Author: JDC Archives

Icaac Mendel Ganc’s name might have stayed forgotten if not for the JDC Archives six-year digitization effort that has made his records accessible in an online database. Ganc’s name appears on six World War II-era records and document JDC’s efforts to help him flee the Nazi regime from Poland to Lithuania, Lithuania to Japan, Japan to India, and India to Palestine. A floormaker born in Warsaw, Poland in 1916, Ganc was 25 years old in 1940 when he fled eastward to Vilna, Lithuania. His name is on a list with 8,977 other Jewish refugees who registered with the Refugee Committee...

    For over a decade I have been an ambassador of the JDC as a Jewish federation fundraiser. It has always been a privilege to talk about “the Joint’s” life-saving work to donors and lay leaders. Little did I know that during the war years the JDC helped my own family, thus making what was once merely a professional pledge into something deeply more personal. My opa (German for “grandfather”) Joseph “Jose” Katz, his parents and five siblings were living in Nentershausen, Germany in 1939. They fled from Nazi Europe to Ecuador, a developing country that accepted refugees...

Jack Joslow's Rosh Hashanah Story by JDC Archive http://www.archives.jdc.org.php7-34.lan3-1.websitetestlink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Jack-Joslows-Rosh-Hashanah-Story-by-JDC-Archive.mp3 The JDC Oral History Collection contains over 100 interviews with JDC leaders and staff members who worked with the Joint from the 1930s to the 1990s. The interviews were recorded between 1966 and 2003, and include stories about the JDC’s humanitarian work across the globe. The collection includes interviews with individuals such as Paulette Fink (1911-2005), who organized housing for 1,500 child survivors of the Holocaust; Samuel Haber (1903-1984), who served as the JDC Director in the U.S. Zone in Germany from 1947 to 1953; and Monroe Goldwater (1885-1980), who...