This chapter deals with the difficulties of Jews who left Israel in the immediate years following independence. During those years, Europe was the main destination for emigrants from Israel. But while some emigrants wished to settle in Europe, many went there in search of further emigration possibilities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the hardships faced by new immigrants in Israel and the motivations behind emigration. It then focuses on the circumstances surrounding emigrants’ departure from Israel and arrival in Europe, their encounters with relief agencies and Jewish communities, and their attempts to emigrate overseas.

Emigrants found that relief agencies and countries of immigration were reluctant to provide material support and resettlement services to people who had already settled in Israel, which was regarded as the foremost country for resettlement of Jewish refugees. Migrants also encountered constraints imposed by the Israeli government which obstructed emigration from the country. They found that by leaving Israel, they had gone against the grain and put themselves in conflict with the bodies on whose assistance they were hoping to rely. Immigration to Israel for them was not a permanent return from exile but rather another stage in the struggle to find a home.

Chapter 2 examines the discourse between governments, aid agencies, and the press concerning the Mennonite refugees who fled from the Soviet Union to Paraguay via Germany and China between 1929 and 1931. Although the Soviet, German, and Canadian governments, the German press, and aid agencies in Germany and North America cast the situation as a refugee “problem,” this chapter contends that it gave each entity a valuable opportunity to assign broader meanings to the refugees, advance a range of agendas, and define their own constituencies along the lines of class, nationality, or religion. This chapter also shows that the refugees were aided and inhibited by their national, religious, and economic identifications, which left them with an ambiguous collective narrative about who they were as a group. Consequently, this chapter contends that outsiders’ interpretations provided the Fernheim Colony refugees with new ways to collectively understand themselves as heroes, victims, Mennonites, Germans, and Paraguayans.