Happy New Year from the Center for Jewish History. We’ve dug into our partners’ vast collections to find a wonderful selection of vintage Rosh Hashanah greeting cards to celebrate the Jewish New Year of 5773, which begins at sundown on Sunday, September 16, 2012. The colorful cards date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and offer nostalgic greetings in English, Hebrew and…
The first reference to a Jew in Connecticut was to “David the Jew.” In 1659, he was fined 20 shillings by the city of Hartford. His crime: going into houses when the household heads were absent and trading with the children. In the decades that followed, there were several scattered references to Jews in Connecticut. These first Jews were mostly Portuguese and Spanish, and…
I’m Jaime Taylor, the Center for Jewish History’s systems librarian. My job has two components: I administer the catalog software, and I also do strange things with the catalog records themselves. As such, by chance I see records for all sorts of interesting items that I might not otherwise realize the Center holds. Some months ago I read a title, “Trinitite from Trinity Nuclear…
In collaboration with #HistoryUnfolded: U.S. Newspapers and the Holocaust, a program of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), CJH will be hosting a ‘Research Sprint’– a day for Citizen Historians to conduct research in newspaper collections and investigate U.S. press coverage for specific Holocaust events in 1938 on March 18, 2018. Data that is uncovered for this project helps the USHMM to discover…
By Nicole Greenhouse, Archivist at the Center for Jewish History Currently, I am working on a project to arrange and describe a 100 linear foot accretion to the American Jewish Congress Records (I-77) at the American Jewish Historical Society. As I work through the collection, I was struck by a run of the “Anti-Nazi Bulletin” that I found in a few boxes of the…
By David Myers, President/CEO of the Center for Jewish History The final song of the smash Broadway hit Hamilton asks with great poignancy: “Who will tell your story?” The line is a telling reminder that those who lack power or fail to live long enough, such as Alexander Hamilton, often don’t get to leave behind their own version of the past. The task of…
By Moriah Amit, Senior Reference Services Librarian, Genealogy Coordinator Although the notion that our immigrant ancestors’ names were changed by clerks at Ellis Island has been debunked time and again by noted scholars in Jewish genealogy (see References below), this myth remains pervasive in the stories that American Jews tell about their family history. The truth, that most of our immigrant ancestors chose to…
By Andrey Filimonov Audio recording: Public Service Announcements urging support for Soviet Jewry by Rita Moreno, Bayard Rustin, Sam Levenson and Alan King, recently digitized at the Center for Jewish History. Link to digital audio file: http://digital.cjh.org/4552838 Originally found on an open-reel tape, in the Records of National Conference on Soviet Jewry, I-181A, Box 369, Tape number M15. Bayard Rustin. Original photograph found in…
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…
By James Benjamin Nadel, Research Intern You might not expect a 95 year old literature professor to emphasize youth when discussing his life. But that is exactly how Justus Rosenberg described his upcoming talk at the Center for Jewish History to me. “I will do it from the perspective of a teenager…it is for someone like you.” Next Wednesday, Justus will be discussing his…
