This is an article written by a child identified as G.P. for the Avigdor High School magazine that was published before Rosh Hashanah, 1947. G.P. was originally from Italy and begins the article explaining their family’s decision to flee in the wake of the German occupation of the country. G.P. with his or her mother and siblings boarded a train and planned to cross the border into neutral Switzerland. The family, accompanied by guides, approached the border on bicycle and later on foot, taking care not to be noticed. At one point, the guides told the group to throw themselves to the ground because German patrols were passing. Finally, the guides showed them where creep though the wire fence; they injured their hands and feet but continued walking. They advanced until a light was shined in their eyes and, hearing shouts in German, they were sure that they had been caught. Fortunately, this was only a German-speaking Swiss soldier. At the Swiss border they were interrogated and then sent to a Swiss camp. G.P. remembers it as a difficult time, since they couldn’t eat anything at the non-Jewish institution. After a few weeks the family arrived in England, but, as G.P. wrote, “I think I shall never forget our troubles which we had to bear for nearly eight years.”
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Avigdor High School – Following the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, the British government approved the rescue of thousands of Jewish refugee children known as the Kindertransport. The children were taken in by foster families across the country, and religious children found themselves suddenly living in non-Orthodox or even non-Jewish homes. Rabbi Schonfeld, one of the community leaders, took it upon himself to find alternative housing options for the Orthodox children where their religious practices and traditions could be observed. One of these options was the Jewish Secondary School (JSS), which moved to Shefford with the outbreak of the war. After the war, JSS moved back to London where it was renamed the Avigdor High School. In 1946, Rabbi Schonfeld began helping child survivors in displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe. Already home to British Jewish children and the German Jewish refugee children, the Avigdor School also became home to the children who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. The staff struggled to find a way to contend with the trauma that the child survivors brought to the school and invited the children to share their experiences and stories in the school magazine as a method of healing.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
The Jews of Italy - The Italian Jewish community has ancient roots that can be traced back to the Roman era in the second century BCE. In ancient Rome the community was highly organized with several synagogues. With the introduction of Christianity to Italy the situation of Italian Jews generally declined, and anti-Jewish laws were passed. Similar to other European countries, the Middle Ages brought persecution and expulsions. However, this was also a flourishing period for Bible commentary, Talmud, Hebrew grammar, and halacha (Jewish law). Jews were also known as skilled medical practitioners, some serving as physicians to the kings, nobles, and clergy. The fifteenth century was a time of migration: many Spanish Jews arrived in Italy following the Spanish expulsion of 1492, and a few years later, more arrived from France. In the sixteenth century, when many Italian areas fell under Spanish rule, Jews fled the inquisition and moved to southern Italy and other European countries. This was also the period when the first Jewish ghetto was established in Venice and other prohibitions were issued against the Jews including a yellow badge, ghettos in additional cities, forced labour, and expulsions. This continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Influenced by liberal thought, French rule in Italy, and the decline of the Papal influence, the Jews slowly gained emancipation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1910, a Jew was prime minister of Italy, one of the first in the world. Another Jew served as mayor of Rome from 1907 to 1913, and Jews also served as senators. Italian Jews fought in World War I, half of them as officers. The 1930s brought Mussolini, fascism, and, ultimately, anti-Semitism to Italy, influenced by Nazism and the racial ideologies of the time. Despite the fascist regime’s alliance with Germany, the Italians did not initially cooperate with the deportation of Jews to the camps. The deportation of Italian Jews only began in September 1943, when the Allies captured southern Italy. While many Jews were saved by local Italians and the Church, approximately 7,500 Jews were murdered. The Jewish community has declined since World War II due to immigration to Israel and other countries, assimilation, and low birth rates. It is estimated that 45,000 Jews live in Italy today.
The Jewish Community of Britain – The first mention of Jews in Britain is from 1070. In the eleventh and twelfth century Jews were legally under the protection of the monarchs in return for heavy taxes and loans and lived mainly in the financial centres of London, Oxford, Lincoln, Bristol, and Norwich. In the late twelfth century, the Jews suffered from anti-Semitic restrictions, blood libels, riots, and massacres. One of the worst anti-Semitic massacres of the Middle Ages took place in York where the entire Jewish community was burnt to death at Clifford’s Tower. In 1290 King Edward I expelled all the Jews of Britain and their homes and properties were confiscated. For many centuries, Jews did not officially live in the country, but many lived secretly until the rule of Oliver Cromwell, when they were readmitted due to the intervention of the Dutch rabbi and leader, Menashe Ben Israel. Many of these new Jewish arrivals were of Spanish and Portuguese origins. An attempt to legalise Jewish presence in Britain was made in 1753 with the Jewish Naturalisation Act, and in the nineteenth century Jews received equal rights. The community prospered and comprised academics, bankers, scientists, and merchants. Among these distinguished British Jews of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were Sir Moses Montefiore, Nathan Mayer von Rothschild, and Benjamin Disraeli. Due to the good conditions, the lack of violence towards Jews, and religious tolerance, in the nineteenth century Britain became a target for Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. The new Jewish immigrants lived mainly in the large industrial cities, especially London, Manchester, and Leeds. The East End of London became a Jewish neighbourhood where Yiddish was commonly spoken. In the twentieth century many more Jews fleeing the Nazis arrived in Britain, including the famous kindertransport, the British rescue effort of thousands of children from Nazi-occupied Europe. The Jewish community of Britain numbers over 300,000 today. This is the fifth largest Jewish community in the world and the second in Europe.
