Feb 3, 2012:

The Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce Adam Teller, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Brown University, as the recipient of the NEH Senior Scholar Fellowship for the 2012/2013 academic year.

The fellowship, made possible through a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Center for Jewish History, will enable Dr. Teller to spend a year in residence at the Center to advance his work on the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugee crisis that followed the Chmielnicki uprising of 1648 and subsequent wars. Entitled, Making Connections: The Polish-Jewish Refugee Crisis and the Shape of the Jewish World in the Seventeenth Century, Dr. Teller’s work traces the experience of thousands of east European Jews, uprooted from their homes and sometimes even sold into slavery, as they spread across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, trying to start a new life. While in residence at the Center, Dr. Teller will make use of a wealth of material found in the collections of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo Baeck Institute and American Sephardi Federation. Dr. Teller’s research will also examine the ways in which various Jewish communities and institutions in different countries cooperated in order to help the refugees, thereby reconstructing the social, economic and personal connections which turned these disparate centers of Jewish life into a 17th century “Jewish world.”

Dr. Teller’s expertise is in the history of the Jews in Poland-Lithuania during the early modern period. His numerous studies deal with the economic, social, cultural and religious aspects of that history. His published work includes two Hebrew-language monographs: Living Together: The Jewish Quarter of Poznan in the Seventeenth Century (Jerusalem, 2003) and Money, Power, and Influence: The Jews on the Radziwill Estates in Eighteenth Century Lithuania (Jerusalem, 2005). The second of these is currently being translated into English. He is now completing a new study on the history of the communal rabbinate in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Adam Teller is associate editor of Gal-Ed: on the History and Culture of Polish Jewry, and a member of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.

Jan 19, 2012:

The Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce it has been awarded a $229,600 Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for a two-year project, Illuminating Hidden Collections at the Center for Jewish History.

Three of the Center’s partners, American Jewish Historical Society, Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, are participating in the project, which focuses on collections that encompass stories of Jewish migration, establishment and assimilation over the last 150 years. It will also uncover the histories of Jewish political and cultural organizations in the U.S. and include dozens of collections that reveal stories of Jews leaving Germany for America and Israel prior to World War II.

"The Center is proud to be a recipient of this most prestigious and important grant,” says Michael S. Glickman, the Center’s chief operating officer. “This initiative is at the core of our mission to ensure greater access to the materials of the Jewish people and to create a lasting legacy of our partners' holdings for scholars, students and the general public."

The CLIR grant enables the Center and its partners to address almost half of the hidden collections in their possession, creating access and providing a unified gateway to diverse works that are currently inaccessible. Patrons will be able to use these new resources both in the Center’s Reading Room and through its Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC).

CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.

For more information about the CLIR grant or the Center, please contact our Press and Media Relations Department, via email or call 212.294.8307.

Jan 12, 2012:

The Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce a $2.5 million gift from The David Berg Foundation to establish The David Berg Rare Book Room. This contribution will enable the Center and its partners to realize their longstanding goal of creating a public space that showcases and preserves some of the most important works in Jewish history.

"We are incredibly grateful to The David Berg Foundation for its unwavering commitment to the Center for Jewish History," says Michael S. Glickman, chief operating officer of the Center. "It is only because of friends like this that the Center is able to ensure that Jewish history remains vibrant—as well as relevant—in today's world. This rare book room will be part of David Berg's legacy as an ardent supporter of the Jewish people and their history."

The room will provide the Center's partners — American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research — with a state-of-the-art facility in which to house some of their most important printed materials, including seminal first editions and a cross-section of rabbinical literature, Jewish philosophy and intellectual history that dates back hundreds of years.

Scheduled to open this fall, the public will be able to visit The David Berg Rare Book Room six days a week, reinforcing the Center's commitment to making information and history available to the thousands of people who visit each year. This glass-enclosed, high-security space—situated adjacent to the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Great Hall and the Collection Management & Conservation Wing—will use the latest technology to display and protect the works that have helped establish the Center as a preeminent home for Jewish scholarship.

"Our core mission is to preserve, protect and present the treasured collections of our partners," says Center Co-Chairman William A. Ackman. "This project elevates our ability to showcase important works and we are grateful to The David Berg Foundation and its trustees for this tremendous opportunity."

Nov 15, 2011:

by Alex Joffe
This article originally appeared on the Jewish Ideas Daily website.

Jews have long been the People of the Book.  But as computers replace books and possibly libraries, museums, and universities, will they soon be the People of the Byte?  If so, what will happen to their understanding of their history?  These were the questions raised by a recent two-day conference at the Center for Jewish History titled "From Access to Integration."  At the sessions, librarians, archivists, and scholars explored the cutting edge of the Jewish digital world.  They outlined the immense technical challenges involved in creating databases for scholarly and public use and described the digitization projects that are steadily surmounting these challenges.  They also addressed the puzzle of "integration," which may be harder to solve.

It is astonishing to see how far technology has come in making Jewish information available.  Tasks that are impossible for the human eye to perform—like reuniting the hundreds of thousands of dispersed fragments of the Cairo Genizah in New York, Cambridge, and elsewhere—are being done by computer algorithms.  The diversity of Jewish sound—hazzanut, Israeli folk songs, Borscht Belt comedy routines, Torah chanting from Lithuania to Morocco—can be preserved and disseminated to anyone in the world with a computer.  Jewish newspapers from Israel and Arab countries, Ottoman-era photographs of the Holy Land, and archives of Jewish communities living and dead, especially documentation of the vast life of European Jewry—all of these are or will soon be available.

Yet technology, which can make two- and even three-dimensional representations of the past available again, cannot make them alive.  How will these streams of data flow into the individual and collective processes of creating a historical memory with texture and feeling?  Will the human relationship to the material remains of the past be reduced to "output"?  This is the challenge of integration.  Conference participants discussed integration in the technical sense: cooperation among institutions on projects or initiatives such as finding ways to combine databases into larger, searchable wholes.  For these technologically skilled participants, the medium is—quite properly—the message.  But integration in the broader sense is not only, or chiefly, a matter for technicians.

Princeton historian Anthony Grafton, in the conference's keynote speech, took a decidedly mixed view of the prospects for integration in the fundamental sense.  He enthused about the potential of digital collections for scholars but sprinkled cold water on the proceedings by noting some key problems.  One of them was the 800-pound digital gorilla in the room—Google, whose Google Book collection is rapidly becoming one of the largest libraries in the world.  Google's work is frequently shoddy in execution, with everything from blurry fingers marring pages to bizarre and inexplicable restrictions on access to books published decades or even centuries ago.  Ironically, Google's book collection is difficult and sometimes impossible to search properly.

Grafton also noted the lack of reliable guides to the vast, shapeless digital sea.  Wikipedia, though improving, is notably deficient in less-traveled areas and can be downright misleading on politicized questions, not a few of which relate to the Jewish past.  Grafton recalled the great 19th-century Jewish bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider, whose ceaseless toils in the library created invaluable catalogues for future scholars.  But as Steinschneider put it, his audience consisted of "readers who know something."  Would future guides be written by and for scholars?  Students and laypeople?  Computers?

Grafton also noted the dangers of too much or too little specialization.  Jewish studies and Jewish learning, he said, have never been found exclusively in universities and libraries; they have pervaded the Jewish community as a whole, providing intellectual and, indeed, transcendental substance to Jewish communal life.  But with Jewish learning and Jewish community in deep flux, will the new digital ocean be so daunting that individuals who are searching will be deterred from diving in?  Conversely, when any student can access any Jewish idea, text, image, or sound, what will happen to Jewish teachers and schools?  How will they find such resources?  Will they even look for them?

There are other costs and benefits to be weighed as one form replaces another.  Digital remembrances have the advantage of infinite reproducibility and unerring accuracy—provided that the data were accurately entered in the first place.  But who will guarantee the authenticity of digital files?  And what about their survival?  Digital book-burning is, as yet, impossible; but, without readable file formats, some digital texts may be reduced to obscurity in just a few years.

Digitization also represents a profound phenomenological change.  The digital experience sacrifices the uniqueness of the artifact itself—the book, photograph, sound, building, landscape—for an idea, or, more properly, a representation.  The individual loses the sensory experience of the artifact in return for gaining access to vast new bodies of data not yet organized as knowledge.  For lovers of books, there is something immutably sad in the thought of the Jewish world's being reduced to the contents of a hard drive and projected in two cold dimensions on a screen.  Similarly, the fate of the library as a place for study, sharing, and contemplation is in doubt: Many universities are already shipping books to off-campus warehouses and converting their libraries into glorified coffee shops.  But this is more than a matter of nostalgia: Will the change increase users' alienation or enhance integration?  Especially for Jews, who hold books and ideas close to heart, these are not small issues.

And when everything is accessible and all boundaries are blurred, just what is Jewish material?  As sources, influences, and outcomes become searchable down to the level of a few words, brushstrokes, or notes, will Jewish history, literature, art, and music still appear to be things or categories in themselves, or will they seem necessarily embedded in other, larger contexts?  "Jewish studies" have long been at the leading edge of making connections and crossing boundaries.  Perhaps digital Judaica will expand this enterprise and make the Jewish experience timeless in new ways, but only if it can be integrated into our new Jewish digital communities and selves.

Alex Joffe is a research scholar with the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.

Nov 14, 2011:

by Sarah Kamaras
This article originally appeared on the JointMedia News Service website.

The libraries of the 21st century aren’t quite like the ones frequented by your bubbe and zaidy.

“A traditional library has natural selection. With digital material, selection is much harder,” said Oren Weinberg, Director General of the National Library of Israel, while discussing his personal challenge of moving information into the digital world during a two-day conference at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

Stanley N. Katz, Director for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University, opened a series of interactive discussions and presentations on using digitization to integrate and distribute a wealth of Jewish resources at “From Access to Integration,” held Nov. 9-10.

“Technology in general has matured to a point where scholarship and technology can join hands in an unusually close participation,” Katz told a room full of professionals from universities, institutes and museums spanning the globe.

Weinberg and Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for the Library of Congress, discussed the struggle to select materials that will be useful on a public level, without ostracizing the needs of scholars and other niche audiences. Weinberg, whose National Library of Israel now operates independently, admitted that the library receives flack for veering from researchers needs.

Therefore, Weinberg works with universities to hone in on Israel’s general interests, but believes that the library’s expansion into the public realm is ultimately beneficial to all.

“Researchers have more opportunities for things they didn’t even know existed,” said Weinberg.

The discussion was followed by a host of demonstrations on how digitization is being implemented not only to house and integrate millions of documents, photographs and songs on the Jewish experience, but also to bring “born-digital” projects to life. Louis Kaplan, a co-applicant of Mapping Ararat, presented a virtual world based on Mordecai Manuel Noah’s vision of a Jewish homeland at Grand Island in the Niagara River.

Ararat, which is comprised of a cartographic installation and a website run by social media, is supplemented with a walking tour through Grand Island’s grounds. By downloading a program called Layar to an iPhone, users can see Ararat’s buildings and monuments virtually embedded in the landscape as they tour through the premises while also gaining access to additional articles and photographs on the site.

Kaplan emphasized how digital format projects like Ararat thrive on the continuance of resources’ digitization. He explained that only three primary source letters from the guide to the papers of Mordecai Noah have currently been found. Kaplan urged organizations to digitize their materials for open access on a global scale, to allow projects like Ararat to work with the raw materials they need.

The Center for Jewish History, whose partners include the American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, is home to over 100 million Jewish artifacts. The center has already begun to tackle its own digitization projects through a thematic approach, partnering with the University of Frankfurt to digitize 1,000 volumes of the Wissenschaft collection.

Additionally, the center’s Holocaust Resource Initiative is currently processing 110 collections otherwise unknown to anyone but archivists and creating a record that allow the archives to be fully recognized through a search engine. The center’s current online library operates via a single-search online public access catalog across all formats. By logging on to search.cjh.org, users can gain access to archival and library materials, museum collections and digital materials by using a single keyword to search across various institutions.

Michael Glickman, Chief Operating Officer of the Center for Jewish History, explained in an interview with JointMedia News Service how the center’s online material has also boosted interest in its physical resources. Glickman said that when the center puts something of interest online, it almost always sees the number of physical researchers increase specific to that collection. In turn, that helps the center focus its energy on better understanding what the user is looking for.

“I think the goal for us is to further democratize access,” Glickman said. “Sitting on this wonderful repository we have an obligation to come together and think about how we can make the user experience that much more successful.”

Nov 9, 2011:

The Center for Jewish History launches a two-day conference this afternoon in which global leaders in the digital humanities will explore and discuss the intersection and future of scholarship and technology.

From Access to Integration: Digital Technologies and the Study of Jewish History welcomes leaders from the Library of Congress, Princeton University, NYU, the Smithsonian, the National Library of Israel and many other distinguished institutions, who will discuss how to develop institutional collaboration between archives, libraries and museums worldwide. In an age when people depend — and expect — instant access to information, how do you create an all-inclusive and dependable search?

Speakers include Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress; Oren Weinberg of the National Library of Israel; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett of NYU; Douglas Greenberg of Rutgers University; and Stanley N. Katz of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton University and frequent New Yorker contributor, will be delivering the keynote address at 7:30 on Thursday evening.

"The Center for Jewish History takes great pride in presenting this extraordinary initiative," says Michael S. Glickman, the Center's chief operating officer. "As leaders of almost every Jewish archive, library and museum come together in New York City to explore the digital humanities, the Center is committed to building a thriving network of communication among professionals to ensure greater institutional collaboration as we collectively work to further democratize the primary documents of the Jewish people."

Together with its partners — American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research — the Center holds the world's largest archive of the modern Jewish experience. It is also at the forefront of employing technology to preserve the past. The Center, having created the world's most robust single-search online public access catalog, enables researchers and the general public to access over 100 million documents, 500,000 volumes and tens of thousands of pieces of art, artifacts and photographs through search.cjh.org.

Oct 26, 2011:

By Sam Roberts
This article originally appeared on the The New York Times website

When the Goddess of Liberty was given to the United States, its donor’s agenda was to burnish France’s republican roots after the oppressive reign of Napoleon III and to celebrate the two nations’ commitment to the principles of liberty.

The only immigrants mentioned at the dedication in 1886 were the “illustrious descendants of the French nobility” who fought on behalf of the United States against Britain during the American Revolution.

But it was the words of a fourth-generation American whose father was a wealthy sugar refiner and whose great-great-uncle welcomed George Washington to Newport, R.I., that almost single-handedly transformed the monumental statue in New York Harbor into the “Mother of Exiles” that would symbolically beckon generations of immigrants.

Emma Lazarus’s poem only belatedly became synonymous with the Statute of Liberty, whose 125th birthday as a gift from France will be celebrated on Friday by the National Park Service.

Lazarus’s “New Colossus,” with its memorable appeal to “give me your tired, your poor,” was commissioned for a fund-raising campaign by artists and writers to pay for the statue’s pedestal.

But while the poem was critically acclaimed — the poet James Russell Lowell wrote that he liked it “much better than I like the Statue itself” because it “gives its subject a raison d’être which it wanted before quite as much as it wants a pedestal” — it was not even mentioned at the dedication ceremony.

Finally in 1903, after relentless lobbying by a friend of Lazarus who was descended from Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant, it was “affixed to the pedestal as an ex post facto inscription,” the art historian Marvin Trachtenberg wrote.

“Gradually, thereafter, the awareness spread not only of the significance of the lines of the poem but also of the significance of the aspect of national tradition it expressed,” another historian, Oscar Handlin, wrote. “Liberty was not simply the bond between ancient allies; nor was it only the symbol of liberal ideas of justice and freedom; it was also the motive force that had peopled the wilderness and made the country that emerged what it was.”

Barry Moreno, a historian of the statue for the National Park Service, recalled that it “was never built for immigrants.”

“It was,” he recalled, “built to pay tribute to the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence, American democracy, and democracy throughout the world. It honored the end of slavery, honored the end of all sorts of tyranny and also friendship between France and America.”

Only later, he added, “letters were written home, word of mouth, taught people that you would see this wonderful goddess in New York Harbor when you arrived in America to welcome you.”

“And she became really famous among immigrants,” he recalled. “And it was really immigrants that lifted her up to a sort of a glory that was probably before America really fully embraced her.”

Lazarus, who popularized that “wonderful goddess,” accepted the commission only begrudgingly — few poets relish the idea of writing on demand. But she was stirred by a wave of pogroms against Jews in Russia and by her regular visits to poor immigrants housed in temporary shelters on Wards Island. She would make “The New Colossus” the first entry in a compendium of poems she anthologized shortly before her death from Hodgkin’s disease at 38 in 1887.

The poem went unmentioned in her obituary in The New York Times, but it appeared in a brief article in 1903 when the plaque was dedicated. (An exhibition on Lazarus, the “Poet of Exiles,” opens Wednesday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan.A manuscript of the poem is at the Center for Jewish History.)

“Emma Lazarus was the first American to make any sense of this statue,’’ said Esther Schor, an English professor at Princeton and author of a biography titled “Emma Lazarus.”

“Conceived by the French statesman Édouard René de Laboulaye, the statue was to propound the values of the French Revolution, in a sort of end-run around the repressive Second Empire of Napoleon III,” Professor Schor said. “But Americans were so unmoved and uninterested that it was hard to raise money simply to build a pedestal to support it.”

For Lazarus, who wrote the sonnet in 1883 having seen only the torch when it was on display for a fund-raising drive in Madison Square Park, “it was a moment of moral and spiritual recovery, after her attempts to raise money to benefit the Russian-Jewish refugees of 1881-82 had largely fallen on deaf ears,” Professor Schor said.

Instead of retreating, she broadened her appeal to all immigrants, Professor Schor said. For her “the statue was a special kind of mother — a ‘mother of exiles’ — a mother whose mission is not to reproduce herself, but rather to adopt the abandoned, the orphaned, the persecuted,” she said.

“She’s tender and accepting,” Professor Schor said, “but also fiercely protective, and her iconoclastic message smashes the icons of enlightenment and imperialism.”

The sonnet would survive periodic efforts to excise her reference to “wretched refuse” and would become enshrined in the political lexicon in the 1930s as an anthem for Americans who, with war again threatening in Europe, lobbied to reverse anti-immigration quotas that had been imposed a decade earlier.

“The irony is that the statue goes on speaking, even when the tide turns against immigration — even against immigrants themselves, as they adjust to their American lives,’’ Professor Schor said. “You can’t think of the statue without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her.”

Oct 26, 2011:

The Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce the expansion of its international fellowship program to include senior scholars, early career scholars and emerging artists and writers through a new five-year, $750,000 grant from The Vivian G. Prins Foundation.  The grant will support fellowships for those who seek permanent teaching and research positions in North America. The Center's Prins Program for Emigrating Scholars, Artists and Writers was established in 2010 with an initial grant of $225,000.

The program is designed to help those devoted to advanced study conduct original research in the vast collections of the Center's five distinguished partners: the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The collections include more than 500,000 volumes and 100 million archival documents. This award allows the Center to serve as the gateway for the best and brightest scholars and artists seeking to begin a new professional life in the U.S.

"The generosity of The Vivian G. Prins Foundation, which has now awarded the Center almost $1 million in fellowship grants, will enable the Center to continue serving as a professional resource for scholars from around the globe," says Michael S. Glickman, COO of the Center. "The Prins award raises the level of supported research to new heights and will go a long way toward supporting our scholarly initiatives."

As the Center enters its second decade, the institution has increased its efforts at fostering a community of scholars and ideas by attracting diverse thinkers from a multitude of disciplinary backgrounds. In addition to the Prins Program for Emigrating Scholars, Artists and Writers, the Center supports scholars at various levels, including the only National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Scholar Fellowship granted to a Jewish studies institution; graduate and undergraduate research fellowships; a Visiting Scholars Program; and the Steinberg Emerging Jewish Filmmaker Fellowship.

Sep 15, 2011:

The Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce that its Academic Advisory Council has elected Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford University) as its new chair and Derek Penslar (University of Toronto) as its new co-chair. With this change in leadership, the Center recognizes the enormous contributions of its outgoing chair, Elisheva Carlebach (Columbia University), and co-chair, Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University), who led the Council through an enormous period of academic growth.

The Center’s Academic Advisory Council advises the institution on how to advance scholarship, expand the reach of the partners' collections and impact the world of Jewish studies scholarship.

“Together, Professor Carlebach and Professor Shandler helped advance an emerging fellowship program, developing our Scholars Working Group and new opportunities for research,” says Michael S. Glickman, the Center’s chief operating officer. “Now, Professor Zipperstein and Professor Penslar will take up the Council’s crucial task of helping engage the public in the scholarly work happening at the Center.”

“As I see it, the Council provides the Center for Jewish History with a sounding board as well as a launching pad for ideas, short-term and long-term,” Professor Zipperstein explains. “Gathered on the Council is some of North America's best, most vivid intelligence in early modern and modern Jewish scholarship, all dedicated to the goal of making the Center as accessible and as intellectually rich a resource in Jewish culture as exists in this country.”

Professor Penslar adds, “The Center is one of the world's major resources for archival and library research in Jewish history. It is also no less important a venue for public events and educational activity. It is the Council's privilege to help steer the Center's course in both directions, enhancing its status as a vibrant, creative and unique institution.”

The Center is also pleased to welcome four new members of the Council: James Loeffler (University of Virginia), Tony Michels (University of Wisconsin), Francesca Trivellato (Yale University) and Jeffrey Veidlinger (Indiana University).

Sep 1, 2011:

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), considered the founder of modern Jewish philosophy, promoted co-existence between nations, religions, and races through tolerance and enlightenment, as he bridged a traditional Jewish world with a newer enlightened one. This fall, the Center for Jewish History and Leo Baeck Institute will examine the life and legacy of Moses Mendelssohn, a key figure in Jewish history, with a comprehensive ongoing exhibition, as well as a one-day in-depth symposium featuring international scholars.

At the end of the 18th century, a group of Berlin Jews sought to modernize traditional Judaism. Influenced by ideals of the German Enlightenment, the Maskilim (Hebrew for “enlighteners”) interpreted Judaism as a rational, tolerant, ethical religion. The towering figure revered by the Maskilim was Moses Mendelssohn, who was born in a rural German hamlet of Dessau. Mendelssohn received a traditional Jewish education focused exclusively on studying Jewish sacred texts. His mother tongue was Yiddish and he was taught no German or any other European language. At age fourteen, Mendelssohn followed his Rabbi to Berlin where he encountered a vibrant, cosmopolitan culture flourishing under the Enlightened monarch Friedrich the Great. He taught himself German, French, Latin, Greek and English, as well as philosophy, science and literature. He quickly rose to fame as a master stylist of German and as an internationally renowned German Enlightenment philosopher.

In his life and after his death Jews both hailed Mendelssohn as blazing the path to a modern Judaism and attacked him for leading Jews to abandon their national and religious identity. He was praised by Germans as embodying a tradition of German tolerance and cosmopolitanism and vilified by anti-Semitic German nationalists who saw him as introducing foreign elements into Germany, which corrupted German nationhood.

In 1769, Mendelssohn wrote, “It seems to me that whoever guides people to virtue in this life cannot be damned in the next,” shedding light on equality in the eyes of God on all religions, meaning Jews as well as Christians would be rewarded in heaven for their good deeds.

And in 1783, Mendelssohn included in his writings, “Hatred and vindictiveness, envy and cruelty are, at bottom, nothing but weakness and the effects of fear,” confirming his ideals of tolerance and diversity.

Almost 200 years later in 1979, the German Senate created the Mendelssohn Prize dedicated to the “promotion of toleration for those who think differently and between nations, races and religion” and in 1999 Angela Merkel, now Chancellor of Germany wrote a book celebrating his life.

As both a leading Enlightenment philosopher and a learned, observant Jew, Mendelssohn has come to symbolize many of the tensions within both modern Judaism and the Enlightenment itself. He has been hailed for blazing a path for modern Jews by showing the way to an intellectually open, tolerant vision of Judaism and has been criticized for leading Jews to national and religious apathy. It therefore seems fitting that the Center for Jewish History, a major repository of modern Jewish history, together with its partner Leo Baeck Institute has chosen to reconsider the life and legacy of Mendelssohn.

On September 12, 2011, the exhibition A Continuing Conversation: Moses Mendelssohn and the Legacy of the Enlightenment, co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish History and the Leo Baeck Institute opens through December 2011, and draws upon the enormous archive of Mendelssohn materials housed at Leo Baeck, with contributions from the YIVO Institute and the American Sephardi Federation. The exhibition includes personal items such as Mendelssohn’s letters and eyeglasses; representations of Mendelssohn in prints, paintings, busts, and coins; many first editions of his works, through which the story of his literary career is told; later editions and translations of his works into several languages through which his controversial legacy is explored; and representations of his children, descendants, and students, such as his daughter Brendel who became a Romantic writer and convert to Catholicism; his son Joseph who founded one of the major banks in Germany and was an important figure in the Jewish community throughout his life; his grandson Felix Mendelssohn-Batholdy who became the leading composer of his time; and his student Isaac Euchel who founded the Haskalah.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium of the same title which will take place on Sunday, September 18 beginning at 12:30 p.m. A group of distinguished scholars from around the world will explore questions emerging from Mendelssohn’s legacy that are of contemporary interest, and discuss his significance for Judaism today and in the future. The event is presented by the Center for Jewish History and co-sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute and New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. Three panel topics will be addressed, encouraging further dialogue: “Enlightenment and Secularism,” “Language, Culture and Nationalism,” and “Mendelssohn’s Significance for Jewish Thought and Life, Present and Future.”

Speakers and panelists include: Shmuel Feiner, Braun Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University; Elliot Wolfson, Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU; Lois Dubin, Professor of Religion, Smith College; Edward Breuer, Professor of Jewish History, Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Michah Gottlieb, Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU; David Engel, Greenberg Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU; Elias Sacks, Princeton University; Liliane Weissberg, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania; Allan Arkush, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, Binghamton University; Jonathan Karp, Associate Professor of History, Binghamton University and Director of the American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History; Leora Batnitzky, Professor of Religion, Princeton University; Arnold Eisen, Chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary; and David Sorkin, Distinguished Professor of modern Jewish history at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Through this reconsideration of Mendelssohn’s life, thought, and legacy, the Center/LBI project on Moses Mendelssohn continues the conversations he began, drawing new insights for contemporary thought and life.

Aug 30, 2011:

By Eric Herschtha
This article originally appeared on the The Jewish Week website

The effort to redefine an Enlightenment ‘assimilationist.’

Many Jews have heard of Moses Mendelssohn, the German Enlightenment thinker, but few have embraced him. For at least a century, he has been ridiculed in virtually every corner of Jewish life.

Orthodox Jews have portrayed him as the harbinger of assimilation. Reform Jews said he was too beholden to religious law. Zionists thought that if he had lived in the 20th century instead of the 18th, he’d see that creating a Jewish state was more important than defending the rights of Jews in a non-Jewish one.

“For a long time his reception has been mixed,” said Michah Gottlieb, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. “The reaction has as much to do with how he was being used as to what he actually said.”

But Gottlieb is trying to change that. He is one of several scholars who are refashioning Mendelssohn — the father of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah — for a new generation, arguing that few Jewish thinkers have tried harder to make their faith relevant in a modern, secular age — even if he sometimes failed.

The renewed interest comes at a time when religion has been increasingly attacked in the name of Enlightenment ideas, and the idea of multiculturalism has been bloodied in public discourse. As Jews find themselves increasingly fractured along ideological lines, too, scholars like Gottlieb insist Mendelssohn offers a much-needed riposte.

“Mendelssohn has something to say to Jews today as well as something about the broader debates about religion and politics,” said Gottlieb. “The very fact that Mendelssohn sees tolerance as a religious value and religion as not being coercive is very attractive today.”

The author of the recent book “Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought” (Oxford University Press), Gottlieb has organized an exhibit about Mendelssohn that kicks off with a symposium of leading Mendelssohn scholars at the Center for Jewish History later this month. The goal is not only to revive Mendelssohn’s reputation among Jews, but among the general public as well.

Particularly regarding New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, he says, Mendelssohn and his fellow German Enlightenment figures offer a powerful rebuke.

“There are people who assume that the Enlightenment is fundamentally in favor of secularism,” Gottlieb said, noting that Hitchens has added to that perception. “But several scholars have looked at Mendelssohn as a counter to this. He saw religious belief not just as working alongside the ideals of the Enlightenment but actually bolstering them.”

Of course, scholars themselves still debate what Mendelssohn meant, and why he still matters. Many of them will be at the Sept. 18 symposium, titled “A Continuing Conversation: Moses Mendelssohn and the Legacy of the Enlightenment,” to hash out the details.

One school of thought claims that Mendelssohn was essentially a closet assimilationist. By arguing that Judaism shared the same universal values as Christianity, and that Jewish beliefs fundamentally aligned with Enlightenment ideals like reason and tolerance, it maintains, Mendelssohn opened the door to a watered-down and indistinct faith.

But others argue that in Mendelssohn’s attempt, most famously, to translate the Hebrew Bible into German, he was simply trying to keep Judaism relevant. He may have attacked rabbinical authority, they argue, but he never denied the centrality of religious law, and he took issue with clerical power for an important reason: to help Jews integrate into modern society.

“I find myself somewhere in the middle,” said Shmuel Feiner, a leading scholar of the Jewish Enlightenment who teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is also author of the recent biography, “Moses Mendelssohn,” part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series, and will be at the symposium. “The most important thing in his life was to fight against religious fanaticism and raise the flag of religious tolerance.”

Leora Batnitzky, a professor of modern Jewish thought at Princeton, was less charitable. “In the end,” she said, “I think that Mendelssohn makes Judaism something that can be dispensed with. I don’t think he meant to,” she added, “but that’s where his thoughts led.”

Mendelssohn’s earlier critics have used what happened to his children — four of six converted to Christianity — as evidence for the ultimate futility of his project. But Batnitzky takes a different line. In the failure of Jews to integrate into the German state, she sees evidence of a larger problem: how does one maintain a Jewish identity in a secular society?

“The fact that he doesn’t come up with a fully satisfying answer is evidence of how difficult the problem is,” she said.

In Mendelssohn’s time, European Jews were still political outsiders. Monarchs gave rabbis virtual autonomy to govern their communities in exchange for protection; otherwise Jews essentially had no rights.

Mendelssohn tried to bargain with the Prussian king, arguing that Jews would give up a degree of autonomy if they were granted full rights as observant Jews — something he insisted Jews remain. As an intellectual, however, he usually made his arguments in philosophical terms, not political ones.

“What Mendelssohn tried to do is show the compatibility of belief in Judaism with loyalty to secular culture,” said David Sorkin, a professor of modern Jewish history at the CUNY Graduate Center, who takes the view that Mendelssohn earnestly tried to make Judaism relevant in modern times. “He saw no contradiction between them” — meaning modern values and Jewish beliefs.

Mendelssohn came from a deeply religious family. He was born in Dessau, in 1729, to an impecunious Torah scribe and a mother who was the descendant of a prominent line of rabbis. A gifted Torah scholar, Mendelssohn followed his rabbi David Frankel to Berlin, where Frankel had been named the city’s chief rabbi. Mendelssohn was never ordained, but he remained a scrupulous student of Judaism his entire life.

But by the time he was in his 20s, he had befriended many of the German Enlightenment’s non-Jewish stars, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing chief among them. Through these circles — not through a formal university education, which, as a Jew, he was not entitled to, and never received — Mendelssohn was introduced to secular thinkers like Socrates and Spinoza, Locke and Leibniz.

By his 30s, Mendelssohn had become a key figure in the German Enlightenment himself. He won a prestigious essay contest put on by the Royal Academy of Science, beating out Kant, and later penned an international best seller, “Phaidon,” which updated Plato’s dialogue on Socrates.

“He made Greek ideas accessible to a German audience,” explained Liliane Weissberg, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She will be at the symposium, and is one of a growing number of scholars who are trying to make Mendelssohn a more prominent subject of scholarship on the German Enlightenment.

Mendelssohn, who died in 1786, is still mostly studied by scholars of Jewish history. But many insist that he was of crucial importance to the German Enlightenment as well — not only as a model of religious pluralism, but also for his role in popularizing Enlightenment ideals. His translation of Greek texts earned him the moniker “the German Socrates,” and Weissberg describes him as a new breed of 18th-century celebrity: a public intellectual.

Yet even as his renown grew among Germans and he attained legal privileges only given to prominent Jews, he remained a staunch defender of Judaism. At the peak of his powers, anti-Enlightenment clergymen and critics frequently attacked him, often on account of his faith. He never apologized, even suggesting that Judaism was more attune to modern society than Christianity.

To those who said an unyielding commitment to reason led only to atheism and nihilism, he countered that, on the contrary: it led to the recognition of a benevolent God upon which the entire moral universe depended. Human intellect was a gift from God, moreover, and the best way for man to verify moral truths was through serious philosophical study. By applying one’s intellect, you were not only employing God’s gift, but using it in the service of discerning his truths.

To those who argued that he reduced all religion, Judaism included, to universal moral codes, he said, not so: each faith offered a unique path to understanding God, a being that nonetheless embraced all humanity.

Judaism, he argued, was especially well suited to promote the Enlightenment: its emphasis on daily religious practices served as a constant reminder of the movement’s ideals. This was different from Christianity, he went on, which emphasized dogmatic belief alone.

“What distinguishes Judaism is not so much its beliefs but its practices,” said Jerome Copulsky, a professor of modern Jewish thought at Goucher College, summarizing Mendelssohn’s views. But he added that Mendelssohn’s importance is not in his specific arguments, many of which are simply not relevant today. What matters is the overall tenor of his work.

“He was not the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment, but he may have had one of the greatest temperaments. What Mendelssohn was against was religious fanaticism,” he said, adding, what “he was trying to do was find a way to be a Jew and be modern at the same time.”

Among scholars, there is a tendency to view Mendelssohn as a symbol of a modern, but essentially secular, Jewish identity. But few interviewed missed the irony in this: Mendelssohn was what we would consider today a Modern Orthodox Jew — traditionally observant, yet trying to partake fully in the secular world.

Arnold Eisen, chancellor of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary and a scholar of modern Jewish thought who will appear at the symposium, commented on this point. He said those who regard Mendelssohn as a secularist symbol of how to maintain Jewish identity, however defined, in a modern world, would have to ignore much of his writing — the bulk of which tried to rationalize belief in God.

Eisen argued that in Mendelssohn’s mind, the modern world was all God’s creation, and “that is not something that today’s secularists are going to accept.”

Jonathan Karp, a professor Jewish history at SUNY-Binghamton who will be on Eisen’s panel, put it this way: “Modernity in the 18th century is different from what it is now.” And because of those differences, he went on, we should be skeptical of drawing too many parallels, especially between Mendelssohn’s idea of religious tolerance and what some see as a corollary: multiculturalism.

“What’s different is that in the 18th century there was a single standard for claiming equality” — everyone’s ability to reason, Karp said. But today, multiculturalism is not based on that belief. We simply regard all cultures as equal of respect, even if their core values are at odds with our own. “It’s too strong to say that he’s for multiculturalism, but he’s struggling to find a degree of tolerance and diversity.”

Gottlieb, the organizer of the exhibit and symposium, hopes the current debates about multicultarism will at least make Mendelssohn a case worth studying. “Today, there’s a tendency to see multiculturalism as leading only to the retreat into our own little communities. But Mendelssohn sees these communities as harmonizing and coalescing together.”

Ultimately, Mendelssohn forces us to ask the question: “How does one balance multiple identities?” Gottlieb said. “I think that’s an extremely important question in our current political and cultural environment, and I think it’s one Mendelssohn raises.”

Aug 18, 2011:

During World War II with the Nazi rise to power, more than 2,000 titles from the Wissenschaft des Judentums or Science of Judaism texts housed at the Frankfurt Library in Germany were either destroyed or dispersed. More than half of the lost titles, cataloged at Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) located at the Center for Jewish History in New York, will now be digitized to reconstruct the collection, thanks to a digital humanities grant awarded to the Center from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"The Wissenschaft des Judentums volumes housed at LBI will fill in the missing gaps of Frankfurt's collection, thereby virtually recreating a pre-Holocaust Jewish library," says Carol Kahn Strauss, Executive Director of Leo Baeck Institute.

"This collection is considered the library of Jewish scholarship and through digitization will be reconstructed and accessible for future generations," says Michael S. Glickman, COO of the Center for Jewish History.

According to Jim Leach, Chairman of the NEH, "The NEH grants awarded will promote new areas of research and make the breadth of human experience more understandable and knowledge more accessible."

This initiative is jointly funded by the NEH and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation or DFG), the German government's funding mechanism for the humanities. The project will digitize 1,000 books from the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement that are housed in the LBI collection at the Center and combine them with related volumes at Frankfurt University, whose extensive holdings amounted to the largest Judaica library in Europe before the Holocaust. This $300,000 project will begin in September and will take approximately 2 years to complete.

May 24, 2011:

BY DAN KLEIN
This article originally appeared on the JTA website

One night back in 1985, businessman Bruce Slovin was walking home from a corporate board meeting with a lawyer named Joe Greenberger when Greenberger asked him about his involvement in the Jewish world.

Slovin responded that he wasn’t at all active, so Greenberger invited him to attend the next board meeting of YIVO, the research institute in New York on East European Jewry and Yiddish.

Slovin, who had recently lost his grandfather and father, attended the meeting and found himself spellbound.

“There was sitting my grandfather and father, who had just died -- another Shlomo and a Yaakov,” he said, invoking his father and grandfather’s names.

“They were smoking with cigarettes like this” -- he said, making an overhand gesture with his own Parliament cigarette. “They would drink schnapps after they had the board meeting. They were great storytellers. My father and grandfather were alive again.”

The flash of nostalgia set Slovin, a Brooklyn native, on a course that led to his joining the board of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and ultimately becoming the founding chairman of the Center for Jewish History in New York.

The center is a partnership of five historical organizations: the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO. It features the largest repository of Jewish historical artifacts in the Diaspora, with an impressive building near New York's Union Square that contains 100 million artifacts and documents, and a library with half a million volumes.

More than 250 people gathered May 10 at a dinner to fete Slovin, 75, as he steps down as the center’s chairman.

The gala, held on the occasion of the center’s 10th anniversary, served as an opportunity to recognize the New Yorker’s lead role in the long, bumpy road to creating the center and putting it on sound financial footing.

An event that raised $1.2 million for the center also featured the unveiling of a stone plaque engraved with Slovin’s profile that will hang in its lobby.

“There would be no Center for Jewish History without Bruce Slovin,” Michael Glickman, the center’s chief operating officer, told JTA.

After attending that first board meeting in 1985, Slovin was shocked to discover that the documents in the YIVO archives were not well preserved.

“I saw these records degrading. There was no proper humidification, the warehouses were a mess,” he said. “We were broke all the time; that’s all we could afford.”

Slovin, then the president of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings and of the Revlon Group, was soon installed as YIVO chairman. He began to push the often-resistant board to sell the building and move to a lower-priced area.

Greenberger, however, was thinking bigger: He suggested bringing in other Jewish organizations.

The idea for the Center for Jewish History was born.

Between 1994 and 2000, when the center opened to the public, Slovin had raised $67 million using strategies that many at the gala joked were “unique.”

“He came to my office and asked me for money,” Simon Ziff, whose name now adorns the center’s Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogical Institute, told JTA at the gala. “I’m not a big giver, but Bruce is tireless.”

“I was astounded by the amount of time he put into this venture,” added Ted Mirvis, co-chair of the board of trustees for Yeshiva University Museum and secretary of the center’s board of directors, at the gala.

Slovin, who received a bachelor's degree in economics from Cornell University and a law degree from Harvard, had honed his ability to raise money as a child. He was so adept that eventually he was banned from a fundraising competition for planting trees in British Mandate Palestine because he won so often.

Despite his prowess, the center faced consistent financial difficulties. In 2007 there was controversy over a proposed takeover by New York University of the financially troubled center. More recently, the Forward reported that Slovin was asked to step down from the YIVO board amid a string of painful layoffs.

Slovin described the story as untrue and “dead wrong.”

The center also faced accusations of mismanagement and detractors who questioned its very raison d’etre. 

Among the critics was Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and a prominent historian of American Judaism. Sarna repeatedly called for the center to be dissolved into its constituent parts.

But Sarna, among others, reconsidered his position with the announcement in January that the center had raised more than $30 million in 15 months from 22 donors -- allowing it to wipe out its debts for the first time.

In February, Sarna called the center one of the most important Jewish archives in the world.

“Now that it’s financially viable,” he said, “it’s perfectly clear that it has found a place.”

Slovin points to the academic’s endorsement as a benchmark for the center.

It is this relative peace from debtors and critics that has allowed “everyone to relax a little bit,” he said, and made him comfortable with stepping down as chairman.

The chair will pass to William Ackman and Joseph Steinberg, who together led the recent capital campaign and were its largest donors.

While he will remain on the center’s board and as YIVO’s chairman, Slovin plans to focus on his business, the real estate and financial holdings company 1 Eleven Associates, as well as bringing in more scholars to the center and writing its history.

“Bruce doesn’t claim to be a scholar,” Mirvis said, “but he understands the needs of scholars.”

Hearing this, Slovin smiles wryly.

“I’m just smart enough to understand the need to have a history,” he said. “As a people as valuable to human kind as the Jewish people are, it seemed dead wrong not to have as much of history as we can save -- and we have tons more work to do.” 

May 4, 2011:

The Center for Jewish History Board of Directors has unanimously elected William A. Ackman and Joseph S. Steinberg as Co-Chairmen of the Board and Amy P. Goldman as Vice Chairman. The new leadership begins its tenure at an exciting time in the Center’s history. Having successfully completed a one-year capital campaign that raised $30,000,000 to pay off its mortgage, the Center celebrated its 10th anniversary as a now debt-free institution. The Center is recognized as one of the foremost Jewish research and cultural institutions in the world, having served over 1 million people in more than 100 countries.

The Center for Jewish History Board of Directors formally recognized and honored Bruce Slovin, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, who envisioned and created the Center as a communal home to five partner organizations: American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS); American Sephardi Federation (ASF); Leo Baeck Institute (LBI); Yeshiva University Museum (YUM); YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO). Mr. Slovin’s vision and dedication have molded the Center into a formidable institution: a place where the history of the Jewish people comes alive through scholarship and cultural programming, exhibitions and symposia, lectures and performances. On behalf of the tens of thousands of people who have participated in the creation of the Center over the past 10 years—as funders, researchers, scholars, lay leaders and members of the general public—we show our profound appreciation for Mr. Slovin’s passion, determination and invaluable leadership. The Center’s success and growth are a tribute to his legacy.

As it enters a new decade, the Center continues to provide access to its five partners’ collections, spanning over 600 years of Jewish history, through the centralized online public access catalog and serves as the preeminent repository of the modern Jewish experience.

Apr 1, 2011:

The Center for Jewish History, the nation’s leading repository of Jewish history and experience, announces two fellowship offerings made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Vivian G. Prins Foundation.

Jay R. Berkovitz, Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was selected to receive the inaugural NEH Senior Scholar Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History for the 2011/2012 academic year, made possible through a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

According to Michael S. Glickman, Center for Jewish History, COO, “This inaugural NEH fellowship will go a long way toward supporting our mission and expanding our profile in the academic community. The selection of Jay Berkovitz through this award puts a capstone on the Center’s work, raising the level of supported scholarship to new heights, and positioning the Center as a unique research institution in the scholarly world.”

Mr. Berkovitz’s expertise is in Jewish history and law, and he specializes in early modern Jewry with an emphasis on Jewish jurisprudence, ritual, and communal governance. His recent publications include Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860 (2004); Tradition and Revolution in Early Modern France [Hebrew](2007); and a forthcoming book on seventeenth-century rabbinic authority Ya’ir Hayyim Bacharach. He is Co-editor of Jewish History.

He will spend a year in residence at the Center, where he will investigate Jewish life in the 18th century from a thoroughly new perspective. His research project, "Protocols of Justice: Family, Community and Law in Early Modern France," is based on the records of the Metz rabbinic court during the years 1771-89. The Metz court register has never before undergone scholarly examination. Brimming with details of inheritance disputes, commercial transactions, the changing status of women, and recourse to French courts, the 1200 cases that came before the rabbinic tribunal challenge the idea of an insular Jewish legal system. The project will explore how members of this vibrant community navigated the powerful winds of change in the two decades preceding the French Revolution.

The Center also named two recipients of the Prins Fellowship, designed for foreign scholars at the beginning of their careers seeking permanent teaching and re¬search positions in North America. They are: Jolante Mickute of Lithuania who will expand upon her doctoral dissertation “Modern, Jewish, and Female: Politics of Culture, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Poland and Lithuania, 1918-1939,” a political, cultural, and sexual history of Jewish women nationalists in interwar Eastern Europe; and Jan Lánícek of the Czech Republic, a part-time Lecturer at the University of Southampton and University of Portsmouth in England, who will research the question of minorities in inter-war Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, analyzing Jewish/non-Jewish relations in order to better understand the changes in East-Central European policies towards the Jews.

“The Center for Jewish History actively works to foster and advance scholarship, to expand the reach of the rich collections of its partners and to impact the wide world of Jewish studies scholarship. Working with an elite group of academic advisors, the Center continues to expand its offerings to further engage the public in its work,” continues Mr. Glickman.

Mar 8, 2011:

By SAM DOLNICK
This article originally appeared in the New York Times Online Edition

In 1932, as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, a Jewish librarian in Frankfurt published a catalog of 15,000 books he had painstakingly collected for decades.

It listed the key texts of a groundbreaking field called the Science of Judaism, in which scholars analyzed the religion’s philosophy and culture as they would study those of ancient Greece or Rome. The school of thought became the foundation for modern Jewish studies around the world.

In the tumult of war, great chunks of the collection vanished. Now, librarians an ocean away have determined that most of the missing titles have been sitting for years on the crowded shelves of the Leo Baeck Institute, a Manhattan center dedicated to preserving German Jewish culture.

The story of how the hundreds of tattered, cloth-bound books with esoteric German titles ended up in New York includes impossible escapes, careful scholarship and some very heavy suitcases. And while the exact trails of many of the volumes remain murky, they wind through book-lined apartments on the Upper West Side, across a 97-year-old woman’s cluttered coffee table and into a library’s cavernous stacks.

For Jewish scholars, the collection of Science of Judaism texts (in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums) is a touchstone marking the emergence of Jewish tradition as a philosophy and culture worthy of academic study.

"We're all heirs to the legacy of Wissenschaft," said Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

The University Library Frankfurt still houses the bulk of the collection, but experts there have determined over several decades that they were missing some 2,000 books listed in the 1932 catalog. In the last two years, a team led by Renate Evers, head librarian at the Leo Baeck Institute, found that her shelves had more than 1,000 of the lost titles.

While scholars say the books in New York are probably not the same copies as those lost from the Frankfurt library, their rediscovery offers the chance to rebuild what one professor called "a legendary collection." Frankfurt librarians are putting the collection online, while the Center for Jewish History, the institute's parent organization, is seeking a grant to do the same.

"This is very exciting," said Rachel Heuberger, head of the library's Judaica division. "You can reconstruct a collection that otherwise never would have come to life again."

Scholars say the books were most likely brought to New York from Europe by private collectors and antiquities dealers. In the past 50 years, donors, nearly all of them German Jews who immigrated and prospered here, gave them to the Leo Baeck Institute.

The donors, photographed in their cinched ties and sober suits, represent a generation of scholarly New York immigrants that is nearly gone. They escaped the Nazis, built new lives and created a sophisticated community that centered on books, culture and learning. Their ranks included the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

Many came to this country hauling suitcases filled with books, and as they settled here, they created academic journals and scholarly institutes. They debated politics during formal dinners in Washington Heights parlors. They took typewriters along on vacation so they could keep working.

Herbert A. Strauss, who came to New York with his wife in 1946, owned one of the lost books, an 1843 volume by Ludwig Philippson. Where he got it, his widow, Lotte, has no idea. A historian and a professor, he was always coming home to their Upper Manhattan apartment with his arms full of new tomes.

"He was not only married to me," Mrs. Strauss said. "He was also married to his desk."

When he died in 2005, she donated 4,500 of his books to the Leo Baeck Institute.

The couple had met in Germany, and escaped together to Switzerland just steps ahead of the Gestapo. They recounted their ordeals in separate memoirs published in 1999.

Mrs. Strauss, 97, a great-grandmother, recalled meeting her husband. "I was fascinated by him," she said. "He was good-looking and he had new ideas."

On a recent afternoon in her sun-drenched apartment, Mrs. Strauss pulled out her husband's brittle papers. There were Nazi-era ration cards decorated with swastikas - red for bread, blue for meat. There was a lifeguard certificate from Berlin that showed a young man, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, smiling at something off-camera.

Did he carry books with him when he came to New York?

Mrs. Strauss laughed. "We came here poor as church mice," she said. "You went as you were; you didn't carry a thing." She was eight months pregnant and had one dress to her name. Mr. Strauss built his library, and their life, in New York.

Ludwig Schwarzschild, a dermatologist, brought his library with him when he came to the United States in 1934. Although his practice north of Frankfurt was shuttered by the authorities, he, his wife and their two young children were able to take most of their possessions out of Germany, said their daughter, Lore Singerman, of Annapolis, Md.

Mrs. Singerman, 78, remembered a Manhattan childhood of heavy European furniture and crowded bookcases. Reading was highly prized - prayer books, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic.

Her father owned one of the lost Wissenschaft volumes, an 1888 edition of a Hermann Cohen book. His family donated it to the institute in 1970, the year he died. Mrs. Singerman does not know where her father got the book, but said, "If it was in German, he probably brought it with him - he didn't buy German books here."

Fred W. Lessing, another German Jewish donor, built such a vast book collection at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y., that he ordered catalog cards from the Library of Congress to keep track of it all. He was chief executive of a Yonkers metal company, but his passion was his library and discussions with professors and writers.

Mr. Lessing scoured auction catalogs for treasures, with a special focus on the history of the Enlightenment. His children knew enough not to touch his "good books," said his daughter Joan Lessing. "His library was part of our lives," she said. "Books were in every room."

Mr. Lessing gave the institute an early-20th-century edition of a volume by Adolf Eckstein, but his daughter did not know where he had gotten it.

Even the Frankfurt librarian who cataloged the entire collection, Aron Freimann, came to New York. After arriving in 1939, he went on to work at the New York Public Library.

Today, his granddaughter, Ruth Dresner, lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She keeps her grandfather's catalog on her shelf - she calls it his "magnum opus" - and plans to leave it to her children.

"I'm 80 years old, and I'm very devoted and dedicated to perpetuating tradition," she said. "I am very proud."

Feb 24, 2011:

DIVERSE, RARELY SEEN, ONE OF A KIND, HISTORIC IMPORTANT TREASURES ILLUMINATE ASPECTS OF MODERN JEWISH HISTORY

It’s been ten years since the Center for Jewish History opened its doors in New York City as the largest repository of Jewish history and experience, outside of the State of Israel. By bringing together five distinct and independent Jewish institutions under one roof, the Center was created to preserve, protect and present the treasured collections of its partner institutions totaling more than 500,000 books and 100 million documents that include pieces of art, textiles, ritual objects, as well as music, films and photographs. In honor of the Center’s 10th Anniversary year, an exhibition entitled Zero to 10 provides the public with a first-look at the treasures housed at the Center from each of its five partners: the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Yeshiva University Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Among some of the treasures on display include:

• Thomas Jefferson’s 1818 letter denouncing anti-Semitism and invoking America as a bastion of religious freedom and tolerance.
• Emma Lazarus’ handwritten draft of her iconic 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.
• Torah scroll belonging to the Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760), founder of Hassidism, featuring lines written in his own hand.
• Dutch Masters in the Rose Room by Larry Rivers (1997), born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, a playful oil and canvas work based on a conflation of the iconic Dutch Masters cigar box and a Rembrandt group portrait, among other popular and art historical motifs.
• The Trial of the Jews of Trent, 1478-1479, ink, gouache and gold on paper. Written for the first Duke of Wurtemberg, Eberhardt I and bearing his arms, this is the only known German copy of the records of the Trials of the Jews of Trent, accused of the ritual murder of a young Christian boy named Simon in 1475.
• A Torah Crown from Austro-Hungary, ca. 1886-1922. Made of silver, repoussé, chased and parcel gilt, this elegant, elaborately gilded Crown is a beautiful example of Central-Eastern European Judaica craftsmanship of the late 19th and early 20th century, which survived the Shoah.
• Letter signed by Lord Rothschild, Samuel Montagu, David Alexander, and Claude Montefiore - leaders of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. They organized the Russo-Jewish Committee in London and wrote this letter to assist the victims of the 1905 pogroms in Russia.
• Gazette of the United States - In 1790, the Gazette, a New York newspaper, reproduced the first correspondence between the newly elected president, George Washington, and Levi Shaftall, leader of the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah, Georgia.
• Ceremonial Bindalli Dress - Gallipoli, 19th Century - This dress was worn by Buka Yohai during her ceremonial walk to the mikvah (ritual bath) before her wedding ceremony, and was also worn by both her mother and grandmother for the same purpose before their weddings. This particular example is unique in its depiction of grape clusters and sheaves of wheat to symbolize fertility.
• Portrait of Michael Gratz by Thomas Sulley, ca. 1805-1808 - Michael Gratz (1740 - 1811) emigrated from Germany to America in 1758. He and his brother Barnard went into business together, speculating in the West, purchasing furs in the Ohio River Valley, and dealing in kosher meat in Curacao. The brothers were central to the founding of Louisville, KY. Michael married Miriam Simon of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in June of 1769. They had twelve children, among them Rebecca Gratz who was one of the 19th century’s most important American Jewish philanthropists. The artist, Thomas Sully, was a leading portraitist of the day. He painted the likenesses of many prominent Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Patrick Henry.
• Postcard from Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah – This postcard was composed by Ms. Szold and sent from Jerusalem to her cousin, Melvin Krulewitch, during her first visit to Palestine in 1909.
• De Universa Mulierum Medicina (Textbook of Women's Medicine) - Written in 1609 by Roderigo de Castro, who had fled from the Lisbon in the wake of the late 16th century escalation of the Inquisition, this volume is considered a pioneering work of modern gynecology and obstetrics.

Visually arresting and conceptually sweeping, Zero to 10 has a three-fold mission: to enable the viewer a better appreciation of how crucial decades and past centuries impacted Jewish life, to understand how multiple changing forces shaped Jewish history, and to explore the continuing heritage of Jewish belief and experience.

In his introduction to Zero to 10, Steven J. Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and member of the Center’s Academic Advisory Council, writes, "No culture saves everything. Time passes, timber burns, stone is eroded, documents are misplaced, and memories become distorted and rendered unidentifiable. All the more so for a people without a central political or religious authority; for a peripatetic people, like the Jews, without vaults that held treasures for millennia or longstanding archives. Who was there to gather the remnants of the past, to determine what must not be lost?"

"This process of gathering the shards of the past began late for Jews. It started mostly sporadically, as often as not, on the initiative of one or another individual, with documents ferreted out of synagogue attics or the bookshelves of ancient buildings and saved, perhaps, in a drawer or two of someone’s house, eventually with collections becoming so voluminous that they required a room or two, and then institutional backing for their care."

Each work from the striking array of art, artifacts, manuscripts, ritual objects and textiles illuminates an aspect of Jewish history and experience across a sweep of continents. "This exhibition," Zipperstein continues, "shows, side by side, the widest array of the collections housed at the Center for Jewish History from written texts, to art, to ritual objects and even personal ephemera from ages gone by. This is history, our history, arrayed over space and time, and presented as a triumphant exploration of the first ten years of the Center for Jewish History."

Zero to 10 is unlike any other exhibition as Gabriel Goldstein, Exhibition Curator and Associate Director for Exhibitions and Programs at Yeshiva University Museum explains, “This past decade has brought about great changes in human experience, with unprecedented technological innovation, alongside economic, religious, political and environmental upheaval. Against the backdrop of this revolution, the institutions at the Center for Jewish History have been able to provide access to their collections in ways that were almost unimaginable only a decade ago. Zero to 10 provides a window into the fascinating holdings of the partner institutions, and allows us to examine primary evidence, the building blocks of our understanding of the past."

"In its first decade, the Center for Jewish History has become a destination for visitors from around the world and one of the world's most important venues for research, academic conferences, exhibitions, and cultural events," says Michael S. Glickman, CJH Chief Operating Officer. "Our goal for the future is to continue to expand the Center’s resources and reach, making it a focal point and a magnet for research, education, discussion, and artistic creation that informs and inspires the public in all aspects of the Jewish experience and identity."

Feb 7, 2011:

The Center for Jewish History, the nation's leading repository of Jewish history and experience, names its candidates for its inaugural Joseph S. Steinberg Emerging Jewish Filmmaker Fellowships for the 2011 academic year. The candidates include: Rebecca Kahn Bloch and Emily Kennedy of Oberlin College for their joint project entitled: Radical Judaism in a Radical Campus: The Emergence of a New Jewish Community at Oberlin College, exploring the history of Jewish activity on American college campuses. This project will make extensive use of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) collection covering Jewish Student Organizations on American campuses from 1907 through 2006. Marianna Yaroslavka of University of Southern California is selected for her project entitled: Survival in Eastern Siberia: The Other Jewish Side, exploring a little-known area of Siberia, where a once thriving Yiddish community now struggles with its re-birth and survival. This project will make extensive use of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and AJHS collections, housed at the Center.

"This initiative supports the use of our partners' collections through film and most importantly helps students with the costs associated with researching their work. The goal of these documentaries is to shed light on aspects of Jewish life that might otherwise be forgotten," says Michael S. Glickman, Center for Jewish History COO. "We are grateful to the Steinberg family for their vision in supporting filmmakers who are working within the vast archival collections at the Center."

n addition to the research conducted at the Center, the fellowship recipients will present their finished works in a public forum. Fellows are required to conduct on-site research for their respective filmmaking projects at the Center. Each award carries a financial stipend of $2500. Applications for the 2012 academic year will be available in May 2011.

For further information regarding the Center for Jewish History and how to apply, click here.

Jan 25, 2011:

By TAMAR SNYDER
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week

For a museum dedicated to digitizing and preserving history, The Center for Jewish History is now better positioned to face its future.

The center, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, announced earlier this week that it has raised the $30 million needed to pay off its existing debt associated with the purchase and construction of its building on West 16th Street.

The building houses the collections of five institutions: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Board members William Ackman and Joseph Steinberg quietly launched the capital campaign in September 2009, when presented with unfavorable terms for renewing some $30 million in tax-exempt bonds. Continuing to dip into its endowment fund to pay nearly $2 million in annual debt obligations would have hampered the center’s financial stability.

Ackman, CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, contributed $6.75 million, and Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, gave $5.35 million. Bruce Berkowitz's Fairholme Foundation contributed an additional $6.75 million.

These gifts represent the three largest individual gifts that the center has ever received.

The three philanthropists increased their initial gifts since this was an all-or-nothing capital campaign (either pay off the debt in its entirety, or not at all). "They increased their generosity to help us see the finish line," says Michael Glickman, the center's chief operating officer.

The vast majority of the $30 million - some $27.5 million - was paid in full. Only $2.5 million came in short-term pledges to be paid out over a couple of years.

Now, the center is focusing on raising $1.5 million to meet the terms of a three-for-one challenge grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities last August. The fund will support the center’s archival processing and digitization efforts. The center aims to raise $5 million by the end of 2012.

"It's much easier to have a conversation with a donor about working toward our mission and why we need to raise money [for archival and digitization efforts], than it is having a conversation with a donor about paying down your debt," Glickman told The Jewish Week.

For 2011, the center's budget will remain under $6 million. "Given our experience over the last couple of years, we have learned to do more with less, as I think everybody has," Glickman said.

The center is rolling out several initiatives, including compiling digital versions of Holocaust-related collections so that they are accessible online. It will also host a conference in November focused on digital technology and the study of Jewish history.

The center also plans to continue its work to foster a community of scholars and serve as a hub of Jewish history. In addition to fellowships for graduate students and post-docs, it is searching for senior scholars as part of fellowships funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"It's a nice opportunity for us to continue working toward making the collections more accessible and putting them, broadly speaking, in the hands of the public,” Glickman said.

Jan 24, 2011:

Single Largest Fund-Raising Effort Since Building was Completed in 2000

In September 2009, the Center for Jewish History, a not-for-profit cultural institution and the largest repository of Jewish history and experience outside of the state of Israel, was faced with rising debt service costs and the inability to meet increased financial demands. The Center was created ten years ago from the vision of Bruce Slovin, Center Chairman and Founder, who raised $100 million to bring together five esteemed historical organizations under one roof and to establish one of the greatest cultural and academic resources in the Jewish community.

In late 2009, coupled with the worst recession and economic downturn in recent times, Mr. Slovin approached the Center's board and asked board members William Ackman and Joseph Steinberg to spearhead a bold effort to raise $30 million to pay off the debt. Today, the Center announced that its 10-year-old construction debt was fully retired with $30 million raised by Mr. Ackman, Mr. Steinberg, the Fairholme Foundation, and 19 other donors, freeing the organization to move forward with its culture and humanities agenda to preserve and present the history of the Jewish people.

"The Center for Jewish History has emerged from a difficult financial situation stronger than ever thanks to the donors who recognized the significance of this essential institution," said Bruce Slovin, Chairman and Founder of the Center.

While cultural institutions across the country struggled to stay afloat during the recession and resorted to drastic measures in order to cover operating costs, the Center expanded its offerings, increased its hours and created new initiatives to support its core mission of preserving and presenting the collections of its five partners, safeguarding the memories and experience of the Jewish people. The Center's five independent partners include: American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), founded in 1892; American Sephardi Federation (ASF), founded in 1973; Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), founded in 1955; Yeshiva University Museum (YUM), founded in 1973; and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO), founded in 1925.

"I understand the importance of history and have been an enormous beneficiary of what I have learned about our past," said board member Bill Ackman. "In partnership with Joe Steinberg and other generous donors, I am delighted to have helped to ensure the preservation of the record of our history, and to have contributed to the advancement of our understanding about those who have helped to forge a path for our generation."

"Today, the Center is internationally recognized as a model for not-for-profit collaboration. Since its founding, more than 15,000 donors worldwide have contributed more than $150 million to support the Center's work," adds Michael S. Glickman, Chief Operating Officer of the Center. "Our goal for the future is to continue to expand the Center's resources and reach, making it a focal point and a magnet for research, education, discussion, and artistic creation that informs and inspires the public in all aspects of the Jewish experience."

The Center for Jewish History was founded with a core mission to preserve, protect and present the treasured collections of its five partner institutions totaling more than 500,000 books and 100 million documents that include pieces of art, textiles, ritual objects, as well as music, films and photographs. The collections at the Center range from the early modern era in Europe and pre-colonial times in the Americas, to present-day materials from across the globe. The Center provides access to a comprehensive collection of historic archival materials including the seminal works of Franz Kafka, Theodor Herzl, Moses Mendelssohn, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and many more.

During the next decade, the Center will continue to focus on long-term sustainability, while incorporating technology to help achieve its mission of expanded access. The Center plans to continue working with its partners to digitize aspects of their collections and build an even greater online portal to the materials it houses, making the archive and library more easily available to the public and fostering continued engagement and dialogue around the history of the Jewish people.

Jan 24, 2011:

By MIRIAM KREININ SOUCCAR
This article originally appeared in Crain's New York Business

The Center for Jewish History, a nonprofit that houses the largest repository of Jewish history outside the state of Israel, announced Monday it has raised $30 million to pay off its longstanding debt.

The debt was accrued 10 years ago when the Center built its home on West 16th Street. The organization had been paying around $1.5 million in debt service costs each year, but in September 2009, at the height of the economic downturn, their letter of credit expired, and renewing would have meant signing up for a higher interest rate.

The board decided to launch a capital campaign to knock out the debt in one blow and skip paying some of long-term interest costs. Led by trustees William Ackman and Joseph Steinberg, it raised the money in less than 18 months with the help of the Fairholme Foundation, which gave nearly $6.8 million, and 19 other donors.

"The Center for Jewish History has emerged from a difficult financial situation stronger than ever, thanks to the donors who recognized the significance of this essential institution," said Bruce Slovin, chairman and founder of the Center.

The organization, which operates on a $5.5 million annual budget and has a $10 million endowment, is now financially sound and can get back to focusing on its mission.

"Our goal for the future is to continue to expand the Center's resources and reach, making it a focal point and a magnet for research, education, discussion, and artistic creation that informs and inspires the public in all aspects of the Jewish experience," said Michael Glickman, chief operating officer of the Center. The nonprofit houses the collections of five institutions, including the American Jewish Historical Society and the Yeshiva University Museum.

Jan 21, 2011:

By STEPHANIE STROM
This article originally appeared in the New York Times Online Edition

Few nonprofits groups have dared embark on a capital campaign since the financial crisis started.

But the Center for Jewish History, which serves as the umbrella for the largest collection of documents, photographs, books and other materials related to the Jewish experience, had little choice.

A letter of credit that backed some $30 million in tax-exempt bonds it had floated in 2001 to buy and renovate its home on West 16th Street in Manhattan was expiring, and the terms to renew it were onerous. “We couldn’t afford it,” said William A. Ackman, the peppery hedge fund manager and one of the center’s board members.

The debt had long been a headache for the center. Though it had no trouble raising the $5.5 million it needs for its operations, it had to dip into its endowment each year to make its $1.5 million in required principal and interest payments.

"Raising money for debt service is not part of our mission and that made it a harder sell when we were fund-raising," said Michael S. Glickman, the center’s chief operating officer. "That in turn made it much more difficult to hit the target for our operating budget each year, particularly as the credit market was freezing up."

What's more, the center was missing out on investment opportunities because it had to keep its endowment in Treasury securities.

The center was not alone. Many nonprofits that had floated tax-exempt bonds during the heyday were grappling with rising interest rates, swap contracts suddenly gone sour and other financial challenges related to their debt.

After the letter of credit expired at the end of 2009, the bank that issued it gave the center a yearlong extension. (Mr. Ackman declined to name the bank.)

Bruce Slovin, an investor who founded the center and serves as its chairman, decided the only solution was a capital campaign and asked Mr. Ackman and another board member, Joseph S. Steinberg of Leucadia National, to take the reins.

They quickly agreed to kick in $5 million apiece. Other board members also contributed to the campaign "and then Joe and I went around taking people to lunch," Mr. Ackman said.

At first, he said, fund-raising went along smoothly. Bruce Berkowitz, the investor behind the Fairholme Fund, which had invested in General Growth Properties along with Mr. Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management, was one of the first external donors to contribute. His Fairholme Foundation gave $5 million - "making the decision in about 15 minutes," Mr. Ackman said - bringing the center halfway to its goal.

Over the year, eight more donors kicked in amounts ranging from $100,000 to $2 million, but raising the full amount was slow going, Mr. Ackman said.

"It was getting close to the end of the year, and the bank wasn’t happy," he said.

He offered to increase the amount he was donating by 20 percent on the condition that other donors do the same. Mr. Berkowitz agreed to do so, as did one other donor, but the center was still short of its goal.

To sweeten their pitch, Mr. Ackman and Mr. Steinberg had promised donors that they did not have to cut their checks until the total amount required to retire the debt had been pledged. With the time quickly running out for the donations to qualify for tax deductions for 2010, Mr. Ackman grew concerned.

"I honestly was worried that some donors might just take their money elsewhere," he said. "The thought of that catalyzed the board, and so we all chipped in a little more."

In the end, a total of 22 people contributed to the campaign, with the smallest gift being $50,000.

Now the center is debt-free. "Our $10 million endowment is being invested, and we are doing some absolutely fabulous programs, working on digitizing the collections and launching some new initiatives to make them more accessible," Mr. Glickman said. "The center is in a better position than ever before."

As for Mr. Ackman, he's out fund-raising again, this time through tickets for the Harbor Investment Conference on Feb. 3. The proceeds from that conference will go to Boys and Girls Harbor Inc., which operates a charter school and after-school programs in New York City.

Jan 8, 2011:

This article originally appeared in the New Vilna Review.

Michael Glickman, Chief Operating Officer for the Center for Jewish History in New York City, recently took some time to answer a few questions via email for the New Vilna Review about the work of the center and the important role it is playing in helping to preserve, protect, and share Jewish history.

NVR: For our readers who may not have heard of the Center for Jewish History, can you give us a brief overview of what the center does?

The Center for Jewish History, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is an institution dedicated to the preservation of the history of the Jewish people. More specifically, it is home to five distinguished archival and museum organizations, each of which focuses on specific aspects of modern Jewish history. Our focus is on the preservation and perpetuation of the combined collections of these partners – American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Yeshiva University Museum. The Center for Jewish History is home to collections totaling more than 500,000 volumes and more than 100 million documents, including thousands of pieces of artwork, textiles and ritual objects, as well as music, films and photographs. These collections represent the largest repository of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel. By collecting these works of historical and cultural significance, preserving and digitizing them, sharing them through programs and exhibitions both on site and online, and by making these materials available to scholars around the world, the Center will continue to create new opportunities for the stories of modern Jewish history to be told.

NVR: What inspired the creation of the center?
 
The Center was founded and conceived by our Chairman, Bruce Slovin. Archives and libraries are extremely expensive operations to run, and the financial environment of the 1990s made it clear that, in order to survive and thrive, cultural institutions were going to have to find new, innovative ways to collaborate and to share the challenges of institutional life. Mr. Slovin, then the Chairman of the Board of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, believed that the only way to ensure the survival of these extraordinary institutions was to form a coalition that would provide a shared physical space and recognize a host of efficiencies and value.

NVR: The center seems to have quite a range of different programs and events – how do you decide which programs to sponsor? Is there an over-arching vision that informs these decisions?
 
The mission of the Center for Jewish History is to perpetuate the study of and engagement with modern Jewish history through scholarship, culture and ideas. In terms of the programs held at the Center, I would say that when we choose to sponsor a program, our goal is to bring the highest-possible quality of product to our constituents, in any area in which the Center is somehow engaged. In other words, the vision is simple – programs that help carry on the core mission of the Center are those with which we want to be associated.

In addition, each of the Center’s five partner organizations create and execute their own calendar of public programs and events. While we do collaborate throughout the year on any number of these programs, partner programs are by and large done independently of the Center. But it is equally fair to say that, in all cases, the goals of our public offerings are essentially the same – to continue the mission of our institutions.

NVR: What are some of the center resources that can be accessed online via your website?
 
The Center’s website and online portals are some of our proudest accomplishments, and are always the focus of ongoing work to improve our interface with all of our users, whether they’re conducting academic research, accessing the resources of the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, or looking at our upcoming calendar of programs and exhibitions (as well as participating in those programs through webcasts and virtual tours). One of our greatest accomplishments is the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), a rarity in the library world that allows users to search through the combined collections of our partners with a single click, whether archival materials, library books, museum objects or digitized images of any of these.  We continue to develop new features to better interface with our users, including the development of innovative search tools, finding aids and collection based websites. The website offers FAQ sheets to assist patrons with genealogical research, links to every image digitized through the Center’s Gruss-Lipper Digitization Lab, and a wide array of additional research and archival resources.

NVR: Can you tell us a little about your own background and how you came to work for the Center for Jewish History?
 
I came into the Center for Jewish History nine years ago as a fundraiser for YIVO and have been running the institution since 2005. My background is in public affairs and prior to the Center I worked for a governmental agency and a private liberal arts university. I came to the Center because I was intrigued by the idea of such collaboration among not-for-profits and I have always enjoyed working in an educational environment. More specifically, I enjoy a good challenge, and raising money and running an independent research and cultural organization certainly has its challenges. It has been a truly amazing opportunity and I continue to be inspired by what I believe our future holds.

NVR: Is there anything else you would like to add?
 
I encourage everyone to come explore the Center for Jewish History in person and online. We are located at 15 West 16th Street in New York City and at www.cjh.org online.

Oct 1, 2010:

In his literary work Necropolis, Boris Pahor presents a new understanding of the lesser-known systematic racially discriminatory policies against the Slovenian population residing within Fascist Italy, which took place a full decade prior to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Long ignored in Italy and abroad, Boris Pahor is now considered the most influential living author in the Slovene language. He has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature and in 2007 he was awarded French order of Legion of Honor. In 2009, Mr. Pahor also became a member of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recent Italian and US historiography has revised the notion that Mussolini’s anti-Jewish Racial Laws of 1938 were an isolated case. Boris Pahor provides the background for understanding the complex and often contradictory behavior of Italy’s Fascist regime. In Italy, his work is gaining increasing recognition and his story has drawn much attention on the history of the Slovene minority in the North East. His work has given a voice to the Slovene minority of Trieste. Pahor’s writing style has been compared to Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun and Irme Kertesz, yet it is truly his own. He tells his story from the perspective of a traveler who, in the 1960s, revisits the concentration camp sites of his suffering. He moves freely from the past to the present, convinced that the experience of the camps cannot be put into words.

A panel of experts will participate in a literary program designed to enlarge and complete the understanding of racial policies in Trieste, Italy, held at The Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street in NYC, on Thursday, November 4th at 6:30 pm. Pre-eminent scholars and critics of the literature and history of Slovene Trieste –Jože Pirjevec, University of Primorska, Slovenia; Uri Cohen, Columbia University; Annie Cohen-Solal, NYU and Michael Biggins, University of Washington Libraries and Pahor’s translator – will join to explore Trieste's cultural diversity then and now, and how one of Europe's most multicultural cities became an epicenter of racist violence.

The literary program is presented by Center for Jewish History, PEN World Voices Festival, and Centro Primo Levi and co-sponsored by the Consul General of Slovenia. Admission: $15 general admission; $10 members of CJH, CPL, PEN World Voices Festival and affiliates of the Consulate General of Slovenia. Please call SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or visit www.smarttix.com.

The aftermath of World War One brought about a new geopolitical configuration, perceived as detrimental by most of the ethnic minorities that had made up the former Austro Hungarian Empire. In the cosmopolitan port city of Trieste, in the northeastern corner of Italy, the ethnic Slovenes became the target of discrimination, harassment and suppression. With the advent of Fascism, those who resisted Italian efforts at assimilation were imprisoned, shot, or (eventually) sent to concentration camps.

Boris Pahor, who later became one of the most prominent authors writing in Slovene was drafted in Mussolini’s army in 1941 and sent to the Libyan front. After the armistice in 1943 he returned to Trieste, by then occupied by the Nazis. He joined the Yugoslav resistance forces, and was arrested in 1944 and sent to the camps at Dachau, Struthof, Harzungen and Bergen-Belsen. His memoir of his camp experiences, Necropolis, recently published in its second English edition by Dalkey Archive Press, will be the centerpiece of this event.

Martin Riker, publisher at Dalkey Archive Press in the U.S. which has just released a new edition of Necropolis in paperback as part of a series on Slovenian literature, believes Pahor is probably the most important and most revered Slovenian writer living today. “Necropolis is universally considered his greatest work. It is a moving work of Holocaust literature, and sets itself apart from similar works because of Pahor's meditative, Proustian eye/voice. We could think of no better novel with which to launch a series intended to offer English-language readers a chance to encounter the intellectual and emotional depth and sheer literary accomplishment of Slovenian literature.”

Aug 4, 2010:

BY SHELLY BANJO
This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal Online

David Berg, the youngest son in a struggling immigrant family who came to Ellis Island from Russia in 1904, felt he had made it in America.

The late real-estate lawyer, known for developing New York's Regency Towers and Boston's Harbor Towers had gone to Harvard Law School, built up a real-estate empire and subsequently gave away much of his fortune to Jewish, education and law-related charities.

Now the foundation that bears his name is continuing his legacy with a $300,000 donation to the Center for Jewish History with another goal: Get more people in the doors of this Union Square research center and museum, which is dedicated to preserving the history of the Jewish people.

"David felt as an immigrant Jew who had made it in America that he had to support Jewish causes, the indigent and the elderly," says Michele Cohn Tocci, the David Berg Foundation's president and a member of the Center's board of trustees. "He'd say: 'If I don't do it, no one else will.'"

Ms. Tocci says there's a direct connection between Berg's philanthropic intent and the Center for Jewish History's mission.

The center was founded a decade ago as a campus for five Jewish organizations in Manhattan that came together to create a common space for research, exhibition and public programming for the American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Collections at many of these institutions had been poorly kept and were at risk of damage. The general public had limited access to the collections and the institutions decided that by coming together they could better preserve the works, attract funding and draw visitors. The center now has nearly 100 million documents and 500,000 volumes such as the personal collections of Moses Mendelssohn, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.

The center's History of Genocide Initiative, partially funded with a $75,000 grant by the David Berg Foundation, included a public exhibit based on letters by Raphael Lemkin, the international lawyer who coined the term genocide and helped persuade the United Nations to adopt the 1948 Genocide Convention. The exhibit drew in thousands of people, boosting museum attendance by about 10% to 40,000 in 2009.

As it approaches its 10-year anniversary, the center is shifting its focus from building its collection toward attracting more visitors to learn about Jewish history. It will launch its "Decades" exhibit in October, to focus on important decades in Jewish history.

"We're a well-kept secret in New York and we're working on changing that," says Michael Glickman, the center's chief operating officer "The first 10 years were focused on building the institution and infrastructure. The next decade will be about improving access to the collection and building a community of scholars and a general audience to engage in the work we're doing."

Jul 21, 2010:

Two grants were recently awarded to the Center for Jewish History:

The first is a three-year $225,000 grant from the Vivian G. Prins Foundation to support Post-Doctoral fellowships for Emigrating Scholars, who seek permanent teaching and research positions in North America. The award will support two 12-month fellowships each year for foreign scholars who are at the beginning of their careers. Fellows will be provided with an annual stipend of $35,000 to conduct original research at the Center's Lillian Goldman Reading Room and utilize the vast collections of our partners. This award allows the Center to serve as the gateway for the best and brightest emerging scholars seeking to begin a new academic life in the U.S., and complements the recent award we received from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support fellowships for senior scholars. Prins Fellows will begin their work at the Center in the Fall of 2011.

The second grant of $165,000, funded by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, will initiate an international online resource for the world community to digitally access Holocaust-related primary source materials from our partner’s collections. After producing Holocaust Resources: An Annotated Bibliography of Archival Holdings at the Center for Jewish History, which listed all relevant Holocaust materials available at the Center through 2007, the Center will now expand its efforts in this area and process additional partner collections and provide online access to as many of these documents as possible.

Jun 30, 2010:

The Center for Jewish History, dedicated to the preservation and presentation of Jewish history, culture and experience across countries and generations, has received an $860,092 grant from the Leon Levy Foundation. As one of the rare philanthropies to appreciate the significance of archival processing in preservation efforts, the Foundation has made a three-year commitment that will enable the Center to process thousands of linear feet of its partners' archival collections, create an institutional archive, and formally assess the preservation needs of the collections to ensure their future use. The new award follows a three-year Leon Levy Archives grant made in 2007, which funded an initiative to process over 1,200 linear feet from nearly 80 archival collections that prior to the start of the project were completely hidden from the public. Now fully integrated into the Center's Online Public Access Catalog, these collections' bibliographic records are each associated with a finding aid so that researchers across the world can view its content online.

"The generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation, which has now awarded the Center over $1.5 million in archival grants, will enable the Center to establish the Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Processing Laboratory as a dedicated space for this specialized work," says Michael S. Glickman, COO, Center for Jewish History. "This new laboratory will ensure a lasting legacy of the Jewish people by providing continued access to our partners' collections for future generations."

Shelby White, founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, said, "Throughout his life, Leon had a profound interest in history. As a consequence, the foundation has focused on helping enable scholars and the general public to gain greater access to important historical material, such as the vast repository of Jewish culture housed at the Center."

"Preserving the history of the Jewish people is what we're all about," adds Amy P. Goldman, Ph.D., chair of the Center's Board Committee on Archive and Library Services. "Our partners' collections are filled with rare and invaluable documents that would be lost forever were it not for archival rescue operations of this magnitude. We are truly fortunate and deeply grateful to donors like Shelby White who understand and support that mission."

The combined collections of the Center's research institutions – the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) – constitute a repository of more than 500,000 volumes and over 100 million archival documents that together constitute the largest repository of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel. Alongside these research collections, the Yeshiva University Museum (YUM) holds nearly 20,000 museum objects, exhibiting a full spectrum of artistic, religious and cultural expression; and the American Sephardi Federation (ASF) is pioneering the documentation and study of the history and culture of Middle Eastern origins.

The partner collections range from the renaissance era in Europe to pre-colonial times in the Americas, to present-day materials from across the globe. The arrival of Jews from Recife, Brazil to the United States in 1654 spawned New York's oldest synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel, whose papers rest within the AJHS and ASF collections. YUM holds the original letter written by Thomas Jefferson to this Congregation, in denunciation of anti-Semitism. LBI houses a 16th Century renaissance book collection in which arguments defend the importance of Jewish ideas and texts in a Christian world.

The Center provides access to a comprehensive literary collection, including many first editions of the seminal works of such authors as Franz Kafka, Theodor Herzl, and Else Lasker-Schuler; as well as the personal collections of such figures as Moses Mendelssohn, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein.  Researchers also have access to the first Hebrew books and Jewish prayer books published in the United States; and the personal papers of prominent public figures from 18th and 19th century America such as: Haym Salomon, financier of the American Revolution; Uriah P. Levy, the nation's first Jewish Commodore and savior of Thomas Jefferson's home in Monticello; Moses Michael Hays, founder of the Bank of Boston; Adolphus S. Solomons, co-founder with Clara Barton of the American Red Cross; and Emma Lazarus, poet laureate of America's immigrants, whose collections include "The New Colossus," the handwritten original of her 1883 poem that is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

May 15, 2010:

As part of our efforts to improve and enhance services for researchers, the Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce that we are extending the operating hours of the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute to six days a week.

Beginning on Sunday, June 6, 2010, scholars, students and the general public will have the opportunity to conduct on-site research every Sunday from 11am - 4pm.

The full array of electronic resources and the open stack reference collection will be available on Sundays. Additionally, materials from the archival and library collections of American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, and the library of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research will be available upon request.

All requests for Sunday usage must be received by 4:30pm on the preceding Thursday. To make a request, please visit catalog.cjh.org, login or become a registered user, search for the materials you wish to request, and click the "Reserve" link on the left side of the item record. Once you fill out the required fields, your request will be processed. Should you have any difficulty in identifying materials or placing a request, please contact reference services at 917-606-8217 or via email.

In addition to new Sunday hours, the Center offers research hours on Mondays from 9:30am - 7:30pm, Tuesdays - Thursdays from 9:30am - 5:30pm, and Fridays from 9:30am - 1:30pm. Please note that YIVO archival collections are available Monday - Thursday from 9:30am - 5:00pm.

Apr 26, 2010:

The Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) at the Center for Jewish History in New York City recently signed an agreement with Dr. Horst Freitag, the German Consul General in New York, on behalf of the German Foreign Ministry, to receive $3 million over 4 years for LBI's "New Acquisitions Preservation Project", allowing for the cataloging of significant new historical material pertaining to the survivor population of refugees from Nazi Germany. The funding, authorized by the German Parliament, covers the years 2010 - 2013.

According to Carol Kahn Strauss, Executive Director of LBI, "The new funding will enable LBI to microfilm fragile and valuable historical archival materials, providing worldwide access to researchers, scholars, families and the general public. This funding will increase the rate at which microfilming will be conducted and allows for in-house handling of materials that are too fragile to be transported outside of the Institute." The Institute is simultaneously digitizing its archival collections.

The funding will also be used to catalogue and conserve LBI's collection of several thousand books, including a recently acquired collection of rare 16th century volumes dealing with Christian-Jewish relations. Works by Martin Luther, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas More are included. Among the archival papers being processed is the Pinkus Family Collection, a very important family from Silesia (a historical region in East Central Europe that spans Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany). The Pinkus and Fraenkel families were the leading textile manufacturers of their day and pioneered important welfare benefits for workers in their linen factories. Other members of this philanthropic family included the author/playwright Gerhart Hauptmann and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Ehrlich. Another collection of papers, those of George M. Mosse, contain some of the most important research done in the 20th century on the rise of National Socialism. A grandson of Berlin publishing magnate Rudolf Mosse, George spent his professional life as an internationally respected historian analyzing the society and its citizens. Taken to school as a boy in a chauffeur-driven car, Professor Mosse provided his students with intellectual insights and personal reminiscences of a period in history that changed the world.

"Access to these original materials that provide new insights into the German-Jewish heritage is important to scholars in the US and Europe, and increasingly to the new Jewish population in Germany," continued Mrs. Strauss. As Dr. Freitag noted, the LBI archives are also being used by German citizens, especially high school and university students, who are interested in accessing their own local history - what happened in my town? How did the citizens react? What would I have done?

Leo Baeck Institute is the only organization dedicated to preserving the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. The Institute was founded in 1955, with offices in each of the great outposts of the exiled community: London, Jerusalem and New York. From the beginning, New York was the repository for all library and archival collections. In 2001 LBI New York opened a branch of its archives at the new Jewish Museum Berlin.

Apr 12, 2010:

The Center for Jewish History has joined "The Commons on Flickr". The Commons is a group that consists of major archives, libraries, and museums from around the world which share their images via Flickr with the public.

Read the Flickr blog entry welcoming CJH as a member

View the Center's photo stream

The Commons has two main objectives: To increase access to publicly-held photography collections and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge to them by adding descriptive tags and notes as well as leaving comments.