Image: Courtesy of Leo Baeck Institute By James Benjamin Nadel, Communications Outreach Associate As the summer ends, and opportunities to explore the great outdoors grow fewer, I wanted to draw attention to the little discussed history of Jewish hiking organizations. Several of these youth groups existed in pre-World War II Europe, but one stands out in particular for its unique engagement with various cultural…
Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) In 2011 the Center for Jewish History and the Leo Baeck Institute, one of its five partners, embarked on a project with Goethe University Frankfurt am Main to digitize nearly 1,000 books that went missing from the university library’s Judaica collection during the devastation of World War II. The goal of the project was to digitally recreate the Freimann Judaica Collection as it…
Exhibition on view through October 25, 2014at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th Street, NYC) (Above image fabricated with maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection: www.davidrumsey.com.) In the mid-to-late 19th century, many German-born rabbis left Germany to practice their faith in the United States. Isaac Leeser, Isaac Mayer Wise, David Einhorn, Max Lilienthal, and Bernard Felsenthal educated congregants from the pulpit, spread…
Out of the ArchivesWhen Facebook Was an Actual Bookby Alyssa Carver, Project Archivist, Center for Jewish History This pretty bouquet comes from a circa 1828 Poesiealbum in the Pinkus-Peters Family Collection (AR 25520) held by the LBI Archives. Once belonging to Ernestine Fränkel of Neustadt (now Prudnik, Poland), the small, handmade volume contains personal greetings, drawings, embroidery, paper-cut art, handwritten poems and other mementos. The…