Yiddish Culture in Paris after Liberation and the Holocaust, 1944–46

In December 1944, four months after France was liberated from Nazi occupation and French collaboration, the Yiddisher folks-khor (Jewish People's Chorus) performed three Yiddish songs at the Naye prese's, the communist Yiddish daily newspaper in Paris, 1944 New Year's Ball. Seven months later, the Parisian Jewish avant-garde theatre PYAT returned to the stage to celebrate its tenth anniversary on July 11, 1945, three days before France's national fête. The Yidisher folks-khor, billed as the Chorale Populaire Juive, took the stage in their "first [official] performance since liberation" on December 28, 1946 with a French-language program.

This paper will examine Yiddish culture in Paris during the immediate post-World War II period. This focus on Paris, the European city to which many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had flocked after the war, joining the estimated 180,000 Jews remaining in France in 1946, gives us a unique entry point to evaluate how a transnational cultural and national community reconstituted itself in response to liberation, war, and genocide.