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This article examines the crisis that confronted French Jewry as it struggled to reconstruct families that had been torn asunder by the war in the first few years following the Liberation. At the moment when politicians and psychologists throughout Europe promoted the family as instrumental to social reconstruction, Jewish child welfare activists preferred a collectivist approach. This article focuses on the debates, as well as the policies and educational programs instituted by postwar child welfare workers, as they experimented with new models for social organization.