AT A MEETING of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s country directors in 1954, the director of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Saul Kagan, underscored his belief in the need to re-establish the foundations of religious, educational, and cultural life in the communities of western Europe. Old-age homes, orphanages, sanatoriums, and children's vacation homes were clearly essential for collective physical survival and health, he argued. Yet these institutions would become little more than ‘archeological exhibits’, he wrote in the notes for his presentation, unless the communities took steps to ensure that the values of Jewry were preserved and would live on. A year later, the French Jewish educator Isaac Pougatch expressed similar concerns in a work he provocatively entitled Se ressaisir ou disparaître. Pougatch was relieved that the Jews of Europe were no longer in danger of physical annihilation. If nothing were done to inculcate future generations with Jewish ideals and principles, however, European Jewry would undoubtedly disappear. It would be a ‘gentle death’ brought on by a welcoming rather than a hostile society, Pougatch commented, but it would be ‘a death nevertheless’.

In order to ensure their communities’ spiritual and cultural survival and growth, religious and educational leaders in post-war France, Belgium, and the Netherlands had to face four daunting tasks. First, they had to re-establish and reconstruct centres for Jewish learning and prayer. Second, they would need to recruit and train a core of new rabbis and Jewish educators to replace those who had been killed. Third, they would have to reach out to the thousands of men, women, and children who had lived through the war with little or no connection to Jewish community life or schooling and who after the war evinced little interest in participating in formal Jewish activities. Fourth, they would have to devise a way to overcome the serious ideological and cultural divisions over the nature and purpose of Jewish community life that had arisen in the interwar years and that continued to threaten collective solidarity and stability.

The limited talk of spiritual and cultural revival among west European Jews in the first few years after the war swung wildly between dreamlike enthusiasm and utter despair.