Author: JDC Archives

  On Saturday January 25th, Joseph Block marked his coming of age by reading from a Torah that had been given to the Jewish community in Belgrade, Serbia by JDC in 1947. Connecting his modern-day ceremony to the Jewish community in Serbia, which goes back 2,000 years to Roman times, Block imbued the ceremony with a sense of history and the interconnectedness of global Jewry. After World War II, JDC sent hundreds of Torahs to Europe to help invigorate Jewish religious life in the wake of the Holocaust. The Torah was discovered last year, and Herbert Block, Josephs father,...

For Deborah Strobin and Ilie Wacs, the story of Jewish refugees seeking safe haven in Shanghai during the Second World War is more than history. The two were among the 18,000 European Jews including artist Peter Max and former Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal who spent the war as refugees in China. Shortly before the outbreak of war and weeks after their fathers tailor shop was turned over to a Nazi Party member, Deborah and Ilie and their parents fled Vienna and escaped to the East. In Shanghai, supportfrom JDC not only assured their survival, it allowed the family to...

 A product of eight years of research in repositories across Ukraine and Russia, The Final Chapter: Agro-Joint in the Years of the Great Terror, by Misha Mitsel, Senior JDC Archivist, has just been released by JDC. It chronicles the tragic history of Agro-Joint, the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation, an agricultural cooperative established by JDC in cooperation with the Soviet government in the late 1920s to train and resettle Jews as farmers in Ukraine and the Crimea. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union were labeled unproductive citizens and deemed ineligible for...