The Cold War: A Community Divided
This chapter focuses on the Cold War, which split both Europe and its Jews into two camps. The Cold War imposed new barriers, both literally and figuratively. For the Jews of western Europe in particular, Soviet and American threats of unleashing nuclear missiles raised the prospect of a posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler over his ideological and ‘racial’ enemies. Divisions also arose in the communities themselves, reviving political debates from the interwar period that threatened to undo the fragile unity that leaders had attempted to forge after 1945. Yet rising East–West tensions did not totally paralyse west European Jewish communal life. Despite the formidable obstacles, both non-communist left-wing elements in the European Section of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and mainstream leaders in western Europe worked diligently to steer a middle path between the demands of local political militants and leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States.