Religion, specifically the estrangement of Jewish children from their religious heritage, was perhaps the most divisive issue facing the Kindertransport at the time, and it remains a contentious legacy of the programme. For a variety of reasons, the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) made the decision early on to accept all apparently suitable hospitality offers, with the result that well over half the children were initially placed in non-Jewish settings. It has long been argued that this was due to an insufficiency of offers from Anglo-Jewish families (the vast majority of whom lived in London, Manchester and Leeds), but this claim was disputed at the time by Jewish religious leaders who contended that the government and RCM leadership wanted the children to be as widely dispersed and as assimilated as possible to avoid stoking antisemitic and anti-refugee sentiments among the British population.

 

Whatever the reason, even many refugee children who were initially placed with Jewish families were subsequently evacuated to rural areas and placed in non-Jewish homes when the war began. The refugee organisations were slow to respond to the situation and by late 1942, when they eventually formed a committee (the Joint Committee for Religious Education and Welfare) to arrange Jewish teaching for refugee foster children or to remove Jewish children to Jewish settings, its efforts were often resisted, resented or even refused.

 

The Kinder were a religiously diverse group and included observant orthodox,  children, those who had been raised in assimilated less observant homes, and a significant number of children who were considered Jewish by Nazi authorities, but who had not been brought up with any Jewish identity at all. The refugee organisations were faced with a huge task in respecting and managing the varied religious needs of so many children and both Jewish leaders at the time as well as later critical researchers have concluded that their efforts often fell short.