Individual Recovery and Collective Redemption through Skilled Labor after the Holocaust: The Organization for Rehabilitation through Training in Italy

After the war, Holocaust survivors in Italy owed much of their recovery to a network of humanitarian agencies and voluntary organizations that provided them with immediate relief and long-term rehabilitation programs aiming to retrain them for “normal life” after the horrors they had witnessed. This paper sheds light on an overlooked aspect of Jewish recovery in postwar Italy: the emphasis the rescue network put on vocational training and manual labor as means to promote healing, reintegration, and equality. Through a critical analysis of still unexplored primary sources, it traces the origin of the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) in Italy and its first programs. The article reveals that the advocacy of vocationalism after the Holocaust helped Jewish survivors to assign new meanings to manual labor. In particular, the activities of the ORT in Italy involved both secular and orthodox local Jewry in an intense discussion around work ethic.