Re-defining <i>Bricha</i> : A Case Study of Czechoslovakia

This article examines Czechoslovakia as a key transit country for Jewish refugees from Poland in the immediate postwar years. It challenges the prevailing historiography of the Bricha, which has portrayed Zionist emissaries as the principal organizers of the migration of Jewish survivors to Mandatory Palestine. Instead, it highlights the role of nongovernmental actors: local Jewish communities and non-Jewish humanitarian organizations such as Catholic Caritas, which provided essential assistance to refugees regardless of their religion or nationality. By tracing these interwoven networks of support, the study demonstrates that postwar Jewish migration was sustained by a wide range of actors and motivations, rather than by an ideologically driven initiative. Czechoslovak refugee policy, often presented as sympathetic, appears in a more pragmatic light, closely connected to domestic considerations and to the simultaneous expulsions of national minorities. The article argues that the term Bricha should therefore be used only when analyzing an ideologically charged concept, not as a general designation for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland and other countries in East-Central Europe then. It offers a new framework for understanding Jewish migration after 1945 by placing the Czechoslovak case within the broader context of Europe’s entangled displacements and forced migrations.