The Holocaust

JF&CS was part of a remarkable project after World War II. We welcomed a group of almost 50 adolescent Holocaust survivors, assumed responsibility for their care, and with a number of other organizations marshaled a host of resources to enable them to rebuild their shattered lives.

Ida Mae Kahn, president of JF&CS Women’s Committee at that time, recalled, “I received a telephone call saying, ‘A group of children are being sent to Boston. We have no place to put them…they have no connections, no one to turn to. We’ve got to make provisions for them.’”

Thoughts turned to Camp Kingswood, the summer camp in Bridgton, Maine, that JF&CS had recently purchased. First, “the Women’s Committee put the camp in condition and this group of children were brought from New York and taken immediately up to Camp Kingswood…must have been six or eight in the first group.” At the same time, a year-round residence, Bradshaw House, was being readied for them in Dorchester, and plans were begun for an array of schooling opportunities and alternative living arrangements.

There was such variability among the adolescents, in terms of age, country of origin, pre-war life and experience during the Holocaust, that no generalizations are possible as to the effect of this particular resettlement experience. But many are grateful for the safe haven in which they landed, a host community eager and willing to help, and a community of fellow adolescent survivors.

Feiga Hollenberg Connors lost her entire family in Poland, and came here in 1947, at the age of 14. She reflected on the role JF&CS played in her life. “I have no idea what it would have been like otherwise. I needed the agency desperately, not because it made me alive, but because it was a buffer for my survival. Having people around you, the kids that I came with, a support group…was very important. JF&CS did act, in a true sense, as my guardian, and I am very grateful for that.” Feiga Hollenberg Connors went to Windsor Mountain School in the Berkshires, Boston University, and became a social worker, working with adolescents herself.

Dr. Robert Berger was raised in Hungary and was 15-years-old when he came to the United States from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. When reminiscing, Robert Berger said about JF&CS, “By and large, I think they’d done probably as much as was humanly possible…they really had a multi-tiered system. I would be very much surprised if there were many other cities in the United States that had this kind of an arrangement. Looking back on it, I probably couldn’t have done what I did without them. I did a lot of it on my own, but it was nice to have that kind of back-up." Robert Berger went on to Harvard University, Boston University School of Medicine, and became a prominent cardiac surgeon.

At the end of 1956, JF&CS again prepared to help a wave of refugees, this time Jews from Communist Hungary. Thus, in the ’40s and ’50s, JF&CS continued its long tradition, begun in the late 1800s and continuing to the present, of helping Jewish refugees from other parts of the world — Jews escaping from oppression to a better way of life.