This collection documents the life of pharmacist and entrepreneur Arthur Abelmann. It contains materials about his personal and professional life, including his service in World War I. The bulk of the material concerns Chemiewerk, the pharmaceutical firm he founded in 1920 and cultivated for 13 years. In 1933, Abelmann was forced to resign his leading position and then to sell the company in one of the earliest cases of "Aryanization."

The collection contains Bernard G. Richards personal and official correspondence, papers from his involvement with the American Jewish Congress and Jewish Information Bureau, published and unpublished writings, publications collected by Richards, articles about Richards and his activities, correspondence and articles from testimonial dinners in honor of Richards, and photographs. Significant correspondents include Joseph Barondess, Louis D. Brandeis, Vladimir Jabotinsky, J.L. Magnes, Louis Marshall, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jacob H. Schiff, Philip Slomovitz, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Morris Winchovsky, and Stephen S. Wise.

Bernhard Kahn dedicated 50 years of his life to welfare activities in order to help distressed Jews. Among others he worked for the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Comittee and the American Joint Reconstruction Foundation .The collection contains personal as well as professional correspondence, articles on Bernhard Kahn’s work and biography, lectures and speeches by him and a number of official documents such as letters of consignment, citizenship papers and educational and professional certificates.

The collection contains the records of the Foreign Committee of the Bund, a Jewish political party espousing socialist democratic ideology as well as cultural Yiddishism and Jewish national autonomism. While a Central Committee led the Bund in the Russian empire, outside of Russia the party was represented by its Foreign Committee, which was based in Geneva, Switzerland. During the period when the Bund had no legal status or was semi-legal in Russia, the Foreign Committee assumed many important organizational functions of the party apparatus.

The collection contains play manuscripts, programs, playbills, posters, photographs, correspondence, agreements, scrapbooks, clippings, printed ephemera, and memorabilia relating to Yiddish theater primarily in the early twentieth century, especially the interwar period. Also included are items of printed ephemera related to Yiddish film, Hebrew theater, and a broad range of Jewish performers, including cantors, singers and dancers. Geographically, the materials originate predominantly in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, including parts of the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union; and, to a lesser extent, the United States, especially New York City. Also included are materials from Western Europe, Palestine (Eretz Israel), South America, and other regions around the world. Among the theater personalities represented in the collection with significant amounts of material are Herz Grossbard, David Herman, Joseph Winogradoff, Rudolf Zaslavsky, Zygmunt Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Moyshe Lipman, Ida Kaminska, and Esther Rachel Kaminska. The theater groups best represented include the Varshever Yidisher Kunst-Teater (VYKT; Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater), founded by Zygmunt Turkow and Ida Kaminska; the Vilna Troupe; Yung Teater / Nay Teater (Warsaw; Vilna), under the direction of Michael Weichert; the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (known by its Russian acronym "GOSET"); Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, of New York; and the Hebrew theater "Habimah." A wide variety of other professional as well as amateur theater groups are represented with smaller amounts of material.

Joseph Roth was one of the most prominent Austrian writers of the first half of the 20th century. Particularly his novels and newspaper essays gained him the respect of contemporary critics. Joseph Roth's papers at the Leo Baeck Institute Archives consist of handwritten and typewritten manuscripts of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays, including mostly complete manuscripts of his works Die Hundert Tage (The Ballad of the Hundred Days), Büste des Kaisers (The Bust of the Emperor), and his 'Trozki' novel Der stumme Prophet (The Silent Prophet). Joseph Roth's journalistic work is also well represented. There are a few personal items and over one hundred photographs of Joseph Roth and his wife Friederike. The Joseph Roth collection also contains correspondence with family and publishers, clippings about Joseph Roth, and reviews of his work. The addenda mostly consist of invitations to conferences and exhibitions, and scholarly articles on Joseph Roth's work and life.

The Marianne Salinger Collection comprises a broad variety of personal and professional documents pertaining to Marianne Salinger and her family. Spanning four generations, the material is clustered around individual stories of several family members and their relationships, each illustrated by different document types and genres, including personal and official letters, diaries, clippings, photographs and slides, various certificates, advertisements, restitution papers, as well as a couple of annotated books of various genres such as children's books, one cookbook, one autobiography and a language textbook. Some translations are included.

Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv Collection consists of diverse materials that pertain to pogroms in the period between 1918 and 1921 that took place mostly in Ukraine but also in Belarus, Poland, and Russia. There is a wide variety of topics that are covered in the collection including Ukrainian-Jewish relations during a short lived Ukrainian Republic, Ukrainian-Jewish political, communal, and governmental organizations, Ukrainian government and the role of politicians and military Commanders in pogroms, most notably Symon Petlyura and Ataman Grigoriev, pogroms and its aftermath, military occupation of Ukraine by the German, Polish, Bolshevik and General Denikin’s armies and its relationship to pogroms, Jewish self-defense and relief work. Also included here are materials pertaining to the trial of Sholom Schwarzbard who was tried in France for assassination of Symon Petlyura. The collection consists of of large amount of lists and eyewitness testimonies, correspondence, complaints and petitions, reports and resolutions, statements and proclamations, memoranda and circular letters, conference materials, statues and by-laws, clippings and bulletins, military orders, and photographs.

This collection contains manuscripts of some of the earliest Yiddish plays, correspondence between playwright, poet, and director Abraham Goldfaden, the father of Yiddish theater, and various actors and writers, as well as some family correspondence, newspaper clippings on Goldfaden and his impact on Yiddish theater, articles by Goldfaden on a variety of topics, and various other theater materials, such as title pages of plays, programs and song sheets. The collection illustrates Goldfaden’s great and ongoing influence on Yiddish theater.

This collection contains documents relating to David Pinski’s role as a Yiddish writer, playwright, essayist, translator, editor, literary critic, and author of novels, plays, short stories, essays, and poems. There is personal and professional correspondence, manuscripts of novels, plays, poems, essays, and articles, translations of Pinski’s works into English and Russian, lectures made on various occasions, personal documents and photographs, programs, notes, and newspaper clippings. These materials demonstrate Pinski’s important role in Yiddish drama and literature, Jewish community life and Yiddish cultural institutions.

The Grigori Gurevitch Papers consist of materials pertaining to his involvement with the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire and abroad. The bulk of the collection consists of Gurevitch’s manuscripts on politics, history of Kiev, anti-Semitism, Russian political immigrants, and Jewish revolutionaries, notes, and drafts and also includes correspondence, small amount of clippings, receipts, two petitions, and a photograph

Maxim Vinawer Papers consist of materials pertaining to Maxim Vinawer’s activities as a political and a communal leader. The collection covers the period between 1915 and 1926. These materials illuminate Vinawer’s participation in Russian politics as one of the leaders of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), his appointment as a Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Crimean Regional Government in 1919, and his activities as a prominent figure among Zionist and émigré groups in Paris. The collection consists of correspondence, circular letters, memoranda, bulletins, clippings, minutes of meetings, essays, manuscripts, drafts and notes

This collection contains the personal and professional papers of historian and bibliographer Philip Friedman. These materials include correspondence with individuals and with organizations, newspaper clippings, subject files, manuscripts of works by Friedman and by others, and some of Friedman’s personal documents. These materials relate to Friedman’s work on the histories of various Jewish communities, particularly those in Poland, and his work gathering source documents about the Holocaust.

Raphael Lemkin, an international lawyer, initiated the use of the term "genocide," and succeeded in persuading the United Nations to adopt the Genocide Convention in 1948. Documents include personal correspondence and artifacts; correspondence, documentation, clippings, and articles regarding the United Nations adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on the Crime of Genocide treaty; and source material for the unfinished manuscript, History of Genocide. Collection also includes photographs, identity cards, articles, papers, essays, clippings, magazines, research materials, term papers, posters, United Nations materials, and microfilm.

The collection contains the papers of Shalom Schwarzbard (1886-1938), the Russian-born French Jewish watchmaker, revolutionary, writer and activist for Jewish self-defense. In May 1926 in Paris, Schwarzbard assassinated the exiled Ukrainian nationalist leader Simon Petlyura, whom he held responsible for the pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine in 1918-1921. His trial in October 1927, at which he was acquitted, drew worldwide attention. The collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts of Shalom Schwarzbard's autobiographical writings, personal documents, clippings, and printed ephemera, as well as poems by Schwarzbard's wife Anna and others. Materials in this collection mostly relate to Shalom Schwarzbard's writings, his speaking engagements following his acquittal, and his efforts in the 1930s to organize Jewish war veterans and war victims of the First World War.

This collection consists primarily of the research material underlying Werner Frank's genealogical work, "Legacy: the saga of a German-Jewish German family across time and circumstance" (2003, Avotaynu Foundation). It contains correspondence with distant relatives and genealogical researchers, copies of archival documents, and family trees relating to the following German-Jewish families from Baden: Frank, Regensburger, Heinsheimer, Oppenheimer, Furth, Wimpfheimer, Eppinger, Ottenheimer, Wolf (paternal) and Weingartner, Gutmann, Herz, Blum, Geismar, Auerbach, Auerbacher, Uffenheimer, Günzberger, Weil (maternal).