At the height of an international refugee crisis bringing hundreds of thousands of eastern and east central European Jews to France's soil, something extraordinary occurred in the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg. In the spring of 1938, in a three-storey house on a tree-lined street in a bourgeois neighbourhood, the doors opened for the inauguration of a Jewish youth centre. The Merkaz Ha’Noar was to provide the city's Jewish youth movements with shared space for their headquarters, open meeting areas and a library.Footnote 1 Supplanting the community's centre of the synagogue on the Quai Kléber in the medieval core of the city, the Merkaz Ha’Noar became the heart of Strasbourg's vibrant Jewish cultural life in the months before the evacuation of the region during World War II. This home for Jewish youth is a striking example of the successes of Jewish productive energies on the eve of utter catastrophe.
This situation conflicts with scholars’ observations on the ultimate failure of Jewish movements to unite their causes in the capital in the face of an escalating crisis. Characterized by a rapid surge in its size and diversity in the interwar years, Parisian Jewish communal unification efforts seemed to have largely failed by the late 1930s. In face of a population explosion, Jewish French nationals tended to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ elements in Jewish immigration, which, according to Jeremy Guedj, made it difficult to create religious solidarities, and effectively blocked foreign integration.Footnote 2 In contrast, Jewish solidarity thrived in the Franco-German borderlands. An inquiry into youth culture in Strasbourg illustrates a set of local Jewish communal energies that starkly contrasted with the Parisian case.
Looking at French Jewish organizational life in a provincial city can provide nuance to a broader picture typically extracted from the Parisian case, a crude picture of decline and dissolution heralding a tragic outcome under Vichy and the German occupation.Footnote 3 Jewish social assistance organizations like the Russian-founded OZE (OSE), planted roots in Paris’ Jewish quarters in 1933 and greeted waves of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria. OSE and other philanthropic societies established a number of children's homes outside the city, even one specifically designed to treat children who had experienced neuro-psychiatric trauma from the flight.Footnote 4 Yet in spite of the development of an aid-driven political solidarity between French and foreign-born Jews through the decade – a phenomenon facilitated by the rise of antisemitism alongside French xenophobia – cultural integration of the two communities was resisted by strong voices from all sides. Two-thirds of some 76,000 Jews deported from France during the war, the largest number from Paris, were of Polish, Austrian and German provenance, a statistic that, for Maurice Rasjfus, highlights the biases and divisions between foreign-born and native Jews, especially at the highest levels of Jewish communal authority.Footnote 5
Strasbourg had a very different wartime experience from Paris. With Strasbourg having been evacuated and left empty nearly a year before the war's outbreak in France, most Jews had been evacuated to the south by the time the Germans seized and annexed Alsace. Yet in the years leading up to the war, Strasbourg's active and vigilant Jewish public life, including its youth movements, display a unique communal sensibility. Alsace's proximity to Nazi Germany and the region’s embrace of right-wing nationalist politics in the 1930s suggest Alsatian Jews were generally more aware of the Nazi threat than their coreligionists in the capital. Refugee aid and assistance networks in Strasbourg were co-ordinated and well organized to greet thousands of German refugees entering France's eastern borders. And, as in Paris, Jewish youth were increasingly understood as the key to various forms of community regeneration, and a bulwark against impending crisis. Yet the community's unique socio-economic and ethnic composition, combined with the distinctiveness of Strasbourg's urban setting, created an altogether sensational result. The Merkaz Ha’Noar found no match in Paris. This institution presents an anomaly in the history of Jewish diversity struggles in modern France: a case of unique outcomes of more generally employed strategies for dealing with a crisis that was communal, local, national and international.
While some elements in other Jewish communities did strive for unity and co-operation, the Merkaz was, by all accounts, a unique building in a peculiar setting. However, as a ‘normal exception,’ the youth centre brings the experiences of, and interactions between, Jews into sharper relief. Not only does this case-study present the particularities of the Strasbourgeois community and the diversity of the broader French Jewish experience on the eve of persecution and destruction; this uniquely marginal community can also help historians of Paris understand the structures and processes governing everyday Jewish life in the centre before and during the occupation.
Strasbourg's Merkaz Ha’Noar is a case-study for the unique ways that marginal populations, in this case, religious and ethnic minorities, configure public life and culture through the built and appropriated environment. This example allows me to make two central claims. First, the social, cultural and economic development of Strasbourg's Jewish community was deeply embedded within the city's urban evolution under the Reichsland period. The Merkaz's location highlights the peculiarity of an integrated yet proud and visible Jewish community in the late interwar years. Second, a closer look at the Merkaz can offer a window onto the physical spaces that operated as a training ground for Jewish resistance movements during World War II. The spatial settings of the Merkaz, home to Jewish youth as well as to the broader Jewish community, can help us understand the ways in which Strasbourg's Jews forged solidarities that transcended political and cultural divides that plagued the Parisian Jewish community.
I apply insights from urban and architectural history to illuminate everyday interactions and experiences on the periphery that nuance a broader national narrative typically told from the centre. In their article on the social meanings of a home in sixteenth-century Rome, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen use domestic and urban place to understand the texture of everyday life, arguing, ‘Romans, when they strove to control and label the enclosures of dwellings, improvised their moves within a cultural repertoire.’Footnote 6 In 1930s Strasbourg, the Merkaz served as a Jewish communal home, and thinking about this physical edifice and its urban context can similarly help illuminate a range of communal tensions as well as strategies to overcome them.
At the same time, an approach incorporating architectural and urban perspectives within a broader set of social historical methodologies demonstrates the great value of categories of space and place in the practice of microhistory. The Merkaz, while a social artefact of the late 1930s, was simultaneously a physical marker of a much longer and unique urban history of the city's Jewish community. Microhistory is a diverse set of practices motivated by manifold ideologies, and with various ends. This case's uniqueness, then, can be useful not only to think about the longer history of this community, but also to ruminate over the peculiarity of this singular moment. It is precisely the anomalous unit, or ‘normal exception’, that can, with proper reading, reveal clues and codes about the past that may escape the historian's purview with more general and representative units of study.Footnote 7 The Merkaz was a unique case, but its distinctiveness is precisely what gives it value. If, as Spiro Kostof has pointed out, ‘cities are amalgams of buildings and people’, then in order to understand fully this particular group of people and processes, we must seek to uncover the ‘inhabited settings’ that play such a vital role in shaping ‘the mundane and the extraordinary’.Footnote 8
Finally, this study helps contextualize the energy and character of a cohort of significant actors in the Jewish resistance during World War II. Strasbourg was home to a community of young Jewish people trained to co-operate, organize, execute projects and use survival skills in dangerous situations.Footnote 9 Lucien Lazare's research on French Jewish resistance networks and rescue operations emphasizes the power of space and place in fashioning a generation of young Alsatian Jews who, when dispersed into the south of France after the evacuation of the region in 1939, regrouped and recalibrated their communal energies in new environments.Footnote 10 Thousands of internal Jewish migrants brought their social structures with them to new towns and cities in the southern zone, setting up shop or joining up with local movement branches. Thanks to effective leadership, members of these peacetime youth movements became engaged in wartime philanthropy, education and mutual social assistance in rural agricultural centres, as well as resistance and clandestine rescue networks in Paris and the southern zone.Footnote 11
This type of study is especially welcome in Jewish history. France's Jewish population, a quintessentially urban people, is typically examined from its Parisian ‘centre’. To some extent, there is good reason for this. The largest and most ethnically and economically diverse Jewish population in France lived in Paris, the administrative centre of Jewish religious and administrative life from the Napoleonic era onward. The central Jewish seminary, located in Paris from 1859, furnished French provincial communities with rabbis for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The largest Jewish deportations during the Holocaust took place in Nazi-occupied Paris. However, a Paris-centred focus obscures the local variety and texture of Jewish life in the provinces. As David Garrioch has succinctly argued, ‘Paris is not France.’Footnote 12
Strasbourg's location in the borderlands of Alsace, routinely passed between France and Germany over some two hundred years, marked the city with unique features, cultural traditions and distinct urban development. But Strasbourg also offers an alternative vision of modern French Jewish life that defies scholarly interpretations of Jewish communal impotence during the interwar and war years.Footnote 13 The history of Strasbourg's Jewish community provides an extraordinary example of Jewish social and cultural innovation during the interwar period, the seeds of which were sown while the region was annexed to Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1918. This study contributes to European Jewish studies by underlining the significance of concrete, urban settings in examining the everyday experiences, interactions and social practices of Jewish public life.
The Merkaz is an example of what political theorist Margaret Kohn has called a ‘house of the people’, a space that ‘integrate[s] individuals into a shared conception of reality’ and that facilitates ‘change by creating distinctive locations to develop new identities and practices’.Footnote 14 While antisemitism at home and abroad put extraordinary pressures on the Parisian Jewish community, in Strasbourg, the 1930s were years that often saw integration and accord. This house was certainly built (or repurposed) by its inhabitants. In illustrating the power of the built environment in forging new kinds of communities, identities and politics, the youth centre offers a unique location from which to reimagine Jewish and French history on the eve of World War II. In its brief existence before the evacuation of Alsace in 1939, the Merkaz managed to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. It brought together Jewish communal energies and youth groups that, in cities lacking such a centralizing structure, remained largely fragmented through the crises of antisemitism and economic depression that characterized the late 1930s. The Merkaz was not only the heart of a diverse and vibrant youth culture, but a locus for broader ‘adult’ Jewish cultural activity in the city and the region. It served as a model for other Jewish communities in towns in the eastern provinces, who often consulted with Strasbourg Jewish leaders when they built their own youth centres.
Finally, this case-study also invites us to think about the city's peculiar urban landscape. Paris is typically the template for the thick description of individuals’ experiences of urbanity called for by Michel de Certeau, when he noted ‘space is a practiced place’, and Walter Benjamin's 1930s Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the place from which modernity can be observed and experienced.Footnote 15 Yet, for all its centrality, its enormity and its diversity, the French capital had no equivalent to the Merkaz Ha’Noar: in fact, even established and successful youth movements like the Éclaireurs et Éclaireuses israélites de France struggled to secure meeting space in the capital, and often resorted to occupy consistorial spaces in the ninth arrondissement.Footnote 16 The Parisian Jewish youth press reported on the eruption of fierce and violent debate among various Jewish youth movement delegations at meetings designed to bring groups together.Footnote 17
In contrast, Strasbourg's Merkaz embodied the unique character of the city's Jewish public life, a culture shaped by the city's complex French and German roots, a history of negotiation and exchange, and facilitated by its particular class homogeneity. In Strasbourg, a city with no historic Jewish quarter, young Jews put their politics aside to establish themselves in their new home in the heart of the city's urban extension, a modern neighbourhood constructed during the Reichsland period.Footnote 18 This case-study suggests the importance of the city in Jewish life beyond Paris on the eve of World War II.
Jews, urbanization and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Strasbourg
Jewish populations in towns and villages throughout the eastern French provinces were not ignorant to the rise of right-wing and fascist politics at home and abroad.Footnote 19 A range of autonomist nationalisms developed in the area, and a number of parties closely aligned with Nazi policies gained some footing in Alsace in the late 1930s.Footnote 20 Beyond electoral politics, xenophobia and antisemitism spiked, fired by fears of economic competition with foreign Jewish refugees in an already dangerously depressed economy. Early in the refugee crisis, Jewish and non-Jewish business owners in Metz complained to their merchant association about posters continually being affixed to their storefronts imploring passersby to ‘Buy French – Don't Buy Anything From Jews’.Footnote 21 Furthermore, Alsace's proximity to Nazi Germany and its embrace of right-wing politics in the 1930s suggest Alsatian Jews were generally more aware of the Nazi threat than their coreligionists in the capital, and the community increasingly understood its youth as a bulwark against impending crisis. These geopolitical factors encouraged interest and support for the Merkaz, and also help explain longer-term communal enthusiasm for unification of Strasbourg's myriad Jewish groups and movements.
The background of Jewish communal integration can also be traced beyond the immediate conditions of the interwar economic, social and political crises through the nineteenth century. In many ways, the history of the city's Jewish population is one deeply inflected by Strasbourg's urban development. Nearly 20 years before the Franco-Prussian war, a tourist's guide for the Vosges described Strasbourg as a city in transition, ‘not yet a modern city, yet still not completely medieval’.Footnote 22 Not even a century later, Strasbourg had become a truly European metropolis. During the Reichsland period, the city experienced a rapid urban and demographic growth spurt, and constructed new neighbourhoods north-east of its medieval French core.
Strasbourg's urbanization and modernization in the nineteenth century occurred in tandem with another major demographic transformation, the settling of Jews, which had been prohibited from the late fourteenth century until the late eighteenth century.Footnote 23 Once Jews were readmitted, their process of urbanization and modernization proceeded rapidly for most of the nineteenth century.Footnote 24 In the nineteenth century, Jews from neighbouring areas moved to Strasbourg in droves, eager to partake in urban economic and industrial life.Footnote 25 After the Franco-Prussian war, as many as 12,000 Jews living in the newly German region emigrated to Paris and abroad, selecting French over German citizenship. But rapid urban growth and economic opportunity created internal immigration, drawing local Jews to the area, as well as German Jews, and some Jews from eastern Europe. As a result, while Alsace's total Jewish population dropped from 3 per cent to 2 per cent, Strasbourg's Jewish population increased by 87.2 per cent between 1871 and 1910, and was largely composed of bourgeois professionals and middle-class business and factory owners.Footnote 26
How Strasbourg's Jewish population interacted with the modern city was of particular interest to sociologist E. Schnurmann, who published a thesis on the Jews of Alsace in the 1930s.Footnote 27 As Jewish life in Strasbourg became more modern, urban and bourgeois, he wrote, Jews had also become less particularist and isolationist. Jewish birthrates, for instance, had decreased significantly since the turn of the century, signalling a convergence between Jewish and broader bourgeois patterns of life in Strasbourg.Footnote 28 Traditional elements of the city's Jewish community saw a potential danger in the rapid urbanization and modernization during the Reichsland years, a process that evidently continued after France's liberation of Alsace in 1918. Youth frequently emerged at the centre of these public debates in the Jewish community.Footnote 29 One editorialist in the Jewish press pointed out that ‘youth lives in complete ignorance of Judaism. Familial education, at one time sufficient, is no longer sufficient today.’Footnote 30 The Merkaz's programme, published for the first time in the Tribune juive in May 1938, echoed some of these more general concerns, and blamed the urban environment for diverting the attentions of young Strasbourg Jews from their families, community and Jewish identity.
Our youth, attracted by facile pleasures, fill the cafés and dancehalls, or they are won over by the skillful propaganda of political parties. In both cases, youth is moving towards a total dejudaization, losing its human value and bloats the group of uninteresting people that furnish our enemies with so many arguments against us.Footnote 31
Yet in spite of their danger, these conditions of the urban and middle class of Jews were helpful in integrating Jewish refugees during the refugee crisis. Jewish Strasbourg did experience post-World War I immigration from the east, and thus was well equipped to greet their German and Austrian coreligionists after Hitler's rise to power.Footnote 32 Furthermore, the first waves of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany for Alsace were of the middle or middling class, and choosing these locations for linguistic convenience, family ties and business connections.Footnote 33 In the late 1930s, shared social class, as well as a similar western European (and Germanic) culture between foreigners and locals made it easy for many German and Austrian Jewish refugees to integrate into Alsatian life. For instance, young Léo Cohn and his family fled Nazi Germany for Paris with his family in the spring of 1933. Later in the decade, Cohn moved to Strasbourg and became a veritable community leader in the tense years before the outbreak of war, assuming the position as director of the Merkaz Ha’Noar.
While the conditions of the 1933 crisis helped increase the flow of Jewish migration to the Alsatian capital, Strasbourg's longer Jewish history is also key to understanding its peculiarity.Footnote 34 In Paris, where Jews were a marginal people living in a big and busy city, the Jewish quarter of the fourth district, the Pletzl, developed as a densely populated Jewish neighbourhood in order to retain ties of community, religious faith and cultural practices.Footnote 35 In contrast, there was no comparable Jewish quarter in Strasbourg because Jews were not permitted to reside within the city for some five centuries. In the nineteenth century, Jewish public life was rapidly woven into broader public life. The greatest example of the unique urban integration and modernization patterns of Strasbourg's Jewish community is the magnificent consistorial synagogue. Built on the Quai Kléber, one of the most central and visible locations in the city, the grand synagogue was located steps away from the central market and the train station, and between the busiest roads in the city's commercial core.Footnote 36
Remarkably, in a system that afforded Jews fewer rights than they had in Republican France, Jewish life blossomed during the Reichsland period. Jewish social and economic life was tied to the expansion of the city through Imperial urban building projects. The Imperial German palace, the university campus, the new train station, armories, parks and squares were all designed to efface the city's French identity and mark it as modern and German. Urban development was envisioned as a potent force of Germanic assimilation, ‘a window of the material and intellectual power of the new empire’.Footnote 37 The most sprawling of these building projects, the city's new urban extension, the Neustadt (new city), was designed to relocate the new regime's power from the old French city centre into these new German spaces. Imperial German authorities used vernacular building projects, including new neighbourhoods of buildings with gas heating, electricity and full plumbing, as well as modern roads and a tram system, to attract German migrants to the Reichsland capital.Footnote 38
The Merkaz's address on one of the main arteries of the new German neighbourhood indicates a large degree of Jewish cultural and economic activity in this new quarter.Footnote 39 After the war, when Strasbourg was French once more, Jews had been settled comfortably in German-built areas for years. Commercial and personal announcements in the Tribune juive reveal a vibrant Jewish economic and cultural life along rue Oberlin, an impressive boulevard stretching from the Quai Kléber to the place de Bordeaux (Schiltigheimer-Platz) north of the city centre. While many emigration patterns lead historians to highlight Alsatian Jewish resistance to German rule, the blossoming of Jewish life in Neustadt indicates the degree to which Jewish Strasbourgeois were important components of Alsatian urban modernization, and, further, were able to benefit from aspects of the city's concrete German legacy through the interwar period.
The establishment of the Merkaz Ha’Noar in one of the city's most modern and bourgeois quarters underlines how these late nineteenth-century urban trends were well established in the post-World War I era once the areas had been returned to French control. The parallel and overlapping accounts of modernization, urbanization and Jewish public life came to a head in the 1930s, with a well-integrated, largely bourgeois, and yet very visible Jewish youth community. An early wave of post-World War I immigration of Polish Jews had already primed the community for newcomers. By the late 1930s, the arrival of assimilated middle-class German coreligionists fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria were met with effective aid and assistance networks. This narrative is an important corrective to more Paris-centric stories that emphasize the fragmentation and isolation of a diverse and deeply stratified Jewish community in crisis in the capital. In all its historical, geographical and spatial peculiarity, the Jewish community of Strasbourg found different ways to mobilize community energy in the face of impending crisis.
Building the house of the young Jewish people
In 1938, Jewish communal life in Paris was preoccupied with the refugee crisis. The consistory and welfare committees quibbled with, battled against and struggled amid other desperate organizations to support unending waves of refugees fleeing persecution. By the end of the decade, attempts to unite native French-born Jews, eastern European Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Jewish refugees from Austria, Germany and Romania, had largely failed, leaving the Parisian Jewish community fragmented and vulnerable to anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish legislation after the fall of the Popular Front.Footnote 40
On France's eastern borders, the Jewish community had also been pursuing the goal of unification, and with remarkably different results. In Strasbourg, organization and co-ordination was met with resounding support, and exhibited great successes. Recognizing that the spread of antisemitism and right-wing nationalism put world Jewry in grave danger, one local activist commented in the pages of the local Jewish newspaper the Tribune juive, ‘more than ever before, today's youth has more of a need to organize itself’. An educated, engaged youth in Strasbourg was of vital importance to France's Jewish community at large, because ‘the Jewish youth of a country functions as the thermometer of the situation of the Jews of that country’.Footnote 41
The strategy for Jewish fortification through unification in Strasbourg began with the mingling and merging of Jewish youth groups and movements in the early 1930s. Political and practical differences were set aside in favour of a pluralistic vision of Jewish activity and identity. In 1934, several Jewish youth groups dedicated to excursions and education had fused into a single organization characterized by a ‘positive Judaism’. Few young French Jews were spiritually or physically prepared for a national renaissance in a new land.Footnote 42 The new Ha’Tikwah Hebrew Youth Federation combined the aims of various Jewish and outdoors education clubs into a larger project aiming to regenerate eastern French Jews culturally and spiritually within France's borders. Other Jewish youth groups remained separate but operated alongside the Ha’Tikwah, such as the Éclaireurs israélites de France, the Emouna study group, and Brit Ha’bonim (a Zionist group with socialist leanings).
This administrative strategy of unification also had a concrete spatial component: to gather the city's Jewish youth under a single roof. In January 1933, months before the German federal election and weeks before Hitler's nomination as chancellor, Strasbourg's Jewish community announced the renewal of plans articulated by earlier administrations to build a community centre to accommodate ‘all manifestations of our community's Jewish life’.Footnote 43 While the idea of a ‘Jewish home’ figures in traditional discourses on Judaic practices of marriage and family rearing in the private sphere, the term had evolved with the rise of modern political Zionism to encompass the national sphere.Footnote 44 During the interwar period, these ideas also expanded into discussions about Jewish life outside of the Holy Land, in particular to the integration of Jews in European communities. In the 1930s, Jewish communal authority lauded the collaboration of youth as a powerful tool against the new dangers faced by the community and evoked the idea of building a home as a key strategy for developing this unity.Footnote 45 The representatives of youth groups who remained separate from the Ha’Tikwah federation were animated by similar collaborative drives and interests in acquiring a dedicated physical space, and issued a combined statement in the local Jewish press about the ‘wishes of Strasbourg's youth’ to build a ‘house’ for all Jewish youth movements in the city.Footnote 46
The proposals, discussions and fundraising relayed on the pages of Strasbourg's Jewish press finally came to fruition in the spring of 1938. In April, the Merkaz Ha’Noar was inaugurated at 29 rue Oberlin.Footnote 47 The celebration began even before its grand opening: ‘The House of Jewish Youth in Strasbourg will soon open its doors to the activities of all member-organizations’ the co-ordinating committee of the centre announced in the local Jewish press. ‘Even before the final installations. . .are completed and our meetings can be transported from their somber and primitive locations to a new atmosphere of joy and light, we address our most lively thanks to the administrative committee of the community, and of public opinion, that supported. . .the opening of this home.’Footnote 48 The 15 rooms in the building were ‘hardly enough’ for the plethora of activities already unfolding within the local population of young Jews.
Jewish journalists, activists and communal authorities recognized youth's power to transform the building into a positive living space. The Merkaz, located on a modern boulevard lined with dozens of Jewish homes and businesses, was a repurposed home that was constructed in 1883.Footnote 49 It was neither a sacred space, nor one of explicitly monumental political significance. Yet in spite of its rather ordinary design, the building came to hold a combination of political, religious and social functions for young Jews and the broader Strasbourg community before the evacuation of the region in autumn 1939. It was not necessarily its architecture that the Tribune juive applauded when it announced the inauguration of the building, but rather its potential to ‘[form] and [establish] identity’.Footnote 50 No less than 20 groups including Hatikwah, Torah W’Awoda (a Zionist scouting organization), Yechouroun (a religious boy's club), the Jewish boy and girl scouts, the city's Jewish sporting club and choir and study groups were expected to ‘infuse life’ to the home. Dr Joseph Weill of the Strasbourg consistory proclaimed that under its roof, young people would become ‘architects’ of this vibrant Jewish culture.Footnote 51 The centre's charter, published in the youth bulletin of the Tribune juive in May, stated, ‘your nice thoughts will beautify the soul of this house, so kill the bad thoughts that will tarnish it’.Footnote 52 The ‘house of Jewish youth’ also exerted its own power over the people that dwelled within it. As youth culture swept across the continent, Strasbourg's Jewish communal authorities articulated a fear that complete secularization would result from the widening generation gap. Furthermore, ‘in our rapidly modernizing society, adults and parents no longer [have] the knowledge with which to raise and instruct youth in our traditions’.Footnote 53 This physical space and its vernacular architecture were hailed as tools to shield and fortify Jewish youth, preserve Jewish tradition and protect the Jewish people from rising antisemitism.
Monumental design is often used to confer power of the state, but the vernacular built environment also has the power to encourage social experiences, or ‘the encounter’, an invaluable component of political and social movements. Discussing the ‘house of the people’ prevalent among the popular classes throughout Europe at the turn of the century, political theorist Margaret Kohn points out that workers’ co-operative movements first took their shape on the factory floors, in cafés and public houses. The Merkaz serves as a model for Kohn's observations on the political power of modest spaces. For Kohn, bodies meet in physical spaces. The built environment, monumental or domestic, provides a site in which ‘intersecting forces’ can meet in order to ‘facilitate new solidaristic and egalitarian forms of interaction’.Footnote 54
There was endless opportunity for sociability in this new home, wherein three storeys were filled with rooms of varying sizes housing the headquarters of youth groups with their diverse projects, political ideologies and religious commitments. Larger shared spaces, such as the library, study rooms and meeting rooms, were mandated spaces for shared youth activity as well as the religious and secular needs of the broader Jewish community. Informal Sabbath gatherings for youth were held regularly at the centre. Young and old were invited for public lectures and for parallel religious services during holidays.Footnote 55
The groups of various social and political interests inhabited the space, ‘[made] it [their] own, mark[ed] it, model[led] it, shap[ed] it’.Footnote 56 The Éclaireurs israélites de France (ÉIF), founded in Paris in 1923, had its second largest branch in Alsace, and set up its Strasbourg headquarters in the Merkaz, and played a key role in its renovation.Footnote 57 The ÉIF elevated physical education and manual labour to the level of religious and national duty, making young Jews ‘builders, not talkers’.Footnote 58 Woodwork and bricolage were important activities for young scouts, glorified in ÉIF literature and fiction, and underscored in the personal journals of boys and young men involved in the movement.Footnote 59 Raymond Winter, 15 years old, recorded the first projects undertaken by his group: a set of lampshades for the Merkaz, resulting in an ‘assailment’ of orders, and eight bookcases for the library, ‘a gigantic project requiring a superhuman effort’.Footnote 60 These projects were social experiences that bound these young men to their new ‘home’ and to their new ‘family’ within it.
While there is a dearth of material documenting the quotidian operations of groups, there is ample evidence that their activities did overlap. These energies are evident in some organizational literature from the 1920s.Footnote 61 In 1938, the conservative religious boys’ group Yechouroun was taking its members on outdoors excursions remarkably similar to those being organized by the Jewish scouts.Footnote 62 This season also saw the Youth Fair, organized by ‘all of Strasbourg's Jewish youth associations’ for the spring holiday of Purim, where both religious and secular-themed theatre pieces and musical performances were scheduled. Young Zionists sold food and other products from Palestine, and Yechouroun members manned religious discussion stands. There were lotteries and prizes, games, masks and costume contests, and even a mock ‘Arab village’.Footnote 63
Life at the Merkaz fortified and enhanced these constructive and collaborative energies. In 1939, all Merkaz groups – including the ÉIF, Zionist militants, Orthodox Jewish activists and many others, as well as delegates from Jewish groups in other eastern towns – participated in a two-day gathering. Rather than argue over politics, ideology or religious practice, these young people went hiking, took physical education courses, attended religious services and bible study groups, cooked, sang, danced and played together in the woods and at the centre. A closing lecture by local Jewish activists on the final day implored young people to show their love for God by learning about nature, engaging in agriculture and doing all they could to greet, understand and love foreign (largely German) Jewish refugees arriving in Alsace in droves.Footnote 64 These religious and social imperatives were rooted in a common youth culture facilitated by the Merkaz.
In the midst of a climate of rising antisemitism in France and abroad, many Jewish leaders laboured spiritually, morally and physically to fortify their youth. Paris’ volatile Jewish youth climate in the 1930s was preceded by over a decade of creative community and movement building. Mulhouse's Jewish community made great strides under the energetic authority of Rabbi René Hirscher, who published the region's first regular youth bulletin, Kadimah (Forward), earning Strasbourg's communal praise.Footnote 65 Still, many community leaders from neighbouring towns looked to Strasbourg as a model for the development of youth culture. In February 1939, Colmar's small community inaugurated its own Jewish youth centre in a room in the Koïfhüs, the historic customs house. Representatives from Strasbourg were invited to the inauguration, including Merkaz director Léo Cohn, who was invited to speak at the ceremony.Footnote 66 Yet while it was admired from afar, Strasbourg's youth centre never quite found its match.
Conclusions
The ÉIF field journal kept by Raymond Winter and his friends in Strasbourg's ‘Shield’ troop reveal a Jewish youth deeply engaged in building of a new home in late interwar France. Like many of his ÉIF friends, Winter was born in the area in the early 1920s to a middle-class French Alsatian Jewish family. Like Winter, many of his contemporaries joined youth groups of various stripes that were brought together under the aegis of the Merkaz in the late 1930s. The repurposing of the building, along with a variety of activities and other mundane interactions, brought young people like Winter together in this concrete expression of a vibrant Jewish life in 1938.Footnote 67
The inauguration of a home dedicated to Strasbourg's Jewish youth on the eve of World War II and in the midst of a major refugee crisis was a unique achievement that contrasts starkly with the state of affairs in Paris. Strasbourg's Jewish community built the Merkaz Ha’Noar in a city that was both French and German, in a space both sacred and secular, and, above all, very public and very bourgeois. However, the relative homogeneity of Strasbourg Jewry and the community's relatively new physical presence in this rapidly modernizing city can help us understand the confidence of religious and communal authority in constructing new Jewish spaces.Footnote 68 The Merkaz was not simply a physical meeting space beyond home, school and temple: it was the marker of Jewish life in transition, within a broader set of urban and cultural transformations in late interwar Strasbourg. These conditions within the urban and cultural landscape were unique to Strasbourg and lend insight into how this project was envisioned and why it succeeded in a moment of national and international crisis.
The Merkaz figured as a training ground for French Jewish resistance during World War II. After the evacuation, Winter and his family moved to Montpellier, along with thousands of Alsatian Jewish families. He was quick to join, as were many others, the local (and clandestine) branch of the youth movement he had been a part of in Strasbourg. After joining up with the Sixième, the ÉIF's underground resistance network, Winter took on a false name and became deeply involved with rescue and resistance projects across the southern zone until his arrest and subsequent execution by the Gestapo in 1944. He was 21 years of age. Interwar spaces of co-operation and unity, like organizational life, are key to understanding how many young politicized Strasbourgeois Jews, displaced and disbanded after the evacuation in 1939, regrouped in underground rescue-resistance networks in the southern zone that were highly organized and effective.
It is because of its uniqueness, and not in spite of it, that the Merkaz Ha’Noar is worth investigating in detail and within its urban context. This youth centre was the product of its physical and historical environment and the enabler of a unique cultural phenomenon. Beyond its interwar context, it stands as evidence for the complexity and regional diversity of Jewish life in modern France. If, as Kevin Lynch has argued, we ‘penetrate into the actual experience of places by their inhabitants, in the course of their daily lives’, we can approach this creative moment and render it intelligible.Footnote 69 The Merkaz suggests the power of place to create community, and the power of marginal communities to mould their built environments to produce novel communal expressions and configurations with critical consequences.
