The Baby Boom in Displaced Persons Camps After the Holocaust

Speaker: Serafima Velkovich, Ph.D

The Baby Boom in Displaced Persons Camps After the Holocaust – After World War II the Allies established Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the Allied-occupied zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy to temporarily house the millions of Europeans who were displaced by the war. As more than 700,000 Jews, including many concentration camp survivors, flooded into these camps, they were quick to get married and, within less than a year, the birth rate of the Jewish population in Europe's DP camps was the highest of any group in the world at the time. In this lecture Dr. Serafima Velkovich will discuss the history of this unique phenomenon and explain how you can search for information on the former DP babies in your family.

Bio:

Dr. Serafima Velkovich holds a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2024). Her research focuses on the microhistory of Holocaust survivors' families in Displaced Persons camps, the DP baby boom, Holocaust memory, and the formation of personal and collective identities among those born in DP camps. Her current project at New York University's Center for the Study of Antisemitism, where she is a Visiting Scholar, extends her research on DP baby boomers, with a particular emphasis on the United States' context, Jewish identity formation, and encounters with antisemitism.

Dr. Velkovich is Head of the Family Roots Research Section in Yad Vashem Archives, where she has been working there for more than 20 years. She is on the board of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and a member of the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). She has presented at several IAJGS conferences as well as those at Yad Vashem, Bad Arolsen, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has held fellowships from Yad Vashem, the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.