Bergen-Belsen, a symbol of Nazi satanic evil, was the biggest concentration camp in Germany and the only one to be transformed after the war to become a Displaced Persons' camp and an assembly and rehabilitatation center for many thousands survivors from Eastern Europe, who wished to leave Europe heading for America or Eretz Israel. During its five years' existence as DP camp, Bergen-Belsen became a focal point for the national organization of all the Jews in the British Occupation Zone in North-West Germany, including those who founded the new German-Jewish communities. How did the survivors manage to rehabilitate after the hell they had gone through and against the background of difficult camp conditions after liberation? what was it that motivated them and what shape did their forced yet temporary communal life take? How did they transform from dying people into a dynamic and active entity, with national aspirations? Who were those who founded the new communities side by side with the DO camps|? What was it that motivated them to settle down in Germany, the country of their persecutors and torturers? How did they relate to their DP brothers and what did they aspire to? "New Beginnings" present an unprecedented in-depth inquiry into the development of Jewish lives in postwar Germany. The story of the suevivors, told here from within and based on an extensive variety of primary sources, illuminates a key chapter in post Holocaust Jewish history.

This book, a first attempt to analyze German Zionism in a global Zionist context, sheds new light on the role of German Zionism in the German-Jewish community. It traces the emergence of a small component of the Zionist movement which regardless of size played a distinctive part in both German-Jewish and Zionist history on the eve of World War II. Positioned strategically between East and West, German Zionism was open to influences from both sides. Although post-assimilationist, it was affected by the encounter with East European Jewry. The product was a unique form of Zionism that combined Western ideas with radical "Palestinocentrism."