After the war Palestine was still a British mandate and Jewish immigration was restricted. Between 1945 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 the majority of Jews that managed to enter Palestine did so illegally. Many were intercepted by the British and interned in camps on Cyprus. Eventually, about 200,000 Jews from Europe migrated to Palestine and later Israel between the end of the war and the early 1950s.

The relationship between the She’erit Hapletah (the “surviving remnant”, the European Jews that survived the Holocaust) and the Yishuv (the Jews already settled in Palestine) was a complicated one fraught with many conflicting feelings on both sides.

The Yishuv felt that the European Jews should have seen the writing on the wall earlier, before the war, and migrated en masse to Palestine to help them build the new Jewish homeland away from the constraints and (in their eyes) humiliations inherent to the Galut (exile). The Yishuv saw the Galut as demeaning to Jews and Jews who remained in exile as subservient in spirit, in contrast to the “new Jew”, the strong and confident pioneer settler that was emerging in Palestine. The Galut was to them ultimately an unsustainable way of life as the goyim (gentiles) would never accept Jews as equal citizens and life in exile would always be dangerous. The Holocaust naturally confirmed them in this view.

On the other hand there were those in the Yishuv who were consumed by guilt over their relative inactivity in helping the European Jews. We will not go into that hornet's nest at the moment, suffice to say that many European zionists felt they had been abandoned by their partners in Palestine.

After the war, the Yishuv tended to focus on the kindred spirits they perceived among the Holocaust survivors: those that did resist the nazis, the ghetto fighters and partisans. These were groups that for the most part grew out of the pre-war zionist organisations that had been growing stronger all through the twenties and thirties in Europe. These zionist groups in Europe were preparing their members for eventual aliyah (immigration into Israel, literally “ascent”) by organising all kinds of training, instruction in Hebrew, lectures on the Holy Land, agricultural summer camps and a whole host of other activities mainly aimed at young people. They maintained strong organisational and financial ties with various zionist groups in Palestine before the war and it was these ties that the Yishuv wanted to reestablish after the war.

The Yishuv traveled to the displaced persons camps in Europe where the survivors were waiting for a visa to get out of Europe and initially mainly worked with the remnants of these zionist resistance fighters as these were all eager to emigrate to Palestine, which was not the case for all the survivors. Many survivors wanted to go to the US, Canada and Australia and many did.

They were part of the third group that we haven't mentioned so far and which was in fact the majority of Holocaust survivors, including among those that eventually reached Israel: the non-resisters, the ones who were “victims only”. These were looked at rather askance in Israel. They were the embodiment of the subservient, passive, in fact “degenerate” Jew produced by the exile, the kind of Jew the Israelis wanted to distance themselves from. Whereas the ghetto fighters and partisans were welcomed with respect and immediately started building kibbutzim that they named for their heroic martyrs that fell in the fight against the nazis, the majority of “ordinary” Holocaust survivors initially found few people willing to listen to their stories. They were the targets of a curious mixture of contempt (as “sheep to the slaughter”) and guilt because the Yishuv had hardly reached out to them in their hour of need. It would take decades for their voices to be properly heard and accorded a place in the collective memory of the state of Israel.