Author: JDC Archives

  Documents and photographs from the JDC Archives historical collections on Minsk between the two World Wars will be featured in Professor Elissa Bemporad’s forthcoming book Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press). The author is the Jerry and William Ungar Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Queens College, City University of New York. Bemporad writes: “Becoming Soviet Jews is a study of the acculturation process into the Soviet system as experienced by the Jewish population of Minsk from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the eve of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. By...

JDC’s historic Cyprus Collection is now available digitally for the first time. Consisting of 16,667 pages of textual files digitized from 19 microfilm reels, the collection contains a wide array of materials that shed light on the lives of deportees to Cyprus, including personal letters, group petitions, and newspapers published by the deportees themselves.  The digitization of this collection will be a welcome resource for scholars and researchers interested in the post-World War II era, early Israeli history, and refugee resettlement. View Cyprus collection highlights here. From 1946 until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the...

  Tomorrow, August 4, 2012, Sweden celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg, a man whose life of self-sacrifice saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from their extermination camp fate. Tomorrow we also pay tribute to JDCs life saving role in the heroic mission that Wallenberg undertook. On July 26th 2012 President Obama signed into law a bill bestowing the Congressional Gold Medal on Raoul Wallenberg. A Swedish diplomat who saved as many as 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust by issuing fake Swedish protective passes, Wallenberg risked his life sheltering Jews slated for an inevitable...