Tablet Magazine

Traveling through post-war Poland, a Jewish-British journalist could not but notice the Jewish belongings embedded in gentile life: “silver Sabbath candlesticks in a tavern, a pair of boots insulated with fragments of a Torah scroll, a blouse sewn together out of prayer shawls,” writes Magdalena Waligórska and Ina Sorkina in their article “The Second Life of Jewish Belongings: Jewish personal objects and their afterlives in the Polish and Belarussian post-Holocaust.” Jewish belongings of relatively small value and their circulation became a defining feature of Jewish-non-Jewish relations.

Experts estimate the number of Jews forced to leave the Arab and Islamic world after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 to be between 850,000 and 900,000. Of these, it is estimated that 600,000-650,000 settled in Israel. While in some cases, "discriminatory laws and violent outbreaks were directly responsible," in other cases economic opportunity played a more substantial role.