Author: JDC Archives

Inga Veksler recently defended her dissertation at Rutgers University on the Soviet Jewish transmigrant experience: “’We Left Forever and Into the Unknown’: Soviet Jewish Experiences of Transit Migration.” For Veksler, her dissertation topic is particularly resonant: her family was assisted by JDC in their emigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. In the late 1980s, under glasnost, the number of Soviet Jews emigrating to the West soared. Thousands of Soviet Jews were essentially stranded in transit—“transmigrants”— in Rome and Vienna as they waited for the processing of their applications by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. In...

The JDC Archives is pleased to announce the completion of a major effort to catalogue, microfilm and digitize all of its post-Holocaust era collections, 1945-1954. The culmination of a six-year effort, this project is part of an ongoing plan to make historically significant documents available to scholars, genealogists and the general public. This material is searchable on the JDC Archives website. Online finding aids provide information on the contents of these collections and enable users to identify materials of interest to their research. Highlights from this remarkable trove include: JDC’s far-reaching global rescue and relief efforts to resettle Holocaust...

JDC is delighted to announce the establishment of the Ruth and David Musher/JDC Archives Fellowship. This fellowship was made possible by a generous gift from Ruth and David Musher of New York City, supporters of JDC with a long-time commitment to Jewish education and academic research and scholarship. Ruth and David are affiliated with JDC’s Ambassadors group which is dedicated to creating a visionary and caring Jewish community.  They have both traveled internationally to places where the JDC operates including Russia, Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Israel. After attending the public lecture “Lost Souls: Retrieving Jewish War Orphans...