THE POST-WAR PERIOD came to an end for most Jews in western Europe sometime in the 1960s. Two decades after the Holocaust, communities had largely stabilized themselves by streamlining their social-service agencies, strengthening their political advocacy organizations, and developing co-ordinated fundraising campaigns. While the Cold War was far from over, its impact upon individual communities had lessened considerably. Educators and religious leaders had made the first halting efforts to prepare the next generation of active and committed Jews. International relief agencies no longer played a significant role in daily life and reparation payments for educational and cultural projects were slowly being phased out.

The threat of antisemitism appeared to have diminished as well. Issues that had pitted Jews against the larger society in the immediate post-war period such as the fate of war refugees and hidden children, the allocation of material assistance to survivors, and conflicting memories of the war had been either resolved or had lost their piquancy. The interest that Europeans took in the proceedings of the Eichmann trial at the beginning of the 1960s made a younger generation directly aware of the events of the Holocaust and curious about the role of their parents’ generation in the deportation process. At the end of the decade Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967 captured the attention of Jews and their fellow citizens in western Europe, leading to a temporary confluence of political interests that recalled the heady days of Israel's struggle for independence.

Within the communities of western Europe themselves, the disruptions caused by the influx of immigrants and refugees from eastern Europe in the late 1940s that had slowed the gradual transition from wartime to peacetime were largely a thing of the past. In the 1950s the ability of French community social-service agencies like the Comité Juif d’Action Sociale et de Reconstruction to manage the distribution of material assistance to the first wave of immigrants from North Africa and to those fleeing the suppression of local revolutions and popular demonstrations in Hungary and Poland, with only minimal administrative support from the JDC, was telling proof of how far French Jewry had come since the first difficult years of reconstruction and revival.