The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint) is an American Jewish relief organization based in New York. Founded in 1914 to aid Jews affected by the war, the Joint provides assistance to Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Joint supported, among other efforts, the resettlement of German and Austrian Jewish refugees in Latin America and even in Asia.
The Paris offices closed during the Occupation, but the Joint continued to carry out clandestine relief and Resistance activities, both in France and in other European countries.
At the height of Nazi rule, in 1942, American aid could no longer reach the ghettos in Poland and Lithuania, whose inhabitants were rapidly being murdered.
She managed to practice her craft in other Eastern European countries despite the persecution and before the Jews were deported to the extermination camps.
At the end of the war, the Joint provided support to Jewish survivors from Europe, to those who emigrated to British Mandate Palestine, and later to immigrants to the new State of Israel.
Previously, during the final months of the Occupation, the Joint provided funds to the Children’s Committee of the Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid (UJRE) through the Children’s Relief Organization (OSE), which relayed all requests from the UJRE.
After the Liberation, Joseph Minc, head of the Committee, with the consent of its members (Cécile Cerf, Szmulek Farber, Jeanne Pakin, Sophie Schwartz, Louba Pludermacher, and Isidore Bernstein), wished to receive aid directly from the Joint.
At the onset of the Cold War, the UJRE came to be viewed by the Americans as a communist political organization linked to the USSR. Joseph Minc then proposed a less controversial name: the UJRE’s Children’s Committee became the Commission Centrale de l’Enfance (CCE). Minc served as its Secretary-General.
The new designation has proven effective; the CCE receives directly from the Joint the funding essential to its operations, as well as packages of clothing for children.
As early as 1946, in a room at 14 rue de Paradis (in Paris’s 10th arrondissement), the headquarters of the UJRE, activists came to choose clothes for their children.
The Joint stopped subsidizing the CCE in January 1953.
References:
— Hobson Faure, Laura, 2018, A “Jewish Marshall Plan”? The American Jewish Presence in France after the Shoah, 1944–1954, Paris, Le Manuscrit.
— Joseph Minc, 2001, The Extraordinary Story of My Ordinary Life. Cop . Joseph Minc, Bookpole.
