by Felicity Corkill, Associate Conservator, and Kevin Schlottmann, Processing Archivist, Center for Jewish History All physical objects change over time. Whether accelerated through exposure to light, changes in temperature and humidity, poor handling, or just natural decay, things break down. At the Center for Jewish History’s Collection Management and Conservation Wing, we attempt to address some of this inexorable decay through good storage environment…
Yom Kippur in the NJWB Recordsby Rachel Rudman, M.A., Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History This post is part of the Holiday History Series. To view all posts in the series, click here. Above image: Text on back of photograph reads, “Yom Kippur services at Great Lakes, Ill. I think 1942 or 1943. Rabbi Julius Mark was chaplain. Services held in drill hall, now…
by Ilana Rossoff, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History This post is part of the Jews and Social Justice Series. To view all posts in the series, click here. At the same time that they were coordinating post-war refugee relief in Europe, Jewish Labor Committee members began to take an active role in supporting African-American-led efforts to advocate for civil rights legislation. According to…
by Ilana Rossoff, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History This post is part of the Jews and Social Justice Series. To view all posts in the series, click here. The Jewish Labor Committee is the longest existing prominent pro-civil rights Jewish labor organization. It was founded in 1934 as a union between the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the International Ladies Garment Workers…
by Ilana Rossoff, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History This post is part of the Jews and Social Justice Series. To read the introduction to the series, click here. The Jewish Labor Bund was a unique and memorable force in European Jewish communal and political history. Established in Vilna in 1897, the General Jewish Labor Bund was originally conceived as a vehicle…
World War II-era advertisement for Cole of California. 1943. Yeshiva University Museum. For more, visit the Center for Jewish History’s Flickr photostream.Click here to connect with the Center for Jewish History on Facebook.
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…
NYT: Italian Praised for Saving Jews Is Now Seen as Nazi Collaborator Information about Giovanni Palatucci, celebrated for saving Jews, is being removed from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in light of evidence that the tales may be untrue. Centro Primo Levi here at the Center for Jewish History “stated that a research panel of more than a dozen scholars who reviewed nearly…
Out of the Archives: “The Ritchie Boys”by Kevin Schlottmann, Levy Processing Archivist, Center for Jewish History Werner Erwin Stark (1921 – 1995) was born in Munich, Germany, into a Jewish family of textile merchants. Together with his older brother Walter, he escaped to the United States via France in 1938. During World War Two, Stark enlisted in the US Army and was trained in…
In Memory of Frank Lautenbergby David P. Rosenberg, M.P.A., Reference Services Research Coordinator, Center for Jewish History Frank Lautenberg, the last World War II veteran in the United States Senate (he served from 1982-2001 and 2003-his death, today June 3, 2013), played an important role in allowing many Soviet Jews to come to America. His “Lautenberg Amendment” in 1990 relaxed certain standards for “refugee…