Lady Rose Henriques Archive

Lady Rose Henriques

Rose Louise Loewe was born in London in 1889, the daughter of James Loewe, a well-known figure in Jewish communal life. Her brother Herbert achieved standing as Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University.

Rose Loewe’s childhood was marked by prosperity, piety and a love of the arts. Her particular interest was music, and she performed regularly on the harmonium at her synagogue in St John’s Wood, London.

Intent on a career in music she travelled to Germany to study piano in Breslau. Returning at the outbreak of the First World War she met Basil Henriques, who persuaded her to join him in a venture to establish a Jewish boys’ club in the East End of London. The Oxford and St George’s Club dominated the lives of the couple for decades. Rose Loewe initially took charge of the girls’ section of the club, eventually managing the boys’ section as well when Basil Henriques went off to do his patriotic duty. The couple married in 1916.

Increasingly devoted to a career in social work, broadly understood, Rose Henriques became a VAD nurse at Liverpool Street Station in London during the war.

Rose and Basil Henriques lived on the premises of their club, first in Betts Street, and from 1930 in Berner Street, where new premises were built with a £65,000 grant from the tobacco magnate Bernhard Baron. The home was renamed The Bernhard Baron St George’ Settlement. From this base they undertook very wide-ranging welfare work, involving not only youth work but also mother and baby welfare, help for the aged, the promotion of education, and participation in Jewish religious life and in the arts. Among the East End children she worked with Rose was affectionately known as “The Missus”. Berner Street was eventually renamed “Henriques Street” in the couple’s honor. Both Rose and Basil made successful efforts in bringing Judaism into the hearts and minds of many of those who lived in the meagre conditions in East London. They provided services in their synagogue, Rose playing the organ, Basil reading the services and preaching. Those two set up clubs to which the children would belong, taught them how to take exercises and provided medical care. They gave the children the feeling of being wanted as they took their places in the settlement that Rose and Basil founded. In all this they presented something that the chidren could see as being free of the shortages in which their lives were otherwise spent. They were given the chance of a holiday for a week or so in the camps that those two set up, in Sussex for the boys, in Suffolk for the girls; for the first time these youngsters saw the sea, breathed the fresh air of the countryside; and on the Friday evenings they took their part in the services at which Rose accompanied and directed the singing.

The Nazi persecution of Germany’s and Europe’s Jews aroused the interest and compassion of Rose Henriques at an early stage. In 1943 she found an opportunity to become actively involved in planning for the end of the war by joining the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA) which was established by the Joint Foreign Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews (the same Joint Foreign Committee had called the Jewish Central Information Office into being in 1933). The JCRA had as one of its chief goals the establishment of the Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) - an active service unit for carrying out welfare work among the surviving remnant of European Jewry in Germany. Rose Henriques served as Head of the Germany department of the JCRA. British troops entered the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945. The first JRU team arrived there on 21 June 1945. Rose Henriques arrived with the second team a short while after and based herself in the nearby town of Celle. A third team arrived in August 1945.

Welfare work with Displaced Persons (DPs) in the British Zone of Occupation occupied Rose Henriques until 1950 when Bergen-Belsen was closed down and most Jewish DPs emigrated to the newly-founded state of Israel or to the USA.

In the post-war era Rose Henriques became actively involved in the British ORT organization (ORT are the Russian initials of the Society for Spreading Artisan and Agricultural Work Among Jews), establishing the Workrooms for the Elderly in east London and presiding over the League of Jewish Women, the Association for the Welfare of the Physically Handicapped, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Jewish Research Unit - among many others.

When Basil Henriques was knighted in 1955, Rose became Lady Henriques. In 1964 she was honoured with the Henrietta Szold Award and in 1971, a year before her death, she was appointed a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons' Camp

At the end of the Second World War Germany was placed under military government and divided into four occupation zones, British, French, Soviet and American. The British Zone of Occupation comprised Schleswig Holstein, North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen), Lower Saxony and the Hanseatic city of Hamburg.

In Germany as a whole there were around 13 million people in the care of the authorities, in the British zone around two million. Most of these Displaced Persons (DPs) had been forced labourers, deportees, stateless persons, concentration camp survivors and former prisoners of war.

Allied policy was to repatriate people as quickly as possible - by the end of July 1945 some 3.2 million had been returned to their country of origin. In many cases, however, repatriation was not straightforward. Many DPs did not want to be repatriated, either for fear of new political regimes in their homelands or because - as in the case of the Jews - their former homes were seen as little more than graveyards of families and friends. For Jewish survivors, decisions to refuse repatriation were of course also arrived at through commitment to the Zionist cause. Such people were defined by the authorities as “non-repatriables” and in the British Zone Belsen was a major centre for their accommodation.

Belsen was the largest concentration camp in the British Zone. It is reported that at liberation it housed approximately 60,000 people, roughly half of them Jewish. Many of the inmates were survivors of death marches from other camps to the east. During the first weeks after liberation many thousands died of exhaustion, starvation, sudden over-eating or disease. In addition, approximately 17,000 were repatriated to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, leaving around 12,000, the majority of whom were Jewish. An indication of how significant Belsen was for Jewish life in the British Zone is that its population represented roughly one half of all the Jews surviving in the Zone. In the years after 1945 it became a great centre of Jewish renewal and dominated Jewish life in the British Zone.

The number of people housed in the camp held steady over a long period, although survivors departed for Palestine (often illegally) and new refugees arrived. British policy was not to allow Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and other eastern countries into the Zone. Belsen’s comparative demographic stability strengthened it as a centre of Jewish political and cultural life.

While the British authorities envisaged the DP camp at Belsen as a provisional measure, in fact it closed only in 1950. The chief reason for this extended existence was the inability or refusal of Jewish survivors to “return” to what the British defined as their country of origin. Many Jews perceived themselves as “liberated but not free” and felt passionately that freedom would only come when they were able to settle in a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.

Two distinct groups of Jewish survivors are discernible: young, unmarried people who for the most part originated in Poland and other eastern European countries, and German Jews who were predominantly elderly. From early on, the young Jewish DPs embarked on relationships and marriages and many children were born in Belsen. This also tended to make for demographic stability within the camp.

Living conditions in the camp were poor. Initially the authorities could only provide a diet of c.2,000 calories per day (the World Health Organisation today calculates that 2,400 calories per day are needed to maintain health). The economies of Germany and the UK were in extremely poor condition - and to make matters worse the winter of 1946-47 was harsh.

The younger Polish and eastern European Jews in Belsen were predominantly Zionists who aspired to create a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, This shared conviction gave strong impetus to political organisation and activity. A Jewish committee was elected soon after liberation to promote the interests of the DPs. In September a Central Jewish Committee was established, with Josef Rosensaft as its Chair. The Committee created numerous departments dealing with issues such as health, culture, education, economics and religion.

For the JRU the situation was challenging, because the Jewish DPs were politically at odds with the British authorities over the issues of Jewish nationality and Palestine. The British sought to treat German Jews as Germans first and Jews second, and resisted the segregation of Jewish DPs from other groups. This led to strong opposition from the Jewish side, particularly from the Central Committee.

A number of Jewish bodies were active in the British Zone of Occupation, including the American Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), the Jewish Brigade, ORT and others. The JRU worked to co-ordinate the activities of these bodies and maintain productive co-operation between them. The JRU itself avoided taking political positions, and sought to mediate between Zionists and non-Zionists, the Orthodox and the secular, and all the other interest groups represented. While many JRU workers were Zionists themselves and eventually made new lives in the state of Israel, the JCRA took the position that a continued Jewish life in Germany was a worthwhile and legitimate goal.

The rich and complex social, political, cultural and religious life of the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen emerges from the papers of the Rose Henriques Collection.