BUNDITAL · Paths of No Return: The Bundist Group and the Jewish Refugee Community in Italy (1945-1949)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italy became an important, though temporary, transit hub for tens of thousands of Jewish survivors from Eastern Europe. Among them was a small group affiliated with the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist movement active in Tsarist Russia and interwar Poland. BUNDITAL will investigate this group’s activities, internal life, and interactions with the refugee community and Italian actors, using it as a lens to explore wider questions of postwar displacement, political identity, and refugee agency.Drawing on unpublished archival sources in Yiddish, Italian, English, Hebrew, Polish, and French, the research pursues four main objectives. First, it will reconstruct the trajectory of the Bundist collective, offering a new perspective on the movement’s transformation after the Shoah. Second, it will examine the broader framework of international relief agencies (UNRRA, IRO, JDC) and Italy’s postwar environment. Third, it will analyze the political landscape within the Jewish refugee community, focusing on tensions between Bundists and the Zionist majority over migration destinations and camp administration, including a major case study: the 1948 political trial for collaboration with the Nazis brought against the Bund’s president in Italy. Finally, the project will investigate the regime of forced and hindered mobilities and the routes taken by Bundist refugees outside Europe.By focusing on the Bundist experience in Italy, BUNDITAL will shed light on how refugees redefined political identities, negotiated competing visions of national belonging, and interacted with the structures and forces that governed their mobility. This analysis will also challenge the notion of a straightforward transition from war survival to Zionist identification. In doing so, it aims to fill a significant gap in both the historiography of Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy and the study of the Bund in the postwar period.