As part of my thesis, I had to study the history of the Holocaust memory (or deportation in general) in Europe. In France, the memory of the deportation was dominated by the figure of the resistant deportee, celebrated as a hero, until the 1960-70s. The emergence of the Jewish deportation memory was slow to appear, mainly because de Gaulle, in the aftermath of the Liberation, called for national reconciliation. The Jewish returning from the camps initially refused the name of "racial deportee", frightened at the idea of being again sidelined by the French society. Negationism in the 1970s pushed many deportees to testify and researches since have intensified.
My questions are: how did this memory develop in the United States? Did Jewish people living in the US encourage testimony? Did the Jewish deportees who then immigrated to the US develop their own memory once there or did they try to "forget"? How did the Jewish Americans react to the immigration of the European deportees?
I am open to any kind of documentation. This is not part of my studies but a simple curiosity!
Such a great question!
So asking about the reaction of American Jews to the newly arrived Holocaust survivors and asking about the development of Jewish memory of the Holocaust are kind of different questions, but I'll try to just list a few different factors that link them and are relevant to the topic.
Let's first talk about what Jews were doing WHILE the Holocaust was going on. There's a conception that a lot of people have that the Holocaust wasn't really known about in the US while the war was going on and only became known after the war ended, the Allies liberated the camps, Eisenhower recorded them, etc. But that's not really entirely true. While in the general American consciousness the tragedy that would come to be called the Holocaust wasn't really foremost in their minds, and they certainly didn't think that what they did know was an exclusively Jewish tragedy, there were still small news bulletins about it every so often, especially starting in 1942-3, when a great deal of information became known and publicized about what was going on. Jews themselves were often (but not always) more knowledgeable. While the information about mass murder and death camps was generally buried in the middle of American newspapers, Jewish papers publicized and emphasized it, expressing their shock and horror at the events and spurring the Jewish community to vigorously support the Allied war effort. While in the minds of the American public the war against the Japanese was generally seen as more important (often for somewhat racist reasons), for the Jews, it was the defeat of Hitler that was their motivation as they fought in the war and helped maintain the home front.
Many Jewish organizations and groups also mobilized to petition the US government over this time, as they had been for years earlier, trying to open the extremely strict anti-immigration laws to allow German Jews to escape Nazi persecution. Now that they knew something about the horrors going on in Europe, their efforts redoubled, to little response from the American government. One example was the march of 400 rabbis in Washington considered an extremely radical move, where, while they were received graciously by leading members of the Senate and House, they were completely snubbed by FDR on the advice of his Jewish advisors, because the rabbis were mostly Orthodox immigrants who spoke little English and who, the advisors said, weren't the right "kind" of Jews and were, in the words of Rabbi Stephen Wise, “offending the dignity of [the Jewish] people.” While in the end the march led indirectly to the establishment of the War Refugee Board, it is a searing condemnation of the lack of receptiveness of the American government and public- specifically the State Department- to the raising of awareness about the Holocaust.
The march, as well as most of the other public consciousness raising about the Holocaust during the war, was spearheaded by Peter Bergson (the pseudonym of Hillel Kook), creator of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, whose other efforts also included a touring stage production called "We Will Never Die: A Memorial to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe” by the noted playwright Ben Hecht which starred actors like Edward G Robinson and Paul Muni and was seen by many thousands across the country including Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as hundreds of newspaper ads throughout the US urging US intervention in saving the Jews. His group was extremely controversial, with many Jews- particularly those who were more acculturated in the US- not wanting to make waves and cause American Jews to be seen as "pushy." This is not to say that people like Wise and the more secularized, less publicly outspoken Jewish leaders were completely unheeding to the catastrophe in Europe- in the end it simply means that there were two approaches to contending with the problem, with one being more outspoken and one trying to keep its head down and cooperate so as not to inflame the endemic antisemitism in the US at that time, as well as to establish an image of the Americanness of Jews. On both sides, there were many relief organizations collecting money among the Jewish community in order to provide aid for Jewish refugees from and victims of the Nazis.
Jews fully discovered the horror of the Holocaust in 1945, along with the rest of the country, when photos and newsreels of the concentration camps began to be released. Even those who had known about it before still now had to deal with the realities of what had happened to literally a third of the world Jewish population. Those Jews who had not been connected to the networks of Jews who had been made aware of the realities of the Holocaust earlier now had to learn about it for the first time. The reactions, as they had been two years earlier, were of intense despair, with many trying to memorialize those whom they had lost. I'll return to this later, as the nature of this memorial and the discussion of the Holocaust is actually a matter of fascinating debate among Jewish historians.
Probably the most significant reaction among the Jewish community was the turn toward Zionism, both during and after the war. As in 1939 the British had passed a White Paper severely limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine even as Jews were queueing up to escape Nazi Germany, some Jews were already raring for Jewish statehood and self determination. But the knowledge of the events of the Holocaust made this feeling far stronger, as Jews in many ways felt that their very helplessness in the countries in which they had lived in Europe (and, to many, in the country in which they currently lived, the US) prevented Jews from being saved and directly led to the murder of so many millions. As well, in Germany there were now hundreds of thousands of stateless Jews living in DP camps with no place to go, a mirror situation to the prewar state of affairs in Nazi Germany. Jews began to turn away from the Wise-style acquiescent diplomacy and turned toward a more outspoken way of advocating for their needs- but to be fair, they were in large part able to do this because an effect of the uncovering of the horrors of the Holocaust was a massive reversal of many of the antisemitic trends in the US, which made Jews more confident in speaking out and which made Americans more receptive to listening to them. The unceasing advocacy of many (though not all) of the Jewish community in the US for the State of Israel, which was quite successful, came in large part due to the recognition of what had just occurred to their brethren in Europe.
(I know it doesn't seem like I've answered your questions yet, but I'll get to that soon!)
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