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Leo Baeck Institute Collections

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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Death Masks at the Center for Jewish History

By Lauren Gilbert
Director of Public Services, Center for Jewish History

Death Masks at the Center for Jewish History

Death masks, molded from plaster in the first hours after death before the features have stiffened or atrophied, were used for centuries to preserve the appearance of nobility and other eminent persons as models for posthumous sculptures or painted portraits. In the 19th century,…

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Struggling Against Tyranny: The Gertrude Goldhaber Collection

Struggling Against Tyranny: The Gertrude Goldhaber Collection

“The vicious cycle which was originally created by the overt exclusion of women from mathematics and science must be broken… [I]t is of the utmost importance to give a girl at a very early age the conviction that girls are capable of becoming scientists.”

Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (1911-1998) was a German Jewish nuclear physicist who made…

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Echoes and Reflections at the Center for Jewish History

by James Nadel, Communications Outreach Associate

A month ago, the Center for Jewish History hosted “Echoes
and Reflections
,”  a traveling program for educational
professionals that focuses on Holocaust pedagogy. Echoes and Reflections was
originally co-designed by three of the world’s most significant Jewish
institutions: the Anti-Defamation League, Yad-Vashem (the Holocaust museum of Israel) and the…

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