Research notes

This collection documents the professional life of Austro-American art historian and journalist Alfred Werner (1911-1979). After being released from Dachau in 1939, Werner fled to New York. From 1940 to 1979, he wrote thousands of stories, reviews, and columns, and was an editor of or contributor to dozens of art magazines and Jewish periodicals. His primary interests were European, Jewish, and Zionist political affairs, and 19th and 20th-century European and American art, with an emphasis on Jewish and Israeli artists. The bulk of the collection consists of his published output. The collection also contains some additional professional material, such as manuscripts, research materials, and reference photographs, as well as a few personal documents.

The Bernhard Sokolowski-Mirels Collection contains material pertaining to the family history of the Mirels family and personal documents of the Meyerhof family.

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 collection contains the genealogical research of Ernst Oppenheim, and includes his investigations into the Oppenheim, Pasch, Breit, Altschul, Sirkis and Jaffe families. Included are his extensive correspondence, family trees and copies of original documentation, as well as interview transcripts and notes.

This collection is comprised of the historian Franklin C. West's research on Emil Ludwig and his works. It primarily includes an extensive amount of notes and articles assembled during West's research. In addition, there is some correspondence and drafts of articles.

This collection documents the passionate involvement of Franz Viktor Grünfeld (Frank Victor) in the field of graphology, the study of handwriting as a means of determining personality traits. Grünfeld was active in the field from 1920 until 1965. He published extensively and corresponded with leading graphologists, and also provided handwriting analysis services to companies and individuals. The collection also contains some personal material, as well items concerning his work with his family's textile firm, FV Grünfeld Landeshuter Leinen und Gebildweberei, prior to his immigration to the United States in 1939.

The bulk of this collection consists of genealogical research materials about George Vladar's maternal side, the Jewish families Biheller from Cieszyn (Teschen), Poland and Perl/ Tugenthat from Bielsko-Biala (Poland), and on his paternal side, the non-Jewish Hungarian family Vladar and the non- Jewish Austrian Family Bittermann (various spellings) and Muehler (various spellings). The collection consists of numerous family trees, birth and death certificates, school reports, and a correspondence of Vladar's Grandparents Joseph Biheller and Marie, née Perl.

Collection contains research notes and writings relating to London's works on early American Jewish portraits, miniatures, and silhouettes; this includes family histories of the subjects of the artwork, biographical information on the artists, and information about the works themselves. Also includes items relating to London's personal life, such as her genealogy and a notebook of letters written by her son Robert who was killed in action in World War II during his service in the army; notes, manuscripts, and published and unpublished articles and poetry; art catalogs; legal documents; lantern slides; photographs; correspondence; newspaper clippings; genealogical charts; handwritten sheet music; military medals; sound recordings; a theater program; and a scrapbook.

This collection contains the extensive research of the historian Hanns Reissner. The most prominent subjects of the collection are the philosopher and jurist Eduard Gans and the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, although Reissner's research also addresses many other subjects within the field of both German and American Jewish history. Included in the collection are extensive research notes and correspondence concerning his work, his unpublished manuscripts, clippings and offprints.

This collection holds the papers of the historian and author Helmut Hirsch, which focus primarily on his professional activities and connections as well as some material pertaining to his immigration experiences. Prominent in this collection is his extensive professional correspondence. Other materials included here are some personal correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, notes and research material.

This collection contains research material on the genealogy of Irene Newhouse's ancestors, including members of the Morgenstern, Honigman, and Goldschmidt families and others, mainly from Prussia (in particular, Breslau). It includes as well the correspondence she had with cemeteries, communities and other institutions for her research as well as the family trees she found or made herself.

This collection documents the genealogy of the Jaffe family that originated in Posen (now Poznań, Poland), as researched by Johanna Jaffé. It includes a large amount of genealogical correspondence, family trees, some photographs and a few clippings.

This collection documents the life and work of Kurt Schwerin. Kurt Schwerin immigrated to the United States in 1938 where he became a librarian and professor of law. Contained are several of his writings, research notes and other papers mainly related to his attempts to organize the immigration of his family, to settle down in the United States and regarding to his function as board member and head of the Chicago Chapter of the Leo Baeck Institute.

This collection contains the research and writing of Lore Baum Steinitz. The bulk of the collection focuses on her research into the history of the Wirtschaftliche Frauenschule auf dem Lande in Wolfratshausen and its students and faculty. A smaller portion of the collection relates to the histories of various members of the Baum and Steinitz families, including her own life. Included is research correspondence along with notes and copies of school documentation and publications. Several brief sketches on family members are also present.

The collection of Max Hamburger (1897-1970) documents his scholarship on the relationship between ancient philosophy and modern jurisprudence. It also shows the efforts of an independent émigré scholar to promote himself and his work to universities, publishers, granting agencies, and other scholars. There is very little personal material in this collection. The main document types are correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, and research notes.

Morris U. Schappes, self-taught historian of American Jewish History, author, teacher, and editor of Jewish Currents for 40 years, is also known as a victim of hearings conducted in 1941 by the Rapp-Coudert Committee, a New York legislative committee investigating Communist activities in the state educational system.

This collection is comprised of materials related to the Rapp-Coudert proceedings and Schappes' subsequent imprisonment, and of materials generated in the following decades. Topics represented include academic freedom, Communism in the U.S., the roles of Jews in U.S. history, and Emma Lazarus. The formats primarily present in the collection are research notes, manuscripts, clippings, and correspondence.

The Mühlfelder and Roeckert Families Collection contains both primary sources and research materials that, together, combine to record the history of these families. Charles C. Milford (born Klaus Mühlfelder) compiled the research materials; the greatest quantity of correspondence, documents, and photographs in the collection also pertains to his life. Documents include vital documents, educational records, military service records, and materials relating to Charles C. Milford’s career as a librarian. In addition to Milford, his father Simon Mühlfelder and wife Patricia E. Milford feature most prominently in the first three series of the collection. Family history research focuses on Simon Mühlfelder’s first wife Martha Kassel and people within her milieu. This research is compiled from Milford’s correspondence with scholars and archives, relevant archival finding aids and photocopies of documents held by various archives, articles, photocopies from books, catalog records for pertinent books, and Wikipedia pages and other printouts of biographical information from the Internet. These same types of material also make up Milford’s research on topics of interest, including the history of Jews in Germany broadly and of the Mühlfelder family specifically.

University professor, historian, and scholar Oscar I. Janowsky sought to understand Jewish culture and human rights in light of modern anti-Semitism, imperialism, and pluralistic states. Throughout his robust career he was a professor of history at the City College of New York, he also served as an advisor to League of Nations High Commissioner James G. McDonald, directed and authored major studies in the fields of Jewish community centers and education. The papers in this collection include his correspondence with colleagues and friends, research notes and article drafts, and his unpublished memoirs.

The Paula Elkisch Collection contains her writings on psychoanalysis and her poetry and prose. It also contains her research notes as background information on those writings.

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 materials in this collection document the activities of a wide range of organizations and individuals whose materials were donated to or collected by the YIVO Archives in Vilna before the war, and the activities of YIVO itself. They include documentation on Jewish communal and cultural life in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and in other communities around the world.

The Aspirantur, a graduate training program for scholars of Jewish culture, was founded by the YIVO Institute For Jewish Research in 1935. Led by key figures such as Simon Dubnow, Max Weinreich, and Zalmen Reyzen, the Aspirantur educated students who continued to play an important role in the growth of Jewish studies, including Lucy Dawidowicz, Avraham Sutzkever, and Yosl Mlotek. This collection contains research projects produced by the students, evaluations by their professors, and administrative materials produced in the course of running the program, including planning documents, applications, and correspondence.

The creator of this collection is the psychiatrist Dr. Renatus Hartogs who practiced in New York since 1949. The collection holds correspondence, research notes, issues of the monthly journal Der Überlegene and an unpublished manuscript on motivation.

The Papers of Riv-Ellen Prell contain research, fieldwork, and correspondence she conducted to fulfill her graduate work in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Prell later expanded on this work with further research and wrote a book on the Havurah Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The papers primarily encompass the field notes and interviews she engaged in while observing the Westwood Free Minyan in Los Angeles.

This collection contains the files of Shira Eve Epstein, a Jewish educator and professor, most of which were used as research for her bachelor's thesis, "The Havurah Movement and Jewish Feminism: Preserving While Re-envisioning Judaism."

The Sonneborn Family Collection is comprised of the genealogical and biographical research of Charles Behrend Sonneborn on the Sonneborn and related families, especially the Behrend family. Included are copies of his writings, family trees, various research material and photographs of family gravestones.

The bulk of this collection consists of typescripts, research articles and notes as well as newspaper articles which the researcher and historian Toni Oelsner wrote on the subject of Jews in medieval Germany. Her research deals with anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic stereotypes, as they appeared in the Christian culture of southern Germany. In particular Oelsner analyzed economic processes and their impact on and creating of anti-Semitic harassment and persecution against Jewish communities in southern Germany. Research works that drew public attention relate to anti-Judaic violent persecutions in Endingen in the 1460s.

This collection contains a typescript draft of a research report on Jewish textile manufacturers in Baden-Württemberg circa 1800-1932, prepared by Peter Zimmermann for use by Jacob Toury, as well as photocopies of sources and several notes compiled on index cards.

The Walter Friedlaender Collection describes the professional life of this art historian. The major focus of the collection is his work on sixteenth and seventeenth century artists. It includes correspondence, a few published works, photographs, lecture and manuscript notes, art reference files, newspaper clippings, and poetry.

This collection documents the genealogical research of the lawyer Walther Meyer. Among the many families mentioned here are branches of the Meyer, Eger, Oppenheimer, Borchardt, Neufeld, Ballin, Wertheimer, and Wallach families. Material on them includes many drafts of family trees as well as exchanges of genealogical research correspondence. This collection also contains official decrees and announcements pertaining to the Jewish communities of Hannover from the 1800s.