Following the end of the Second World War, two groups vied for the leadership of the remnants of Polish Jewry. The first, dominated by Jewish members of the (PPR, Polish Workers Party) who regarded the Jewish street as the primary focus of their political activity, sought to spearhead the rebuilding of a Jewish com - munity in Poland along socialist lines. The second, headed by members of the Zionist youth movements that had played a leading role in organizing armed resistance during the Nazi occupation, opposed efforts to re-establish any sort of Jewish community in Poland on a long-term basis, preferring instead to see surviving Polish Jews commit themselves to reconstructing their lives in a Jewish state in Palestine. One of the principal means by which each of these contenders endeavoured to win adherents was to attempt to prove more adept than the other at meeting the day-to-day needs of the approximately 250,000 Holocaust survivors and repatriates from the Soviet Union who gathered in Poland during the years 1944‒6. The Zionists worked towards this goal by establishing a network of informal social service agencies, centred about institutions known as kibbutzim, that provided all Jewish comers with food, clothing, shelter, and psychological support with a mind to channelling them eventually into the ranks of Berichah, the clandestine organization that would guide them out of Poland on their way, it was hoped, to the Jewish homeland. Their rivals, in contrast, placed their hopes in large measure in the creation of an area within the borders of the new Poland where Jews might enjoy especially favourable conditions for settlement, if not a special status altogether. Beginning in mid-1945 they thought that they had found such an area in the newly acquired province of Lower Silesia, and they poured considerable effort into building a strong Jewish community in that region.

During the immediate post-war years each side viewed the other as a serious competitor. The Jewish PPR activists regularly railed against the Zionist concept of what they termed ‘emigrationism’, claiming that their rivals were artificially sowing panic among Holocaust survivors in order to make them flee Poland in fear.