ORT France: Professional Schools and the Transmission of Judaism (1921–1949)
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Based on newly discovered archives, this paper recounts changes in conceptions of how to transmit Jewish particularism in ORT professional schools in France. This organization was at first strongly determined to keep to its mission of teaching in order to achieve a better professional integration of Jews in the economic domain in receiving countries and did not much care about retaining Jewish particularism. However, following the Second World War, it later became aware of the urgent need to add to its core professional teaching the aim of transmitting a sense of Jewish belonging that would be exclusively cultural without referring to religion or to Israel as a State while trying to find a meaning in this mock identity. Given that the plan to teach Jewish history and Hebrew in school was restricted in terms of the time devoted to it, for the sake of efficiency, this concern was mainly dealt with through activities offered outside of school by socio-educational centers often contiguous to the schools themselves, as in Strasbourg. In addition, ORT France played a major part in the creation in Paris in 1949 of the Jewish Museum of Popular Art.
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