JEWISH COMMUNITIES in western Europe experienced the Cold War as both an internal trauma and an external threat. The truce between politically radical and moderate groups in the first two years after the Second World War, particularly in the communities of France and Belgium, that had allowed the establishment of umbrella organizations would be broken by the early 1950s. External ideological pressures affected the day-to-day activities of local communities to a far greater extent than American aid policies did in the postwar period. While mainstream leaders attempted to prevent American Jewish organizations from imposing their perspectives of the East–West conflict, communists generally acceded to Soviet and local party demands to adopt militant perspectives and policies.

The conflict between the Soviet Union and the West also created a physical and political barrier between east and west European Jewry. In the immediate post-war period, there had been a significant movement of populations and ideas across the Continent. As discussed earlier, hundreds of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe migrated westwards. Yiddish theatre and literature written by Belgian, French, and Polish dramatists and writers also crisscrossed Europe. East and west European Jewish representatives met to discuss and debate the fate of continental Jewry at Europe-wide and international conferences sponsored by the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

With the breakdown of the wartime unity between the Soviet Union and the United States, all formal contact between the Jews of the east and the west ceased. Newly established regimes in what became known as the Soviet Bloc closed their borders to emigration to and assistance from the West. The heating up of political rhetoric also meant that the embryonic development of a distinctive European position in world Jewish affairs, which was most clearly expressed by members of the European Executive of the WJC and by Polish representatives at its conferences, would soon be replaced by sharply contrasting positions that closely mirrored the perspectives of the two blocs.

As the British Jewish historian Max Beloff wrote, it was as if European Jews had been thrown back into the First World War when they found themselves pitted against one another in mortal combat.