Jacob S. Eder Maria Framke (Chair of the panel)

Relief for One’s Own Community: Humanitarian Organizations at Home and Abroad

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Abstract

This panel explores how religious, political, and ethnic humanitarian and aid organizations provided relief for members of their own communities abroad throughout the 20th century. It specifically focuses on societies that were – because of migration, religious tensions, ethnic conflicts, colonialism, and postcolonial ruptures – particularly fragmented and heterogeneous. On the one hand, the panel explores how the initiatives of said organizations were perceived at home as well as aboard: which factors determined the perception of their work and how did they themselves try to shape their public image? Connected is the question about their concrete PR efforts: how did they organize domestic fundraising or advertisement campaigns and how successful were these activities? On the other hand, the panel explores the tension between the “domestic” and the “foreign” dimension of the work of these organizations and asks if they helped to reduce or increase the fragmentation of pluralistic societies. This is a particularly relevant question for organizations founded by ethnic, religious, or political minorities.The panel will explore these and related questions by exploring four case studies on Indian humanitarian aid during the 1940s, the work of American Jewish relief organizations in the interwar period, Egyptian humanitarian aid after the Six-Day-War, and relief for students in Eastern Europe after 1919.

Miriam Rürup (Hamburg)
Moderation
Maria Framke (Rostock)
Die Congress Medical Missions in Burma 1942 und Malaysia 1946: Indische humanitäre Hilfe im Kontext von Weltkrieg, Freiheitskampf und Dekolonisation
Jacob S. Eder (Jena/New York)
„Jewish Mutual Responsibility—American Jewish Opportunity”: Amerikanisch-jüdische Hilfsorganisationen in der Migrationsgesellschaft im frühen 20. Jahrhundert
Esther Möller (Mainz)
Blutsbrüder und -schwestern: Ägyptische humanitäre Hilfe im Israel-Palästina-Konflikt nach 1948
Isabella Löhr (Leipzig)
Mobilisierung und Internationalisierung: Humanitäre Hilfe für Studierende im östlichen Europa nach 1919
Daniel Roger Maul (Oslo)
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