Esther Elbin Family Collection

This collection contains a wide variety of family, personal, vital, and legal documents pertaining primarily to the Herz, Steinthal, Buchholz, Isenstein, and Cohn families.

The oldest materials stem from the Herz and Steinthal families and include passports, birth, marriage, and death certificates, letters of protection, passports, concessions for commercial activity, Jewish oaths (Judeneide), and various other papers which document the lives of these two families of protected Jews (Schutzjuden) in 18th and 19th century Saxony and Anhalt. The Steinthal family materials include some family papers written in West Yiddish and Hebrew.

The materials for the other families continue in a similar fashion and include a wide variety of family papers and official documents, largely dating to the 19th and 20th centuries. Notable among these are documents pertaining to Jacob Buchholz's military service during the War of the Sixth Coalition (Befreiungskrieg), official correspondence and a short memoir pertaining to Julius Buchholz's diplomatic mission to secure meat for German citizens during the First World War, a large number of photographs, and several certificates documenting Edith Cohn-Elbin's work in the American Women's Motor Defense Corps during the Second World War.

There are also smaller groups of papers pertaining to the Silberstein and Weiss families, notably typewritten excerpts of the Weiss's accounts of their lives in Hungary and deportation during the Holocaust, as well as of their lives in post-war Germany as displaced persons in the region around Frankfurt am Main.