts.⁶¹

As a Bnei Akiva shaliach at the end of the 1950s, Avraham Carmi encountered a problem of a very different nature. He once invited parents to come to the railway station to take leave from their children who were departing as a group to a summer camp. Parents started to cry. It reminded them of the trains departing for Westerbork during the war. Carmi apologized to all the parents individually.⁶²

 

The Kibbutz As an Ideal

 

Habonim and Bnei Akiva, whose central leadership was in Israel, initially aimed at convincing their members abroad to join a kibbutz. This often did not fit well with the culture of Dutch youngsters. However, there was a significant difference between the two youth groups in the Netherlands on this issue. In Bnei Akiva, mainly lip service was paid to the idea of joining a kibbutz. As the shelihim were usually not members of a kibbutz themselves – indeed, several were school-teachers – this vision was conveyed by them with little emphasis or pressure. But in Habonim, the atmosphere was different, because it was a Zionist-socialist movement. Its shelihim were kibbutz members who were eager to promote the kibbutz ideal, yet sometimes had no experience with working with youth. This led to a crisis in the late 1950s. The chairman of Habonim-Holland wrote to the Israeli headquarters that members of the movement had little interest in joining a kibbutz. He mentioned that the shelihim from Bnei Akiva were teachers, who knew how to communicate with youth and not clash over the kibbutz issue, emphasizing more the goal of making Aliya. Ultimately, also in Habonim the kibbutz matter faded away. Also among our interviewees who initially joined a kibbutz, an estimated 14, only four were still members when the interviews took place.⁶³

 

Professional Choices

 

For some youngsters, the shaliah had a determining influence on the career they chose. Fien Cohen-Marcus remarked that she had seen speech therapy on a shaliah’s list of recommended professions: “Before I saw that list, I had never heard about speech therapy. When I later started to work at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, they were very happy with me. There were hardly any professional speech therapists in Israel.”⁶⁴ Her husband, Frits Cohen, wanted to study agriculture. He was told that he should do something else, as there were already so many students of agriculture in Israel. Cohen then decided to study geology.⁶⁵ However, the careers young people were advised to follow, which would – assumingly – contribute to Israeli society, were not always successful. Mirjam Zangen-Strykowski was advised to become a chemical engineer. She remarked: “I always wanted to become a medical doctor. I was told: ‘There are enough doctors.’ I started to study chemical engineering in Delft. It did not interest me at all. In the middle of the year, I moved to Leiden to study medicine. I thought: ‘I can always find something [a job] somewhere [as a medical doctor].’”⁶⁶

 

The Youth Movements in the Public Domain

 

In the immediate postwar period, the voice and visibility of Jews in the Dutch public domain was notably absent. The Jewish youth movements played an important role in ending this invisibility. Chana Dotan-Broer remarked that after the war, the few Jews living in the south of the Netherlands kept their Judaism to themselves. While travelling to a summer camp, she was greatly surprised to see other Jewish youngsters on the way to the same camp performing Israeli dances on a platform of the Utrecht railway station. She was also greatly impressed by a rabbi publicly blessing his children when he took leave of them.⁶⁷

Snippets appear in a number of interviews illustrating how youth movement members no longer had a problem with publicly manifesting themselves as Jews. Habonim member Fien Cohen-Marcus remarks:

lvrit [the Hebrew language] was very important. We learned it mainly form the songs we sang. I remember well returning to Zwolle from a summer camp with some of my friends. To make an impression on the other train travellers around us, we spoke between us the texts of the Hebrew songs we had learned. It thus seemed as if we spoke lvrit. We felt different in a positive way. We were proud and cheerful.⁶⁸

Fellow Habonim member Ilana Drukker-Tikotin concurs: “While we waited at stations for connections, we danced the hora. On the window of our train car was written that it was reserved for the Jewish Youth Federation. Nobody was ashamed of being Jewish.”⁶⁹

And Hashalshelet member Rachel Erlanger-Cohen recalls:

Yaakov Rosenheim, the then-president of Agudath Yisrael, arrived at Schiphol-Amsterdam airport. We welcomed him there together with the chanichim with a blue and white flag. We had embroidered a Star of David on it. It was a fantastic feeling to hold that flag. It was a sign for the non-Jews that the Jewish people live and exist until eternity.⁷⁰

Marthi Hershler-De Wilde, a scout leader, remembers how she walked with her young hanichim through the Amsterdam Vondelpark. “The group’s leader walked in front, shouting ‘Smol, yamin, smol (left-right-left)!’”⁷¹

She also mentions a major assembly for Dutch Jewry in May 1948 in the Amsterdam concert hall in honor of the establishment of the State of Israel: “Afterwards, we [the scouts] and other youngsters walked with Israeli flags from the Concertgebouw [concert building] through Amsterdam. I also carried a flag.”⁷² This author too was one of the young people that marched on that occasion. I – we – felt that our Jewish identity no longer had to be hidden. The Jews were able once again to show their faces in the Dutch public domain.⁷³

 

Conclusion

 

Nowadays, in regular Jewish societies, youth movements fill a secondary role in a youngster’s life: Home and school take up far more hours. In the interwar period and during the Shoah, the role of youth movements, a phenomenon that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century, became prominent.⁷⁴ In the particular case of the postwar period in the Netherlands, for many Jewish youngsters, the youth movements often became essential. Many homes had broken down, parents had been murdered; some who survived had remarried, and there were reports of traumatic experiences at home. Furthermore, the generation of the parents had to invest much energy and time in reestablishing itself, either as employees or as independent workers. In this extraordinary situation, a kind of vacuum was created.

For many Dutch Jewish youngsters after the war, the youth movement played an exceptional role by filling in the void at home through providing intimacy, joy, a goal in life, and an encouraging environment. Even decades later, many interviewees related how important their youth group had been for them. One remarkable aspect was the vitality that many showed even at their advanced age – all the interviewees were above seventy-five years old. Apparently, the motivation they had inherited in their youth had not entirely disappeared.

 

_______________________

End notes

 

1. This chapter is based on some of the interviews from a comprehensive interviewing project initiated by the author and his sons, Dan and Alon, supported by the Center for Research on Dutch Jewry, and conducted by Wendy Cohen-Wierda in cooperation with the author, in memory of Marianne Gerstenfeld-Schwarz z”l. Gerstenfeld-Schwarz had been a member of Tikwatenoe, the Jewish Scouts, of Bnei Akiva, the Religious Zionist Youth Movement, and of the Dutch Zionist Students’ Organization (NZSO). In the Scouts and Bnei Akiva, she was also a madrichah (leader). A selection of interviews and an analytical introduction were published in Dutch: Manfred Gerstenfeld and Wendy Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht. De (her)oprichting van de Joodse jeugdbewegingen in Nederland 1945-1965 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Van Praag, 2019).
2. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 153.
3. For some overviews, in which anchors can be found for some issues raised by the interviewees quoted in this chapter, see: Jozeph Michman, Hartog Beem and Dan Michman, Pinkas. Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeenschap in Nederland (Amsterdam and Antwerp: Contact, 1999), pp. 200-251; F.C. Brasz, “Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog: van kerkgenootschap naar culturele minderheid,” in Johannes C.H. Blom, Rena G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Ivo Schaffer, eds., Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland (Amsterdam: Balans, 1995), pp. 351-403, 436-439 (English translation: The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002). A new and updated edition, in which the relevant chapter was written by another author, was published recently: Bart T. Wallet, “Tussen marge en centrum, Joden in naoorlogs Nederland,” in: Hans Blom, David Wertheim, Hetty Berg and Bart Wallet, eds., Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland (Amsterdam: Balans, 2017), pp. 407-282.
4. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 88.
5. Joel Fishman, “Een Keerpunt in de naoorlogse geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Joden. De toespraak van opperrabbijn Schuster in de Nieuwe Kerk (1955),” in Hetty Berg and Bart Wallet, eds., Wie niet weg is, is gezien. Joods Nederland na 1945 (Zwolle: Waanders and Joods Historisch Museum, 2010), pp. 118-129.
6. The Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter) was the famine that took place especially in the densely populated western provinces north of the great rivers, during the winter of 1944-1945. The German occupiers cut off food and fuel shipments from farm towns. An estimated 4.5 million people were affected, and about 20,000 died due to the famine.
7. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, pp. 91-92.
8. Ibid, p. 98.
9. Ibid, pp. 194-195.
10. Ibid, p. 301.
11. Ibid, p. 286.
12. Ibid, p. 63.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid, pp. 63-64.
15. Ibid, p. 225.
16. Ibid, p. 64.
17. I may add here insights from my own experience as a youngster belonging to the same group as the interviewees. I believe that having been a leader in the youth movement in addition to having been a teacher of Judaism at the Amsterdam Jewish community’s Sunday School, enables me to have a much better understanding of my grandchildren than I otherwise would have had.
18. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 88.
19. Ibid, pp. 89-90.
20. www.trouw.nl/home/beth-haim-het-huis-des-levens- l -~a35bb0a0/.
21. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 122.
22. Ibid, pp. 169.
23. Ibid, p. 90.
24. Diane L. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank. Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 12.
25. Carry Ulreich, ’s Nachts droom ik van vrede. Oorlogsdagboek 1941-1945 (Zoetermeer: Mozaïek, 2016), p. 15.
26. Ibid, pp. 93-94.
27. Ibid, p. 28.
28. See for instance: Elma Verhey, Om het joodse kind (Amsterdam: Nijgh en van Ditmar, 1991); Dan Michman, “Inleiding: Verbijstering, ontsteltenis en wederopbouw,” in Fré Melkman-de Paauw, Hoe het verder gaat, weet niemand. Naoorlogse brieven uit Amsterdam naar Palestina (Amsterdam: Contact, 2002), pp. 17-19; Emunah Nachmany Gafny, Dividing Hearts. The Removal of Jewish Children from Gentile Families in Poland in the Immediate Post Holocaust Years (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), pp. 273-301; Joanna B. Michlic, “A Young Person’s War: The Disrupted Lives of Children and Youth,” in: Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl, eds., A Companion to The Holocaust (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), pp. 303-306; Sharon Kangisser-Cohen and Dalia Ofer, eds., Starting Anew. The Rehabilitation of Child Survivors of the Holocaust in the Early Postwar Years (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2020).
29. Meir (Maximilian) Bier, We Have Survived and Are Standing Strong (translated from Hebrew) (Givatayim: [Private publication], 2014) p. 162.
30. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 92.
31. See: Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in the Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2007); Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research. Birth and Evolution (London: Routledge, 2013); Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009); David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, Challenging the “Myth of Silence”. Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry (London: Routledge, 2012); Dalia Ofer, “Israel”, in David Wyman, The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 836-922.
32. Ibid, p. 102.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid, p. 276.
37. Bier, We Have Survived and Are Standing Strong, p. 162.
38. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 100.
39. Ibid, pp. 101-102.
40. Ibid, p. 229. The Bergstichting was a shelter for Jewish children who had been removed from the custody of their parents by the court or were orphans.
41. Renee Sanders, Van ’s-Graveland naar het Heilige Land. Nederlandse Palestina-pioniers blikken terug (1996).
42. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 64.
43. Ibid, p. 65.
44. Personal communication.
45. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 306.
46. Ibid, pp. 177-178.
47. Personal communication.
48. See Yoav Gelber, Toledot haHitnaddevut, vol. III: Nose ’ei haDegel. Shelihutam she! haMitnaddevim la ’Am haYehudi (Jewish Palestinian Volunteering in the British Army During the Second World War, Vol. III: The Standard Bearers: Rescue Mission to the Jewish People] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1983), consult index under “Holland”.
49. See also Fré Melkman-de Paauw, Hoe het verder gaat, weet niemand. Naoorlogse brieven uit Amsterdam naar Palestina (Amsterdam: Contact, 2002), letter of December 1, 1945, p. 100.
50. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 58.
51. Ibid, p. 58.
52. Ibid, p. 61.
53. Ibid, pages 128, 228, 259 and 271.
54. Ibid, pages 28 and 140.
55. Hetty Berg and Bart Wallet, eds., Wie niet weg is, is gezien. Joods Nederland na 1945 (Zwolle: Waanders, 2010), p. 35.
56. Ibid, p. 41.
57. Ibid, p. 234.
58. See: lgal Benjamin, Ne ’emanim le ’Atzmam ulDarkam. HaMahteret haHalutzit veHolland beMilhama uvShoah [Faithful to Their Destiny and to Themselves. The Zionist Pioneers’ Underground in the Netherlands in War and Holocaust] Jerusalem: Yad Tabenkin and Ghetto Fighters House, 1998), pp. 98-112.
59. Personal communications.
60. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, pp. 48-49.
61. Ibid, page 48 and 52.
62. Ibid, p. 48.
63. Our counting.
64. Gerstenfeld and Cohen-Wierda, Veerkracht, p. 49.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid, pp. 49-50.
67. Ibid, p. 255.
68. Ibid, p. 68.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid, pp. 130-131.
72. Ibid, p. 130.
73. Maoz (Ibid, pp. 300-301) illuminates another aspect of this issue. The Zionist students’ organization NZSO usually did not take a position on events in the outside world and focused on itself. However, he says, there was an exception: “In 1952 the Slansky process took place against a number of – mainly Jewish – key figures in the communist party in Czechoslovakia. It was the only time that the NZSO distributed a pamphlet in the Dutch non-Jewish student world.”
74. Research literature on the youth movements phenomenon, and especially on the Zionist youth movements, is extensive. For the beginnings and character of this phenomenon, which began in Germany, in nationalist circles; see: Reinhard Barth, Jugend in Bewegung. Die Revolte von Jung gegen Alt in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Vorwärts Buch, 2006). For Zionist youth movements, see for instance: Asher Cohen and Yehoyakim Kochavi, eds., Zionist Youth Movements during the Shoah (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); ldo Bassok, “Youth Movements,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/155.