A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a person who has lost the protection of their country of origin and who cannot or is unwilling to return there due to well-founded fear of persecution. Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting state or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) if they formally make a claim for asylum.
This article lists expulsions, refugee crises and other forms of displacement that have affected Jews.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.
The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world's oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, it was transformed into a research institute and public access library after the end of World War II and is situated in Russell Square, London.
The history of the Jews in Austria probably begins with the exodus of Jews from Judea under Roman occupation. There have been Jews in Austria since the 3rd century CE. Over the course of many centuries, the political status of the community rose and fell many times: during certain periods, the Jewish community prospered and enjoyed political equality, and during other periods it suffered pogroms, deportations to concentration camps and mass murder, and antisemitism. The Holocaust drastically reduced the Jewish community in Austria and only 8,140 Jews remained in Austria according to the 2001 census. Today, Austria has a Jewish population of 10,300 which extends to 33,000 if Law of Return is accounted for, meaning having at least one Jewish grandparent.
In customary international law, an enemy alien is any native, citizen, denizen or subject of any foreign nation or government with which a domestic nation or government is in conflict and who is liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed. Usually, the countries are in a state of declared war.
Josef Kates, born Josef Katz, was a Canadian engineer whose achievements include designing the first digital game-playing machine, and the world's first automated traffic signalling system.
Afghan refugees are citizens of Afghanistan who were forced to flee from their country as a result the continuous wars that the country has suffered since the Afghan-Soviet war, the Afghan civil war, the Afghanistan war (2001–2021) or either political or religious persecution. The 1978 Saur Revolution, followed by the 1979 Soviet invasion, marked the first major wave of internal displacement and international migration to neighboring Iran and Pakistan; smaller numbers also went to India or to countries of the former Soviet Union. Between 1979 and 1992, more than 20% of Afghanistan's population fled the country as refugees. Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, many returned to Afghanistan, however many Afghans were again forced to flee during the civil war in the 90s. Over 6 million Afghan refugees were residing in Iran and Pakistan by 2000. Most refugees returned to Afghanistan following the 2001 United States invasion and overthrow of the Taliban regime. Between 2002 and 2012, 5.7 million refugees returned to Afghanistan, increasing the country's population by 25%.
The Shanghai Ghetto, formally known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, was an area of approximately one square mile (2.6 km2) in the Hongkou district of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The area included the community around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue. Shanghai was notable for a long period as the only place in the world that unconditionally offered refuge for Jews escaping from the Nazis. After the Japanese occupied all of Shanghai in 1941, the Japanese army forced about 23,000 of the city's Jewish refugees to be restricted or relocated to the Shanghai Ghetto from 1941 to 1945 by the Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees. It was one of the poorest and most crowded areas of the city. Local Jewish families and American Jewish charities aided them with shelter, food, and clothing. The Japanese authorities increasingly stepped up restrictions, surrounded the ghetto with barbed wire, and the local Chinese residents, whose living conditions were often as bad, did not leave. By 21 August 1941, the Japanese government closed Shanghai to Jewish immigration.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
Edith Hahn Beer was an Austrian Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by hiding her Jewish identity and marrying a Nazi officer.
The Anschluss, also known as the Anschluß Österreichs, was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938.
German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.
The history of the Jews in Paraguay has been characterised by migration of Jewish people, mainly from European countries, to the South American nation, and has resulted in the Jewish Paraguayan community numbering 1,000 today.
A refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced, refugees, asylum seekers or any other huge groups of migrants.
Between 1933 and 1945, a large number of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. This exodus was triggered by the militaristic antisemitism perpetrated by the Nazi Party and by Germany's collaborators, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. However, even before the genocide itself, which began during World War II, the Nazis had widely sponsored or enforced discriminatory practices—by legislation, in many cases—against Jewish residents, such as through the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Although Adolf Hitler and the German government were initially accepting of voluntary Jewish emigration from the country, it became difficult to find new host countries, particularly as the 1930s were marked by the Great Depression, as the number of Jewish migrants increased. Eventually, the Nazis forbade emigration; the Jews who remained in Germany or in German-occupied territory by this point were either murdered in the ghettos or relocated to be systematically exploited and murdered at dedicated concentration camps and extermination camps throughout the European continent.
Esther Simpson OBE was an English humanitarian who was the Assistant Secretary, later Secretary, of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) and its successor organisations from 1933 until 1978. She worked tirelessly throughout her life to establish work and connections for refugee academics. Her work on behalf of some of the world's greatest scientific minds fleeing persecution combined affection with toughness. Refugees she helped during the Second World War included 16 future Nobel Prize winners, 74 future Fellows of the Royal Society and 34 future Fellows of the British Academy. She described her work as the "academic equivalent of the kindertransport programme".
Hilde Goldschmidt was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. Facing persecution under the Nazi regime, she sought refuge in Britain during the Second World War before establishing herself in Austria in the 1950s.
The Holocaust in Austria was the systematic persecution, plunder and extermination of Jews by German and Austrian Nazis from 1938 to 1945. Part of the wider-Holocaust, pervasive persecution of Jews was immediate after the German annexation of Austria, known as the Anschluss. An estimated 70,000 Jews were murdered and 125,000 forced to flee Austria as refugees.
