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Author: rebeccaweintraub

Do You Have a JDC Story?

Do You Have a JDC Story?

Jewish genealogy and genealogy in general have always been a subject of interest to many. However, in recent years, there has been a surge in interest in the wake of the many genealogy websites, genetic testing, and popular “finding your ancestry”-type television shows. The JDC Archives serves as a treasure trove of genealogical resources for Jewish family researchers around the world – including one of the aforementioned genealogy television shows, Finding Your Roots on PBS! From the Archives website you can search photographs and text documents (all of which are free to access), where you may find a family...

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JDC Archives Scholars’ Workshop Focuses on Refugees and Statelessness

JDC Archives Scholars’ Workshop Focuses on Refugees and Statelessness

Two dozen scholars from nine countries gathered in New York on September 10-11, 2017, for a two-day workshop, “Refugees, Statelessness, Migration and the Work of the Joint,” initiated by the JDC Archives. A Steering Committee including Atina Grossman of The Cooper Union; Linda Levi, Director of JDC’s Global Archives; Maud Mandel of Brown University; and Avinoam Patt of the University of Hartford planned the workshop as a forum for the participants to share their research, from a variety of perspectives and approaches, on Jewish refugees in the twentieth century and JDC’s efforts to address, as panelist Rachel Deblinger put...

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JDC Archives Establishes Collaborative Partnership with JRI-Poland

JDC Archives Establishes Collaborative Partnership with JRI-Poland

As part of the JDC Archives’ efforts to make its online resources widely accessible to the public, it has entered into a collaborative partnership with Jewish Records Indexing – Poland (JRI-Poland), a well-respected Jewish genealogical organization for those with Polish backgrounds,  to share relevant records from the JDC Names Database. The first set of records that has been shared is a group of approximately 6,400 JDC Emigration Service index cards from JDC’s Warsaw office in the period 1945-1949. The JDC Names Database includes more than 500,000 names of those helped by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which have been...

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A JDC Connection Comes Full Circle

A JDC Connection Comes Full Circle

Long before I started working at JDC, my grandmother, Lore Weintraub (nee Simberg) and my great-grandmother, Rosa Simberg (nee Drector), were two of many Holocaust survivors who came to the United States with the help of the Joint. Or so I was told. As an archivist at JDC and one of the editors of the Archives eNews I have been privileged to come across many stories of individuals, both members of the public and JDC staff, who found their JDC connection in the Archives. A budding genealogist myself, I thought I would try my hand at looking into this...

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