Jewish refugees

Two original German manuscripts and their English translations, describing the author’s escape from Nazi Germany (written in 1942) and her subsequent life underground (written in the 1960s).

Case files (containing correspondence, handwritten notes, application forms, documents, and affidavits) in addition to general correspondence, speeches, brochures, and newspaper clippings from the Immigration and Naturalization Office of the National Council of Jewish Women, Worcester Section, regarding assistance provided to Jewish immigrants and permanent residents seeking citizenship from the 1930s to the 1970s. Case files include office correspondence with individuals, Jewish social service agencies, lawyers in the United States and Germany, and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Some case files also contain correspondence and personal statements in support of reparations claims filed with the West German government.

This collection contains the records of the National Refugee Service (NRS), a refugee aid organization founded in New York City in 1939 to assist refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. A successor agency to the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany, which had operated as an umbrella organization of refugee aid agencies since 1934, the NRS remained in existence until 1946, when it was merged into the new organization United Service for New Americans. The NRS program encompassed a migration service that assisted with affidavits, visas and other legal aspects of the immigration process; temporary relief and casework services; job placement, retraining, and small business loans; help in resettling to localities throughout the country; and social and cultural adjustment to American life. The records include minutes, correspondence, memoranda, and reports related to the board of directors; the executive director; lay advisory committees; the various departments within the NRS; special committees assisting professional groups, including physicians, musicians, rabbis, social workers, and scholars; and cooperating refugee-assistance committees and organizations across the United States.

This collection contains official certificates documenting the lives of four family members of the Ogutsch-Katz family. Also included are report cards, clippings, correspondence, and obituaries, as well as many photographs.

This collection contains a handwritten recipe book in Yiddish and German with entries dating to the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as some of Otto Leib's correspondence and essays from the late 20th century regarding the Jewish experience in Southern Germany and Switzerland.

This collection contains manuscripts of novels, short stories, poems, essays, lectures, speeches, translations, and other writings, correspondence, photographs, and personal documents and materials of Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and his wife Inna Hecker Grade. The collection helps to illustrate Grade’s literary development and impact on Yiddish literature over time, from his earliest poetic works written in Vilna and the Soviet Union, to his prolific and accomplished prose work composed mainly in the United States. The collection illuminates Inna Grade's intellectual and academic prowess, as well as the integral role that she played in the editorial and logistical aspects of Grade's literary output.

This collection, which is a sub-group of RG 294 Displaced Persons Camps, consists of the records of Leo W. Schwarz, the Director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC/JDC) for the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany during the years 1946-1947. The papers pertain to his work with the JDC in Germany and to the history of the Jewish displaced persons in Germany after World War II.

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.

This collection contains the correspondence of Paul A. Mayer. Most of it consists of correspondence with family members. Primary topics of the collection are the attempts of Ernst and Lisbeth Mayer to emigrate from Germany, Paul and Margaret Mayer's correspondence from their time in England, and Paul Mayer's correspondence to Margaret during his service in the United States Army in World War II.

The collection mainly comprises manuscripts of Paul Collin in English, including two autobiographical narrations in the form of typescripts; and four completed books (copies of typescripts, in binders) that he distributed to friends. Three of the books convey a mixture of personal reminiscences and ruminations on various historical, social and political topics; one is a collection of jokes, in both German and English. There is also a small binder of recipes handwritten in German, along with some recipes on loose notes, and a few items of miscellaneous correspondence, including one photograph. Also included are a tribute and an obituary for Collin that were published in bulletins of the Jewish Council of 1933 (San Francisco), of which he was a longtime member.

This collection contains correspondence, official documents, photographs, and other archival materials pertaining to Ralph Moratz (1931-2016) and to his project to locate fellow survivors of his Kindertransport from Berlin to France in 1939. After arriving in France, Moratz and thirty-nine other boys sought refuge in the Chateau de Quincy, a Jewish Orphanage near Paris. In 1941, Moratz was able to escape occupied France with assistance from the Children's Aid Society OSE and resettle in New York.

Recording of a reading about experiences as internees in Nazi Germany and as refugees in Latin America.

This collection, which is a sub-group of RG 245 HIAS, includes the records of the main HICEM office in Europe prior to and during World War II. There are also some records from the post-war period relating to the dissolution of HICEM, HIAS’s taking over of HICEM’s operations and HIAS’s work with displaced persons.

The collection represents the papers of Morris David Waldman (1879-1963), a rabbi, social worker and communal leader, who was appointed executive secretary of one of the main Jewish defense organizations, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), in 1928. The executive secretary had top executive function at the organization and was in charge of working out and implementing the organization’s projects and policies regarding monitoring the civil and human rights of the Jews, and intervening on behalf of the Jews both in the U.S. and abroad. In 1942, Waldman was promoted to executive vice-president, a position he held until his retirement in 1945. The Morris Waldman Files relate to all of Waldman's activities as acting executive secretary and vice-president of the AJC.

The collection contains the records of the Paris Office of the American Jewish Committee, established in 1947 to study conditions of Jewish refugees and Jewish communities in Europe and North Africa. The Paris Office was involved in major programs and projects of the AJC to study the needs of and aid to the Jews of Europe and the Middle East. The materials include correspondence, memoranda, reports, clippings, photographs and published materials.

This collection contains mainly correspondence between staff of the JDC Landsmanshaftn Department and members of various landsmanshaftn, benevolent organizations of immigrants originally from the same communities, as well as between the Landsmanshaftn Department and the interest-free loan associations (gmilas khesed societies) and heads of the various Jewish communities, mostly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Collection consists of records of the HICEM Office in Prague, documenting efforts to assist Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia. Records include minutes of National Committee Meetings, correspondence from the HICEM office, including with various aid societies, and extensive individual refugee case files.

The records of the National Council of Jewish Women, New York Section document the organization's community service, advocacy, and supportive administrative, fundraising, membership, and public relations activities from the Section's early years to the present. Included is a large amount of material from the National Organization in relation to the New York Section. This material is dated from 1896 to 1999 and consists of administrative, events, and advocacy matters. The New York Section's community services files include its work on aging, child care, consumer telephone referrals, counseling support, crime prevention, the disabled, domestic violence, early child education, feminism, homelessness, hunger, immigrants, Israel, Jewish education and promotion, literacy, probation, the sick, summer recreation for children and the elderly, and war relief. The Section's advocacy files consist of lobbying efforts for the rights of children, the disabled, the elderly, families, the homeless, immigrants, Israel, and women. The collection is primarily in English, with some Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Greek, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian. Among the types of material are audio tapes, blueprints, correspondence, minutes, photographs, publications, scrapbooks, and scripts.

This collection contains correspondence, records, and publications of the United Service for New Americans (USNA), the major immigration and resettlement organization in the United States for Jewish displaced persons immigrating in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These records document USNA’s interaction and coordination with the United States government’s Displaced Persons Commission, associated Jewish agencies, particularly the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and representatives of Jewish settlement groups in cities and towns across the country. The organization helped obtain housing and job assurances for Jewish refugees without family in the United States and provided assurances that they would not become public charges. The correspondence and records in this collection document the entire process of immigration and resettlement, including obtaining the necessary assurances required for displaced persons to immigrate to the United States, relief services provided immediately upon the refugees’ arrival, their designation to and arrival in communities across the country, and the services provided to the new immigrants by their local Jewish communities thereafter.

This collection contains correspondence regarding the emigration efforts and living expenses of Regina Stein, who had fled from Berlin, Germany to Basel, Switzerland in 1943. She lived in Switzerland in deteriorating health and partially by the support of the Swiss government until she was able to immigrate to the United States in 1947. The collection consists mainly of photocopies.

Name files with biographical data of approximately 25,000 individual refugees from Nazi Germany, including alphabetical index and index by categories

Robert Raphael Geis (1906-1972) was a rabbi, educator, and Jewish theologian. He identified strongly with German liberal Judaism, but his keen interest in Jewish studies brought him close to leaders of conservative Judaism as well. Before the Second World War Robert Raphael Geis worked as a rabbi for the youth and Religion teacher in Munich and Mannheim, and as a rabbi in Kassel, Germany. After the war he served as a rabbi in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany. In the early 1960s, Raphael Robert Geis became engaged in the dialog of Protestant and Jewish theologians. The Robert Raphael Geis collection consists mainly of correspondence and writings. There are only a few personal documents. The writings consist of newspaper articles, reviews of books on Jewish topics and sermons for major Jewish holidays. The correspondence has two main foci: the periods before and after the Second World War. The first period is characterized by letters written by various leading figures of Jewish communities in Germany and is concerned with employment opportunities for young rabbis, as well as insights into inner workings of congregations. A large amount of letters from this period also come from Robert Raphael Geis' students. The correspondence written after the war centers on theological matters and the workings of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der "Juden und Christen" (Working Group of "Jews and Christians").

The collection focuses on the wartime experiences of Rosa Traub and some of her extended family members. Included are Rosa Traub’s diary from Camp de Gurs, a photocopy of her identity card, her handwritten last will and testament, and other items, such as documents pertaining to her nephew Max Liebmann and photo negatives of Albert Einstein.

The bulk of the photographs show refugees at the Rothschild Transit Camp in Vienna, ca. 1945. Also included are photographs of the bomb-damaged streetscape, the Jewish section of Vienna’s main cemetery, elderly Austrians in a city park, and – for no obvious reason - photographs of Sigmund Freud and his daughter, Anna.

This collection describes the professional life of the writer Salamon Dembitzer, who is best known as a Yiddish poet and the author of Visas for America, a novel on the situation of Jewish refugees during World War II. Included in these papers are manuscripts of his poetry, newspaper articles, and novels as well as reviews of his work, correspondence, and biographical information on him.

This collection contains a number of Kaiserslautern Rabbi Sally Baron's homiletic writings and notebooks, as well as a small number of his documents and papers.

The collection relates to the life of Jewish refugees, mostly of German and Austrian origin, in Shanghai primarily between the years 1939-1948. It covers many aspects of their experience, including political and cultural events, relief and charity activities, and self-help. The collection originated from the YIVO exhibition that was organized and displayed in 1947 in Shanghai and later in New York. The collection consists of manuscripts, minutes of meetings, correspondence, newspaper clippings, and printed materials.

This collection contains the papers of lawyer Saul Sperling related to the lawsuit brought by passengers of the S.S. Navemar against the owners of the ship in 1941-1942 for death, personal injury, and property damage that occurred during the difficult journey. Many passengers were Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. Materials include Saul Sperling’s notes, correspondence, legal documents, and bills.

The collection contains correspondence mostly authored by Stephanie and Franz Pisker, dispatched from Vienna, Austria and the Jewish ghetto in Opole, Poland to their daughter Susan (née Herta) in America, before Franz and Stefanie were killed in the extermination camp of Sobibor. Also included are official documents and letters pertaining to their unsuccessful attempt to immigrate to the United States and the questionnaires by the Austrian Heritage Collection of Susan and her husband John H. Graham.

This collection traces the descendents of Masele (Moses) and Hanne Schott of Randegg, many of whom settled in northern Italy in the 19th and early 20th century.