Electro-mechanical laboratory in the school of Dr. Ludwik Natanson

Immediately following World War I, beleaguered Jewish communities faced continued challenges that threatened their existence. New socio-economic realities stripped European Jews of their former livelihoods, leaving them without the means to support themselves. Their communal infrastructure also lay in ruins. To address these conditions, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint”), a humanitarian organization created at the start of World War I, helped the Polish Jewish community to rebuild communal institutions. During the interwar years, the Joint played a vital role in restoring and helping to support Jewish schools and other institutions, working in partnership with the wide spectrum of Jewish groups and ideologies: Hasidic groups, Zionists, Bundists, Yiddishists, and representatives of mainstream Orthodoxy. Over 360 boys studied trades at the Natanson School.