War Orphans find Home: Child Holocaust Survivors and US Adoption – Live on Zoom

This program is sponsored by the “Hear Their Cry: Understanding the Jewish Orphan Experience” Scholars Working Group, which has been meeting at the Center for Jewish History since September 2019.

Soon after the conclusion of WWII, American Jewish families began to express interest in adopting young Jewish war orphans. Prompted by the fundraising images of child survivors that peppered the postwar press, letters of inquiry quickly reached the offices of Jewish communal workers. Their interest belied the reality; there were few surviving orphans to be had. Nevertheless, estimates suggest more than a thousand arrived to families in the war’s immediate aftermath. Using images from the postwar US press, this lecture will highlight the fraught experience of those destined for the United States who were both children and survivors of the Holocaust.

Ticket Info: Free, registration required at warorphans.bpt.me or 800-838-3006 to receive a link to the Zoom event.

About the Speaker:
Beth B. Cohen received her PhD in Holocaust history from Clark University and her Master’s Degree in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University. Her first book, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America, analyzes the reception of adult survivors by the American Jewish community. Her second book, Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience, focuses on child survivors and their complex identity as survivors, children, and Americans. Her work can also be found in: Fogelman, Kangisser Cohen, and Ofer, eds. Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath; Patt and Berkowitz, eds., We Are Here: New Approaches to Displaced Persons in Germany; Cesarani and Sundquist, eds, After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, and others. She has also served as a consultant to numerous Holocaust education projects including the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, March of the Living, and PBS -TV’s Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Cohen is currently a lecturer at California State University, Northridge, CA.