Talk:Sh'erit ha-Pletah

"[A] term used by Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust to refer to themselves"
According to the article in its present state the term is "used by Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust to refer to themselves". I am no expert, but I seriously doubt that "Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust" are the only ones to use this term. 188.169.229.30 (talk) 23:31, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Article mis-title
Holocaust survivors redirects here (Sh'erit ha-Pletah).

This article, Sh'erit ha-Pletah (שארית הפליטה) started in 2005 as an article about a term, and it remains an article about a term. (Read its first sentence.) I HAVE NEVER seen or heard anyone use this term. I believe that I WILL NEVER see or hear anyone use this term. People who speak English (but not Hebrew) never have, and never will, see or use this term. I know that I WILL NEVER say or write this term. I can't even remember it.

I "seriously doubt" that anyone routinely uses this term to refer to Holocaust survivors. Not the Holocaust survivors themselves, nor their friends, families, or rabbis. Definitely not when speaking to strangers or mixed groups in English. (People might use this term when speaking or conversing in Hebrew or Yiddish; I wouldn't know. People might use this term untranslated when speaking in Heblish or Yeshivish; I wouldn't know.) If this term ever was common, I expect its usage went way down after 1957.

What's the problem with this article's title? It's not English. It's not a borrow-word. English has words for it, and they are not Sh'erit ha-Pletah. Why is it in English Wikipedia untranslated? Not having an English title disserves everyone. It is unencyclopedic. When I ask Google Translate to look at the Hebrew page (he:שארית הפליטה), it translates the title to "survivors". In the contest of the first paragraph, it translates the same words to "DP" (that was unexpected – Displaced Persons?). (This article intro says a literal translation is "the surviving remnant".)

English speakers are not obliged to speak Hebrew whenever they talk about The Holocaust. Quite the opposite. In English, I'm obliged to say Sabbath, not Shabbat. (Assuming that my goal is to be understood, and not to obfuscate, extend the English language, or condescend.) If I say Torah or matzoh, many English speakers of every ethnicity know (approximately) what I mean, though it is far from assured. If I mix the Hebrew words Tanakh or HaShoah into English-language sentences, most listeners and readers will have no idea what I'm saying.

If this article is about Holocaust survivors, I think it must be renamed "Holocaust survivors". (Preferably before they are all gone.) If this article is not about Holocaust survivors, but the DP experience that finished 59 years ago now, or a term for it (that probably faded away around the same time), then I think that Holocaust survivors, their lives and experiences from ~1933 through ~2050, and the affect on their children and grandchildren too, is a noteworthy subject, deserving of its own article titled (no surprise) "Holocaust survivors". -A876 (talk) 04:02, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Page urgently needs to be moved back to Holocaust survivors because it is the common English name.E.M.Gregory (talk) 12:28, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Holocaust survivors is a broader topic, as the Hebrew term seems to primarily refer to DPs in postwar Europe. A separate article should be created.--Pharos (talk) 03:13, 7 December 2018 (UTC)


 * I cannot say how totally I agree with A876. This Hebrew term is Hebrew only, never English. Misunderstood political correctness can easily turn into lexical madness, and this is a prime example for it. THE WAY THE LEAD (DEFINITION) IS PUT TOGETHER NOW.

But IF the definition is amended, then yes, we are onto something. There was an organisation by this name between 1945-1950 among Jewish DPs. That's a valid term. Even more so as it is, in my humble opinion, wrongly spelled, but you cannot argue with how an organisation calls itself. Names are names, like Jony or Leezah. (I mean: if one uses the usual transliteration, it should be "She'erit", not the nonsensical "Sh'erit", where the apostrophe plays no part whatsoever in helping the English reader get the pronunciation right). Arminden (talk) 19:08, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Qualification of lead sentence (response to previous comments, above)
I've corrected the lead sentence which previously read: now revised to read: This is a particular population who refused repatriation and remained as essentially stateless refugees in DP camps awaiting emigration to their chosen destination. It is not synonymous with "Holocaust survivors," a great many of whom immigrated to the West, e.g. Commonwealth countries. Additionally, the term "liberation" refers to Nazi-occupied or administered locales, e.g. concentration camps and geopolitical regions, and isn't properly applied to individuals. -- Deborahjay (talk) 13:16, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
 * ... Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust to refer to themselves and the communities they formed following their liberation in the spring of 1945...
 * ... Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust to refer to themselves and the communities they formed in postwar Europe following the liberation in the spring of 1945...

External links modified
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Zionism
The article, when I discovered it, stated as a fact that virtually ALL Jewish DPs were Zionists or at least had no other wish but emigrate to Eretz Israel - British Palestine, and after 1949 Israel. This is not supported here with sourced material. When one looks at the outcome of the placement effort for DPs, the figures do not seem to support the claim. The article states (with a good source for a change) that "About 136,000 settled in Israel, 80,000 in the United States, and sizeable numbers also in Canada and South Africa", still not giving any numbers for Canada, SA and the rest. 136,000 out of "hundreds of thousands" really doesn't look too overwhelming, even if one considers that during the period at hand, three out of six years passed while the UK still upheld immigration quotas for Palestine. Israel has its own agenda in these matters, for the better or worse, and Yad Vashem is a major source of data on these matters - is this the cause for such an unconvincing general tone in the article? Even real facts need to be proven. If (!) it's true that most DPs wished to continue their life in the Jewish state to come, this article does a disservice to disseminating this theory, by sounding more like propaganda than like a scholarly edited encyclopedia. Which WP normally isn't, let's stop kidding ourselves :) Arminden (talk) 04:53, 11 December 2019 (UTC)