In Canada, Jewish survivors who immigrated from Europe after the Holocaust were often received cooly - even among the pre-existing Canadian Jewish community. Franklin Bialystok describes this process in his book, Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community. He argues that Canadian Jewish communities were torn between a great sense of shame for failing to provide additional material / political support to European Jews during the Holocaust, material and cultural inequity between the two groups, and even the sentiment that those who had survived "must have done something" to escape while so many had died. Ultimately, he discusses the 1960s in Canada as a period of reconciliation between the two groups - the rise of Canadian neo-Nazi ideology prompted a united response of the Canadian Jewish community. In this same period, we begin to see a united turn towards Holocaust education and "speaking out."

Bialystok provides an excellent overview of the intersections of ethnicity, religion, and experience that comprised the Canadian Jewish community in the post-war period. His explanation of the many divisions evident in this community is a nuanced and extensive contribution to the literature on identity, ethnicity, and immigration. Historiographically, Bialystok turns a sometimes critical eye upon the Canadian Jewish community and comes away with a far more complex portrait than has been previously available. In terms of public history, this book also provides insight into how different groups understand “history” and the relaying of historical knowledge as an activity that underpins group identity. This is especially clear in an extensive discussion of the Erst Zundel case with an eye upon the reaction of Jewish Canadians and Holocaust survivors.

This varied from country to country, but it's a fairly sad story across Europe. The short answer is: no, they were not welcomed back into their communities.

Many Jews returning to their homes in France, Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia or elsewhere would have found them destroyed by bombing. If their home survived, it was very likely that it would be occupied by people who often refused to leave. Although there might be legal redress for this in some cases, proving ownership wasn't necessarily a simple business in the aftermath of World War II: deeds might have been destroyed by the Nazis or by Allied bombing, there were not necessarily well-functioning courts, and if there were they were overloaded with cases. Lots of people, not exactly anxious to remain in the communities that had previously given them up to the Nazis, abandoned their property and focused instead on emigration.

If they didn't have homes to go back to, they faced a long wait. The problem of refugees and displaced persons in Europe after World War 2 was completely without precedent. The Jews, most of whom had been killed, represented a tiny fraction of this problem, compared with the enormous numbers of ethnic Germans, Balts and Eastern Europeans who had lost their homes or been expelled from them, and would need to be relocated. Most of these millions of people, the Jews included, ended up in refugee camps in Germany - often converted Nazi concentration camps. I think the last of these camps closed in 1958, which gives you some idea of how long it took to resolve the problem. Certainly some Jewish Holocaust survivors were still living in these camps as late as 1951.

It would be a mistake, too, to think that postwar Europe was free from anti-semitism. In Poland, there was substantial anti-semitic violence after the end of the war. The most famous incident was the Kielce Pogrom in 1946, when 42 Jews (themselves Holocaust survivors) were killed by a mob of townspeople. If 42 doesn't sound like a huge number, it may be worth bearing in mind there were only 200 Jews in Kielce at the time. And this is just one incident among many - by 1946 1,000-2,000 Jews had been killed in liberated Poland. Though nowhere else was as bad, there were anti-semitic disturbances across Europe in the years 1945-50 - the one I know about best is the anti-semitic riots in the UK in 1947, sparked by the murder of two British soldiers by the Irgun in Palestine. Rioters smashed windows of Jewish owned shops, attacked a Jewish wedding party, synagogues in Manchester and Derby were damaged or set on fire, and "Death To All Jews" was written over the entrance to Salford Docks (where many dockworkers were Jewish).

So essentially, Europe was not a welcoming place for a holocaust survivor, and it's no surprise that the majority of survivors wanted most of all to emigrate - some to the USA, some to South America, but above all to Israel. The Zionist argument that only a Jewish state could really guarantee the safety of the Jews would have seemed pretty convincing at the time.

I'd really like to write something longer on this, it's an incredibly interesting part of history and there's loads of other stuff I haven't mentioned about how survivors were welcomed (or not) by the existing Jewish community in the UK - which sounds similar to the situation /u/l_mack has described in Canada. I'll see if I can dig up my undergrad dissertation and add some more sources from the bibliography, but a lot of what I've talked about here is discussed in the first chapter of Postwar by Tony Judt, which is a great book.

Around 70 percent of Hungarian Jews were killed. It was particularly sad and senseless since the Axis had already lost the war by the time they got around to mass extermination in 1944.

Many of the survivors ended up in refugee camps, there were lots of orphans. Eastern and Central Europe was a huge mess for several years after war, and many of those Jews had lived in communities that no longer existed.

Also, it wasn't as if Jews were a particularly welcome presence in the country before the war.

I know from the story of Roman blum, many survivors self segregated in ny.