Horváth Rita: A magyarországi zsidók Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottsága (DEGOB) története - Magyar Zsidó Levéltári Füzetek 1. (1997)
Summary The History of the National Relief Committee for Deportees [NRCD]
Summary The History of the National Relief Committee for Deportees [NRCD] (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság) Historians have to face a lot of difficulties when they are engaged in conducting research work concerning the period immediately after the Second World War in Hungary. One of the greatest problems is caused by the fact that we have relatively few authentic sources. The majority of the documents were destroyed, and the remaining few fragmented documents were not available for the scholars until the fall of the Communist Regime in 1989. Thus, the processing of these documents for the purposes of historical research has just begun. The other kinds of difficulties historians have to overcome are inherent in the Hungarian post-war era. Three major international relief organizations: the International Red Cross, the American Joint Distribution Committee, and the Ezra Committee of the Sochnut (Jewish Agency for Palestine) started to aid the surviving Jews in Hungary. When the Hungarian Jewish organizations began to rise to their feet, after the total destruction, they immediately began to struggle with each other for the control of the available budgets of the major international organizations. In other words, they began to compete for the privilege to determine which programs and areas of reconstruction should have been given priority over the others. The different ideological bases of the various organizations affected each organization’s decisions significantly about assigning importance to various tasks. (There were for example Zionist organizations; various religious organizations; and even the Jewish communities belonged to different religious trends: neolog and orthodox; etc.) Moreover, along with these factors the urgency of the tasks caused a lot of overlappings of authorities, of actual spheres of activities, and of aims. This picture was made even more complicated by the fact that the major international organizations themselves also had quite fixed aid and support concepts. One of the earliest Hungarian Jewish post-war relief organizations was the National Relief Committee for Deportees. It was established by the Jewish Community of Pest in March 1945. The Joint began to finance this new organization and its main objective was to care for returning survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. The NRCDXrquote s relationship with the National Jewish Relief Committee (Országos Zsidó Segítő Bizottság) initiated on 31 August 1945 by several organizations with nationwide authority, became problematic immediately. Because of these institutional-organizational problems which were combined with various 57
