European Jewish Children’s Aid (1943-1945). Grown Refugee Children Acquiring US Citizenship in Armed Forces

BACKGROUND

The National Refugee Service (NRS) was a refugee aid organization founded in New York City in 1939 to assist refugees from Europe fleeing Nazi persecution. It represented a reorganization of a predecessor organization, the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany, which had been in operation since June 1934. The NRS remained in existence until August 1946, when it merged with the Service to Foreign Born of the National Council of Jewish Women to form the United Service for New Americans.

This data set contains requests for release from “public charge responsibility,” meaning that the NRS as an organization would no longer be responsible for the individuals in question. This included cases of grown refugee children who had acquired citizenship while serving in the armed forces.

DATABASE

This database includes 287 records of requests for release from public charge responsibility, including cases of grown refugee children who had acquired citizenship while serving in the armed forces.

The fields for this database are as follows:

• Image # (Scan image number within the YIVO folder)
• Surname
• Given name
• Date of birth / Age
• Present age
• Age at admission
• Draft date
• Date of citizenship
• Date oof arrival
• Name of steamship
• Port of entry
• Source (List #)
• Comments

Below are the names of the lists within this collection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The information contained in this database was indexed from the files available from the Center for Jewish History’s collection of scanned source documents from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. This data set is from the “European Jewish Children’s Aid (Lotte Marcuse, Director), 1943-1945”, RG 248. Series V, File: Folder: 536, Reel: 26.218). It can be accessed online at https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/7/archival_objects/433054

Thank you to Nolan Altman, Director of Data Acquisition and Coordinator of Holocaust Database, for his continued devotion and dedication to JewishGen's important work.  

May 2025