How were the Jews economically right after World War 2"

by GhostPirateRobot

I know a lot of Jews lost all their money when it was seized in different European banks during the war. I am wondering what they retained after WWII.

gingerkid1234

As has already been said, this is a tremendously broad question. However, there are a couple important points to frame the discussion:

  1. After most of the Jewish population of Europe was killed, the survivors didn't form a majority of the Jewish community. No significant Jewish community had a majority of Holocaust survivors in its founder population.
  • The majority of the Jewish population immediately after the war was in the US or the Middle East (particularly Iraq and Palestine, but many countries had large Jewish populations), which weren't affected economically the way Europe was (i.e. assets weren't seized). This changed a few years later in the Middle East, but that's later on.

Anyway, post-war the survivors were often quite poor. They were essentially left with nothing, their assets seized, homes taken over by others or destroyed, etc. A significant number were living in DP camps as refugees, without much property of any kind. That said, I don't know of any economic analysis of Holocaust survivors immidiately post-war. One really isn't possible without hard numbers on basic questions like "how many Holocaust survivors were there" (which is hugely uncertain, not only because there aren't hard demographic numbers of refugees in general, but also because there's no universal definition of "Holocaust survivor"), which precludes even making a serious attempt.