UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Providing the relocated German-Jewish homemaker withall the advice she might needwas a more than ambitious aim given the tremendous changes the immigrants had to face in Palestine. As a result of the rise of National Socialism some 50 000 German Jews fled Germany to Palestine in the 1930s. As they were coming from one of the most modern countries in the world it was quite a shock for them to arrive in Palestine: Here they had to deal with a middle-easternclimate, an underdeveloped economy, the Hebrew language, and the Jewish-Arab conflict. Matters were complicated further by the fact that the new immigrants constituted the most bourgeois immigration wave that entered Palestine by then. They mainlybelongedto the urban educated Middle-class, were assimilated to German culture and weren’t Zionists. These features weren’t welcomed by the Jewish community in Palestine (Yishuv), which suspected the newcomers of harming their socialist achievements.