United Kingdom, United States, Israel
United Kingdom
30,850 Austrian Jews managed to escape from the Nazi terror to UK. Many young people were able to be saved by the so-called "Kindertransport". After an appeal by the British Jewish Refugee Committee, the Parliament decided to admit an unspecified number of children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia between the ages of 5 and 17 to the UK. The first transport left soon after the Pogrom Night, the last just two days before the war broke out. Approximately 10,000 children made the trip. Some of them were taken in by foster families; some went to orphanages or group homes, while others worked on farms. Most of the children never saw their parents again.
After the end of the war, UK was the only European country to attract any considerable number of immigrants from Austria, probably relatives of those who went there as refugees and managed to strike roots in their new homeland.
United States
Strict immigration policies severely limited the entry of German and Austrian Jews to the USA. During World War II, immigration to the US was barred for European Jews, but in the period from March 1938 to the moment when the USA joined the war in December 1941 approximately 28,700 Austrian Jews fled to the USA, mainly from France, Spain and Portugal. The majority of the Austrians who fled to the USA did not get there by a direct route. They were escaping after their release from a National Socialist concentration camp, or after they had been pushed from country to country and from authority to authority as emigrants devoid of any rights, or had been driven from one country to the next during the course of Hitler's war of conquest.
The immigration of German and Austrian Jews has been described as the "greatest influx of intelligence in modern American history”.
Israel
The first Israeli census (1948) quoted 7,626 persons immigrating during 1932-1939 and a further 1,807 for 1940-1945. From May 1948 to 1951, the peak years of mass immigration, 2,604 Austrian-born Jews moved to Israel.
Austrian Jews who immigrated to Eretz Israel before 1938 were mainly younger working class people whose immigration was ideologically based and who abandoned their mother tongue and adapted Hebrew quickly, lived in Kibbutzim and experienced a certain "neutralization" of their cultural heritage.
Austrian Jews sometimes experienced a certain bitterness when comparing their lot with the usually better prepared and less destitute German immigrants whose aid agencies often also cared for Austrians. However, their absorption in the new country appears to have been smoother than the more bourgeois German immigration. They often knew Hebrew from their days in the Cheder or from the Zionist movement or spoke Yiddish well. Those, however, who did not manage to learn the language and get used to the different lifestyle, found it often more difficult to get along, since Austrian Jews lacked the strong organizational background the much larger group of German Jews had established. This may explain the relatively high number of people who returned to Austria immediately after the war (787), another 819 Austrian-born persons returned or re-migrated to Austria from Israel in 1948-1952.