By Lauren Paustian, Associate Librarian for Technical Services, Leo Baeck Institute The Center for Jewish History and its partner institutions strive to preserve Jewish history and culture for future generations. As collection stewards and community builders, many staff members of the Center for Jewish History and its partner organizations also make an effort to promote environmental responsibility. Last year, a number of employees from…
Free Events for Genealogists of All Levels May 15 – 24, 2016 The Center for Jewish History invites family historians of all backgrounds to explore their roots at the landmark Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute. Participants can learn how to begin family history research with the guidance of expert genealogists, delve into federal records and safely store family photos, documents and digital files….
Tuesday, February 23rd, Free, Reservation required: http://cjh.org/event/2766 Burning Words is an exploration of the 16th-century debate carried out through the relatively new medium of printed books over whether Jewish books should be confiscated and burned. Extremely rare original volumes from the Leo Baeck Institute library including works by Martin Luther, Johannes Pfefferkorn and Johannes Reuchlin are the center of the exhibit. This talk will…
The First Female Ordained Rabbi: Regina Jonas By Jackie Brettschneider, Research Intern, Center for Jewish History As early as high school, Regina Jonas talked about becoming a rabbi. At the time not one woman was ordained to the position. Jonas’s pursuit came with many hardships and obstacles because she was a woman. Jonas, however, pursued ordination whole-heartedly because of her dedication to Jewish history,…
by Kevin Schlottmann, Archival Services Manager, Center for Jewish History The Leo Baeck Institute’s Milli Frank correspondence (AR 6686) contains dozens of letters and postcards sent to Milli Frank in Brooklyn, New York, between 1937 and 1944, by her parents, aunts and uncles in Germany. Later, some of these relatives wrote to her from the concentration camps of France. None of them appears to…
Photo of the day: A family portrait at the double wedding ceremony of the Heimann and Rosenfelder families in August 1909. From The Leo Baeck Institute.
We’re honoring National Preservation Week (April 26 through May 3) with a series of posts from our archival experts about the best way to take care of your precious artifacts at home. by Moriah Amit, Reference Services Librarian and Genealogy Specialist, Center for Jewish History, and Tracey Beck, Associate Librarian for Cataloging and Periodicals, Leo Baeck Institute If you’re like us, you’ve probably accumulated tons of digital photos and documents…
Celebrating Archivesby Susan Woodland, Senior Archivist, American Jewish Historical Society October is Archives Month, and the archives community in metropolitan New York celebrated the week of October 7th with an extensive list of repository tours, programs, exhibits, a symposium on Disaster Recovery inspired by last fall’s superstorm Sandy, and an award ceremony. See the website of the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York (ART)…
In honor of Franz Kafka’s birthday, click here to view Hans Fronius’s Kafka-Mappe, illustrations of Kafka scenes (Wien, 1946). This publication is made available through an in-progress effort to digitally recreate Europe’s largest pre-Holocaust Judaica library. The $300,000 collaborative project entails digitizing copies of more than 1,000 books that went missing from the library during World War II. The project is funded by the…
Out of the Archives: Early Collaborationsubmitted by Michael D. Montalbano, M.A., M.L.I.S., Institutional Archivist / Processing Archivist, Center for Jewish History Some 25 years before the American Jewish Historical Society, Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research came together as three of the five partners of the Center for Jewish History, they were meeting to discuss potential for institutional collaboration on different…