Scientists

The Dimon-Kurrein Family Collection contains the assorted papers of the Kurrein, Blau, Dimon, and Loewe families. A special focus is on the family correspondence during and after their emigration to the United States and Palestine in 1934. Official documents, a biographical essay, a family photo album, articles on Max Kurrein and several family trees are included in the collection.

The collection deals with Edmund H. Immergut's path of immigration from Austria to Shanghai and later to the United States. Based on correspondence and official documents, Edmund's struggle to become naturalized in the United States is presented in this collection.

This is a collection of clippings pertaining mostly to German-Jewish individuals, whose life, accomplishment, or death had been noteworthy enough to trigger the interest of an editor at a newspaper or a journal. From the 1960s to the end of the 20th century, archivists at the Leo Baeck Institute perused dailies, immigrants’ journals and periodicals of special interest groups in the United States, in Israel, in various European countries and beyond to discover traces of the scattered survivors of German-speaking Jewry. Birthday celebrations, special anniversaries and obituaries as well as reports about deeds and accomplishments were clipped from the publications and collected. Today, these clippings bear testimony of all these individuals’ lives and German speaking Jewry as a whole.

The three scrapbooks (“Stammbücher”) by Otto Fantl were his guest books in his house in Prague. Visitors – individuals working in politics, art, literature, and science – signed the pages, often adding comments, mostly in Czech, but also in German, French, English, and Russian. There is a total of 272 entries, accompanied by obituaries and other clippings, as well as handwritten notes and photographs, providing further information about the various individuals.

Autographs from various luminaries and letters of appreciation to Immergut in the 1960s and 1970s. Also included is a copy of Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel lecture in chemistry, 1977 with a dedication to Immergut.

Luminaries include among others Bella Abzug; Otto Ernst; Felix Faure; John Galsworthy; Josef Girardi; Josef Kainz; Friṭyof Nansen; Josef Popper-Lynkeus; Arturo Toscanini; Emile Zola.

This collection contains a number of documents in Russian relating to Waksman's early life prior and up to the time he emigrated to the U.S. (1886-1910). These include: personal documents and mementos (1911-1966); photographs (1919-1968), including those taken in Stockholm where he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine (1952); diaries kept during his many trips abroad (1924-1973) which: contain scientific data, comments on the scientific developments in various countries, especially France, Italy, Japan, and Israel, comments on the Jewish communities, reflections on his youth, and discussions with famous individuals, the most extensive being Marc Chagall and Vera Weizmann; the first public report of the activities of the Rutgers Research and Educational Foundation, entitled, Of Microbes and Men (1959); material about Waksman (1954-1974); two typescripts: "The Elusive Virus, A Fairy Tale" by Marsel Heilman, a pseudonym (?) (1961), and "Men and Molecules," a sequel to "My Life with the Microbes" (1962); a brochure entitled "Streptomycin : two decades of progress in the Antibiotic Era," containing an article by Waksman (1964); two typescripts, "Man's War Against Microbes" (ca. 1964), and "Antibiotics and Human Welfare" (ca. 1970); an address: "A Student at Rutgers," which he delivered shortly before his death (1973).