Heritage

British Mandate
1919 to 1948

In the aftermath of World War I, the League of Nations granted Great Britain a mandate to rule over Palestine, with the obligation to create a Jewish national home here as pledged in the Balfour Declaration (1917).
In 1922, the territory east of the Jordan River was separated from Palestine and made part of the newly established Emirate of Transjordan.

Palestine

World War I to 1925
During World War I the British wrested control of Palestine from the Ottoman Turks and issued the Balfour Declaration stating British recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a "national home" in Palestine. In the aftermath of the war, the League of Nations granted Great Britain a mandate to rule the territory.

In 1922 the region east of the Jordan River was separated from Palestine and made part of the Transjordan Emirate. Zionist leaders were disappointed by this and further dismayed when the 1922 Churchill White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. The White Paper cited concerns about economic viability, but was also issued in response to pressure from Arab leaders, who feared the emergence of a Jewish majority in Palestine.

1920s to 1930s
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, civil unrest spread in Palestine as Arab nationalists intensified their protests against Jewish immigration. Riots, terrorist attacks, and clashes between Arab and Jewish militias resulted in many deaths.
In response, the British placed further limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Zionist leaders responded by organizing illegal immigration to the country.
In July 1937 the British Peel Commission issued a proposal for the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The plan was accepted by Zionist officials but rejected by Arab leaders.

1939 to 1945
During World War II, Palestine faced the threat of invasion from both Syria and Egypt. Tel Aviv and Haifa experienced several bombing raids.
The Zionist leadership put aside their growing antagonism toward the British and organized Jewish volunteers to fight in the British Army. Special Palestinian units were formed and eventually a separate Jewish Brigade Group was created which saw action in Egypt, Italy, and northwestern Europe.

Nazi Germany
1939 to 1945

During World War II, the remaining Jews of Germany were deported to Poland and other Eastern European countries -- at first to ghettos, such as Lodz, Minsk, Riga, and Kovno (Kaunas); and later to death camps, such as Auschwitz.

Some of the community's more prominent figures were interned in Theresienstadt (Terezin), a camp the Nazis established for VIPs in Czechoslovakia.

When Germany was occupied by Allied forces in 1945, only about 19,000 Jews remained in the country. Most of them had survived because their non-Jewish spouses had struggled to defend them. A few others had survived in hiding.

Warsaw
1942-1943

In July 1942, Nazis began the first of a series of large-scale deportations of Jews from Warsaw to extermination camps. Rumors of the certain death that awaited the deportees in Treblinka and Auschwitz reached the ghetto and convinced some activists that an armed revolt, even if suicidal, was the only acceptable course of action.

In April 1943 a group of Jewish fighters (most of them young adults and teenagers) mounted one of first and longest armed uprisings against the Nazis anywhere in Europe. Armed with only a few guns and homemade bombs, the fighters managed to fend off the Germans for 28 days. During the uprising the Nazis continued to round up Jews for deportation and began systematically burning the ghetto to the ground. By summer 1943, the ghetto, had been reduced to a field of rubble, empty of all inhabitants.