Oral histories (literary works)

The collection contains audio and video interviews with activists of the American Soviet Jewry Movement, former Refuseniks and Prisoners of Conscience.

This collection contains the papers of Babette Wampold and the Alabama Council to Save Soviet Jews and documents their activities on behalf of the American Soviet Jewry Movement. The collection is comprised of correspondence, case files, clippings, newsletters, photographs, and trip reports.

Contains a DVD, printed transcripts, and a CD of transcript files. Belle Kaminer was born in New York to immigrants Charlie and Anna Kleinberg. She describes her life growing up in a railroad flat on Forsythe Street, her later move to the Bronx, and the early years of her marriage to Ikey Kaminer.

Collection includes interviews with 26 individuals actively involved in the development of the Jewish Federation movement. They are William Avrunin, Lavy Becker, Phillip Bernstein, Toby E. Citrin, Rosalie Cohen, Arnald & Madelein Epstein, Jacob (Jack) Fisher, Max Martin Fisher, Louis J. Fox, Sam Goldsmith, Maurice Hexter, Robert Hiller, Jack Kravitz, Robert Morris, Stanley Myers, James P. Rice, Esther Leah Ritz, Dan Rosenberg, William Rosenwald, Florence Hutner Rosichan, Fannie Schaenen, Samuel J. Silberman, Sanford Solender, Lewis H. Weinstein, George Wolfe, and Henry L. Zucker.

The Douglas Morris Collection consists of oral history interviews conducted by Douglas Morris in the mid-1970s. The interviewees were Swiss and German Jews who survived World War II and were living in Germany or Switzerland at the time of the interview. The collection includes audio cassette tapes as well as associated materials such as transcripts, translations, narrative summaries, notes, index cards, and printed research materials. The German interviews formed the basis of Morris’s undergraduate honors thesis at Wesleyan University, and the collection includes drafts and other materials related to this thesis.

This item is a typewritten and edited transcript of an oral history interview with food chemist Fritz Henry Reuter, prepared and conducted by the University Oral History Project in the University New South Wales in 1985.

Papers consist of copies of family photographs, a detailed genealogy research report, and two articles. The Halpern Research Report relates to the Halpern, Rothenberg, Klein, Cantor, and Lasker families. The articles, published in the Bronx County Historical Society Journal, are based on Carl Halpern's reminiciences of family members, growing up in the Bronx, and working as an office boy for the Hauserman Metal Manufacturing Company. The papers also include two oral histories, comprising a total of eight audiotapes that were conducted by Joel Halpern, Carl's son. The first, also recorded by Barbara Kirshenblat Gimblet, interviews Dr. Brusilov, from Long Beach, NY, who describes his life in eastern Poland prior to World War II. The second records Sam Alexander, also of Long Beach, NY, who participated in the Israeli War of Independence.

The bulk of the collection consists of correspondence between Howard and Jenny Hall, exchanged between 1943 and 1944. There is also correspondence documenting their efforts to bring their family members from Germany to the United States between 1939 and 1941. In addition, the collection contains the transcript and the translation of an interview, Howard Hall gave in Germany in 1996.

This collection consists of a published copy of Cheney's Master's thesis, Narratives of Courage: Oral Histories of Jewish Émigrés from the Former Soviet Union, which she submitted to the Public History program of California State University, Sacramento in 2002. As part of her research, Cheney conducted oral history interviews with five Russian Jewish immigrants and one non-Jewish spouse of a Jewish immigrant. The collection includes audiotapes of these interviews, biographical worksheets, release forms, and transcripts. These materials offer a kind of coda to the long epic of the Soviet Jewish struggle to emigrate, as the speakers look back and relate, in English, their struggles in the USSR and subsequent life in the U.S.

This collection is primarily composed of the correspondence of the Wahl family from the 1930s-1950s.

An oral history interview by Ellen Frohsinn with her mother, Lily Frohsinn.

Collection consists of typewritten oral history transcripts of executives in the United Jewish Appeal and the Jewish Welfare Federation in Detroit. The interviewees are Herbert A. Friedman (1918- ), fomer Executive Chairman of the UJA; Lawrence H. Rubinstein (1940- ), former Executive Director of the UJA's National Young Leadership Cabinet; and Leonard N. Simons (1904- ), former Campaign Director for the Jewish Welfare Federation of Detroit and Detroit Civic Leader. Also includes inventories for oral histories available at the Federation of Jewish Agencies of Greater Philadelphia, and the Jewish Federation of Nashville and Middle Tennessee.

The Hadassah Oral Histories consist of audio cassette recordings and typed transcripts of oral history interviews as well as related correspondence and research documents. Interviewees include notable members of Hadassah’s National Board, the Honorary Council, Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO), Youth Aliyah, Machon Szold, and Hebrew University, among others. Discussions cover such topics as Hadassah roles and achievements, Jewish upbringings, education, and family.

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

The records of the Association of Jewish Community Organization Personnel (AJCOP) cover the years 1969 to 1990 (although there is less material for the fiscal year 1989/1990). Though the collection does not preserve the total volume of papers produced by AJCOP, it is valuable to researchers studying the Jewish Community Center movement, especially in the area of the growing professionalization of Jewish community work.

The Records of the YIVO Ethnographic Committee is a sub-group of Record Group 1, Records of YIVO - Vilna. The activities of the Ethnographic Committee consisted of collecting folklore materials, preparing and analyzing folklore questionnaires, corresponding with folklore collectors throughout the world, and maintaining a museum. This collection also includes surviving fragments of the collections of the S. Ansky Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society which was active in Vilna from 1920 until 1940, and of Invayskult, also known as the Jewish Bureau of the Belorussian Academy of Science in Minsk (founded in 1925 and dissolved in the 1930s). Record Group 1.2 includes both administrative files of the aforementioned institutions and folklore and historical materials, which were gathered in these institutions' archives.

The Priest-Rose family is a prominent New York-based American Jewish real estate family. This collection consists primarily of correspondence between Sandra Priest Rose and her extended family regarding the family’s Lithuanian history, and their role in the development of Rhode Island’s late 19th century business community. The collection includes handwritten genealogical charts, newspaper clippings regarding Sandra P. Rose’s grandfather, and the biographies, resumes, and publications of Sandra Priest Rose and Frederick P. Rose’s children and grandchildren.

The collection holds mainly vital and other original documents pertaining to the Gruenfeld and Schafranik families from Moravia.

Audio and transcripts of interviews with 253 German Jewish refugees, who had settled in principal metropolitan areas of the United States during the main period of immigration, 1937-1941.

The following individuals were interviewed:

Adler, Kurt; Albert, Karl; Alexander, Theodore ; Apt, Harry; Apt, Melitta; Arnold, Henry H.; Auerbach, Ella (née Levi) (Selfhelp interview only); Auerbach, Richard Joseph; Aufrecht, Fred; Bachrach, Kurt; Bamberger, Fritz; Bamberger, I. Nathan; Baruch, Hansi (Pollack); Bauer, Bernard; Becker, Dorothy W.; Beiser, Arthur; Bergmann, Martha (Selfhelp interview only); Bern, Fred; Bick, Edith; Bieringer, Walter; Bloch, Marie; Brandt, Richard; Breuer, Jacob; Brill, Walter; Brodnitz, Friedrich; Buky, Herbert; Bunzel, Annelise ; Cahn, Herman; Cahman, Werner; Caim, Sigmund; Caim, Margaret; Callmann, Rudolf; Cohn, Bernhard, N.; Crystal, David; Dohan, Emil; Dorian, Frederick; Dreyfuss, Fred; Einstein, Erna; Eis, Ruth (Née Levy); Elsas, Charlotte ; Elsner, Jerry; Erlanger, Helmut; Erlbach, Erich; Feuerring, Gertrud (Née Falck); Fields, Henry; Fields, Howard J.; Frank, Helmut; Frankel, Ernest; Friedlander, Harriette; Friedman, Arthur; Friedmann, Edgar; Froehlich, Hans; Froeschel, Walter George; Fromm, Alfred; Gans, Ernest; Glaessner, Phillip ; Goldbeck, Kurt; Goldenberg, Norbert; Goldschmidt, Margaret (Née Müller); Goldstein, Mr. and Mrs. Hans; Goldstine, Regina; Gringauz, Samuel; Gruebel, Frederick; Gruenewald, Max; Gruenebaum, Erich Otto; Guggenheim, Felix; Guttmann, Alexander; Hamburger, Martin; Heiman, Jack; Heimann, Thea (née Prinz); Held, Robert; Hellmann, Norbert; Herz, Kurt; Hirsch, Erwin; Hirsch, Theodore; Hirschfeld, Brigitte; Hirschfeld, George; Jacobson, Herman; Jacoby, Gustav; Jonas, Hans (Henry); Jospe, Alfred; Kahn, Oskar; Kamm, Gunter; Karp, Richard; Kaye, Kurt; Kerr, George; Klestadt, Fred; Kober, Helen; Kohn, Helmuth; Koppel, Max; Kreuzberger, Max; Kubin, Rosa (née Lustig);

Landauer, Carl; Lederman, Fred; Lehman, Robert; Lekisch, Karl Peter (Selfhelp interview also); Leschnitzer, Adolf Friedrich; Leschnitzer, Maria (née Bratz); Lessing, Fred; Levi, Heinz; Levy, Harold; Loeb, Julius; Loewenthal, Erich; Lourie, Anton; Lowe, Walter; Lowenthal, Ernst Gottfried; Lowins, Eric; Mainzer, Martin; Martin, Charles; Martin, Regina (née Ullmann); Mayer, Alfred; Mayer, Frederick M.; Mayer, Irma (Selfhelp interview also); Mayer, Max; Mayer, Siegfried; Meyer, Frederick M. and Ruth; Moller, Rafael ; Moser, Alfred; Muehsam-Edelheim, Margaret (née Meseritz); Munk, Michael; Nachman, Ernest; Nachman, Kurt; Nauen, Alice; Netter, Kurt Fred; Neuhaus, Ralph; Newman, Edward; Noether, Rolf; Nowak, Willi; Noymer, Arthur; Noymer, Eugene; Nussbaum, Max; Oppenheim, Max; Oppenheimer, Alice; Ostomel, Maurice; Parker, Lenore; Perry, Alfred; Pessen, Helmut; Peters, Walter; Philipp, Albert; Pick, Charlotte; Pick, Ludwig; Pinkus, Ernest; Pinner, Heinz; Poli, Werner; Pollack, Hansi ; Poras, Frederic T.; Prager, Alfred; Prauer, Herbert; Prinz, Joachim; Rabenstein, Manfred; Reinsberg, Kurt; Reissner, Hanns Guenther; Roche, Paul; Ross, Martin; Rosskamm, Margaret; Rosskamm, Stephen; Rossman, Ilse (née Wirth); Rossman, Karl; Rubel, Theodore;

Sachs, Rudolph; Salomon, Hans; Schaalman, Herman; Schiff, Gabriele; Schloss, David; Schott, Walter L. ; Schwab, Simon; Schwerin, Kurt; Shtull, Jacob; Silberman, Curt C.; Simon, Paul; Slade, John; Sobotker, Martin; Sondheimer, Eric; Stagen, William Ernest; Stahl, Rudolph; Stark, Henry; Steierman, Julius; Steinitz, Hans Joachim; Stolper, Toni (Selfhelp interview only); Stransky, Hugo; Herbert A. Strauss ; Strauss, Susan; Sud, Ira; Taxer, Ellen; Tietz, Albert Ulrich; Tietz, Margaret (née Dzialoszynski); Treguboff, Sanford; Tuchman, Frederick C.; Tyson, Irma; Van der Walde, Ludwig; Walter, Otto L.; Warmbrunn, Hans; Weil, Henry; Weinberg, Fritz; Wertheim, Abe ; White, John; Wimpfheimer, Henry; Winkler, Franz; Winter, Justin; Wise (Weiss), Richard; Witt, Nathan; Wronkow, Ludwig; Wurtenberg, Kaethe; Wurzburger, Walter S.; Zimmer, Erich; Zimmer, Orah; Zivi, Hugo

Five interviews were conducted with the following individuals affiliated with ‘Selfhelp Community Services’: Auerbach, Ella (Née Levi); Bergmann, Martha; Lekisch, Karl Peter; Mayer, Irma; and Stolper, Toni. Transcripts from these interviews may be found in Box 11.

This collection contains 36 oral histories documenting the personal experiences of a diverse group of individuals within the American Jewish community during the Covid-19 pandemic.

United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York is the organization that resulted from the mergers of various New York federations with the New York office of UJA. UJA-Federation and its predecessor organizations have been a central force for communal planning and philanthropy in the New York Jewish community since 1917, and in overseas Jewish communities since 1939. The largest section of this collection covers the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and its predecessor organizations in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Important subject areas include Federation’s work with their affiliated agencies including detailed budget files through most of the 20th century; UJA’s programs in Israel and campaigns in New York during the 1960s and 1970s; an overview of the UJA-Federation Joint Campaign 1974-1986; and the day to day work of the successfully merged organizations 1986-2000.

Contains genealogical materials, correspondence, photographs, oral histories, and other information documenting the history and activities of the Warshaw family.

This collection contains a original documents dating back to the 19th century, clippings and articles, correspondence, programs, pamphlets, photographs and pieces of writing relating to the Jewish community and synagogue of Worms.