Author: JDC Archives

The JDC Archives is pleased to announce that as part of ongoing efforts to expand our digital reach through collaborative projects, we have shared the Records of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA), 1939-1977 collection with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), a cooperative digital library for primary source records about the Caribbean and its neighboring territories. The DORSA collection documents JDCs establishment in 1938 of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, an agricultural settlement for over 700 Austrian and German Jewish refugees in Sosa in the north of the Dominican Republic. The collection records in dLOC link back...

Michael Beizer, Relief in Time of Need: Russian Jews and the Joint, 1914-1924. Slavica Publishers, Indiana University, 2015. This recently published book, written by Professor Michael Beizer, a historian and Property Reclamation Researcher in JDC’s Former Soviet Union Department, depicts the activity of JDC in Russia during the time of World War I, revolution, civil war, pogroms the famine of 1921-1923,  and reconstruction work.  In his broad historical survey, Beizer highlights the main stages in the development of the organization’s activity and the location of its programs.  Structurally, the book’s eight chapters  reflect the basic phases in the early...

Alvin Lewis, a Second Generation Holocaust survivor living in Manhattan, visited JDC’s centennial exhibit, “I Live. Send Help.” at the New-York Historical Society in July 2014. The exhibit included a timeline illustrating some of the many ways that JDC assisted Jews in need around the world from 1914 to the present. “Part of the reason I went to the exhibit was that I remembered hearing the words ‘American Joint Distribution Committee’ as a child in our home in Queens, New York,” Al said. “I had a sense that AJDC was involved in helping my parents after World War II...

This spring the JDC Archives in Jerusalem helped the Gertner family uncover its past. The Gertner family was living in Brussels when Germany occupied Belgium in 1940. Yehiel, the rebbe of a Hassidic community, his wife Sarah, and their two children Yeshayahu and Hava escaped through Vichy France, and in December 1942, walked across the snow-capped Pyrenees into fascist Spain. The Gertners were then arrested by the local police for crossing the border illegally without papers. Yehiel was sent to Miranda del Ebro, the largest detention camp in Spain, which had about 300 Jewish internees. Sarah was imprisoned in...