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Center for Jewish History

A Yom Kippur Blood Libel in New York

By Lauren Gilbert, Director of Public Services

A Yom Kippur Blood Libel in New York

Two days before Yom Kippur in 1928, a four-year-old girl named Barbara Griffiths wandered into the woods near her home in Massena, New York, a small town in St. Lawrence County along the Canadian border. After a day of fruitless searching by crews and volunteers, the New York State…

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“A Virtuous, Honest, Industrious, and Injured Foreigner”: The Case of Henry Simons

By Lauren Gilbert, Director of Public Services

“A Virtuous, Honest, Industrious, and Injured Foreigner”: The Case of Henry Simons

All publications referenced in this post can be found in the Sid Lapidus Collection of Early Modern Judaica at the Center for Jewish History.

In August of 1751, a Polish Jewish peddler named Henry Simons traveled to England carrying 554 ducats that had been entrusted…

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Helene Mayer, Nazi Germany’s Jewish Olympian

By Bear Smith, Reference Services Librarian

Helene Mayer, Nazi Germany’s Jewish Olympian

The 1936 Summer Olympics were, famously, held in Berlin while Germany was under Nazi rule. The Games had not been awarded to the Nazis, though. The International Olympic Committee had awarded the games to Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler’s rise to chancellor and the eventual Nazi takeover of the country….

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A Shul on Every Corner: Remembering Synagogues of the Lower East Side

By Margaret Tilley, Genealogy Specialist and Curatorial Projects Assistant

A Shul on Every Corner: Remembering Synagogues of the Lower East Side

Above, a boy stands before the oldest surviving synagogue building in New York City, located at 172 Norfolk Street. What was then a neighborhood fixture brimming with debates about Jewish identity and rite has, like many other Lower East Side synagogues, since faced…

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Thwarted Citizens: The Mandatory Erasure of the Legacy of Ottoman Imperial Citizenship

June 28, 2024
By Michelle U. Campos

Thwarted Citizens: The Mandatory Erasure of the Legacy of Ottoman Imperial Citizenship

As part of the joint CJH-Brandeis University initiative on the history of Israeli democracy, we are happy to present a selection of blog posts from members of the inaugural cohort of fellows from the Schusterman Center’s Institute for Advanced Israel Studies. Especially in the…

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