“Making the desert blossom as the rose”: The American Christian Palestine Committee’s “Children’s Memorial Forest” and Postwar Land Acquisition in Palestine

Abstract

Abstract The American Christian Palestine Committee believed that Palestine, and not Europe or any other location, should memorialize the European Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Founded in 1946, the ACPC partnered with the Jewish National Fund to establish the Children’s Memorial Forest, a memorial to the more than 1 million Jewish children who perished in the Nazi genocide. Its fundraising campaign sought to plant saplings in the Ein Hashofet region, constituting an early form of Holocaust education among American Sunday school children. It solicited theologically liberal, or mainline, American Protestants’ participation in a land reclamation project aimed at advancing Jewish statehood.