During World War II, the British military dropped several dozen parachutists from Palestine, including three women, behind enemy lines in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. These young soldiers, most of whom had fled Europe only a few years earlier, faced a double challenge: their British mission was to find pilots who had jettisoned over enemy territory and assist them in returning to Allied-occupied lands; their Zionist mission was to contact Jewish communities, assist them in rebuilding the local Zionist movement, and, when necessary, help their members escape from the Nazis. Seven of the parachutists lost their lives in this effort. In Perfect Heroes, an expanded and updated English adaptation of her Hebrew book Giborim le-mofet, Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz recounts the history of these parachutists' wartime escapades and also analyzes the ways that various segments of Israeli society—military, political, legal, educational, youth, literary, and artistic—used the parachutists' story over the course of fifty years to build a nationalist narrative and to promote their own partisan and, at times, contradictory agendas. Baumel-Schwartz also offers broader comparative discussions of how individuals were commemorated as WWII heroes and heroines in many countries, in service of national mythologizing and collective memory.

Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory

Biographies & Memoirs

Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor

Baumel-Schwartz, Judith

Leaders & Notable People

University of Wisconsin Press

Between December 1938 and September 1939, nearly ten thousand refugee children from Central Europe, mostly Jewish, found refuge from Nazism in Great Britain. This was known as the Kindertransport movement, in which the children entered as transmigrants, planning to return to Europe once the Nazis lost power. In practice, most of the kinder, as they called themselves, remained in Britain, eventually becoming citizens. This book charts the history of the Kindertransport movement, focusing on the dynamics that developed between the British government, the child refugee organizations, the Jewish community in Great Britain, the general British population, and the refugee children.After an analysis of the decision to allow the children entry and the machinery of rescue established to facilitate its implementation, the book follows the young refugees from their European homes to their resettlement in Britain either with foster families or in refugee hostels. Evacuated from the cities with hundreds of thousands of British children, they soon found themselves in the countryside with new foster families, who often had no idea how to deal with refugee children barely able to understand English.Members of particular refugee children's groups receive special attention: participants in the Youth Aliyah movement, who immigrated to the United States during the war to reunite with their families; those designated as Friendly Enemy Aliens at the war's outbreak, who were later deported to Australia and Canada; and Orthodox refugee children, who faced unique challenges attempting to maintain religious observance when placed with Gentile foster families who at times even attempted to convert them. Based on archival sources and follow-up interviews with refugee children both forty and seventy years after their flight to Britain, this book gives a unique perspective into the political, bureaucratic, and human aspects of the Kindertransport scheme prior to and during World War II.

Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain, 1938-1945 (Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies)

History

Military

Purdue University Press

World

Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain, 1938-1945

This is a book about Chaskel Tydor, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, who was at various times a bookkeeper, metallurgist, kibbutz founder, Hebrew book publisher, uranium mine manager, and travel agent. Spanning close to 90 years of life, his story takes the reader through three continents, two marriages, and the Holocaust. It is also the story of Jewish people during the 20th century who found themselves wandering between countries, learning to function in new languages and societies, building and joining various Jewish communities, and continuously adopting different outward ways of life while trying to maintain their Jewish beliefs and practices. Through the story of one, albeit unique, man, we learn the history of an era: Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the First World War, events in Weimar and Hitler's Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the struggle for survival in Nazi camps, the creation of the State of Israel, Jewish life in the US after the Second World War, and events in Israel following the Yom Kippur War. This is a book of Jewish survival and triumph, chronicling the transformation and rebirth not only of one man but of an entire Jewish world. Throughout, the book provides substantive "Further Reading" lists and bibliographic information which allows readers to source and compare other scholarship and writings on the places and historical circumstances presented.

The Incredible Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Bochnia (68715): The Story of a Galician Jew - Persecution, Liberation, Transformation

Historical

Sussex Academic Press

What makes us what we are? How does our gender affect our identity? Who are our heroes and heroines and how do they mould the decisions we make and the way we live our lives? In what ways does our connection – or lack there of – to our birth religion shape our adult selves? These are just some of the questions which Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women addresses. In examining the lives and deaths of various Jewish women during the 20th and 21st centuries this study focuses on the dynamic by which they formed their identities at times of crisis, whether in pre-State Israel, during and after the Holocaust in liberated Europe, or throughout Israel’s formative years. As refugees, survivors, new immigrants or veteran citizens of a country these women’s lives are probed and analyzed in terms of their relationship to each other, to their surroundings, their past, their future, their ideologies, and their geographic and virtual communities, presenting us with a mosaic of contemporary Jewish women’s lives.

Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women

Europe

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Freida Sima (Bertha) Eisenberg Kraus was among the two million Jewish men, women and children who emigrated from Europe to the United States during the Great Wave of Immigration (1881–1914). This book tells her story and that of her family, from her birth in the Bukovina to her immigration to New York City alone at age fifteen in 1911, her immigrant work life, her marriage to a widower with four sons, and the birth of their only daughter right before the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. It describes how she and a whole immigrant generation survived that Depression, sent their children off to fight for America during the Second World War while worrying about what was happening to the families that they had left back in Europe. It takes the story further, describing what happened to her European family and how she was reunited with her surviving siblings after the war. The book continues for almost a half century after the war’s end, portraying the «Golden Years» of these former immigrants through their retirement and until the final years of their lives.

«My Name is Freida Sima»: The American-Jewish Women’s Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Young Girl from the Bukovina

Community & Culture

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Books by Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor