On May 13, 1939, the German ocean liner S.S. St. Louis set sail from Hamburg with 937 Jewish refugees on board—among them, Lillian and Georg Friedmann. Fleeing Nazi persecution, they boarded with tourist or transit entry permits purchased from Cuban immigration director Manuel Benítez. Their destination…
On a cold winter afternoon in February 1919, several hundred soldiers descended upon the Jewish neighborhoods of the small Ukrainian city of Proskuriv (today Khmel’nyts’kyi, Ukraine). Ten days earlier, Symon Petliura, head of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, had dispatched to the border city nearly…
On a humid summer’s night in July 1961, thirteen-year-old Ricky Farber and his friends bounced around their suburban neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. There, they stumbled upon an odd and frightening house draped in massive Nazi battle flags. What happened next would be a source of contention: Farber and…
Between 1942 and 1949, the Union of Russian Jews and President Samuel Chobrutsky of the Moscow Jewish Community helped over 15,000 Jewish families across the United States, Mandate Palestine, and South America locate and exchange letters with…
After twelve frantic days of searching for his missing colleague, a weary I. Irving Lipsitch sat down to write a detailed letter to his boss. “I give you herewith the following facts in connection with the matter of Mr. Samuel Littman,” he began, addressing Leon Sanders, president of…
