Romania

The collection consists of more than 300 autobiographies and supplementary biographical materials, such as correspondence, diaries, and documents collected by YIVO in the interest of Jewish youth research. The autobiographies were assembled through public competitions in 1932, 1934, and 1939 directed at Jewish youth aged 16-22. The collection also contains records of the contest, including lists of the contestants, correspondence with them, reports and clippings.

Contains primarily papers of Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, including: addresses to Constitution Grand Lodge of B'nai B'rith and to YMHA; a letter from Ulysses S. Grant appointing Peixotto as U.S. Consul-General to Romania; correspondence during Peixotto's residency as Consul in Bucharest and Lyons; and the estate papers of Moses Levy Maduro Peixotto.

The Records of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites (1859-1878) documents the life cycle of the Board of Delegates, a Jewish civil rights organization located in New York City. The Board served in a two-fold function: acting as a central organization for American Jews and working on behalf of Jews abroad. To the latter end, the Delegates collaborated with the Committee of Deputies of British Jews and the French Alliance Israélite Universelle to provide for the relief and aid, civil, and religious rights of Jews throughout the Americas, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, particularly Romania, Ottoman Palestine including Jerusalem, and Morocco.

In the U.S., the Delegates were partially responsible for the appointment of the first Jewish Military Chaplain and surveyed member synagogues concerning the history and size of their congregation, the first organization to systematically record this type of information in the States. The Delegates merged with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) in 1878 and dissolved in 1925. Correspondents include Adolph Crémieux, Sir Moses Montefiore, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, Isaacs S. Myer, the Rev. Dr. Arnold Fischel, and Maj. General Benjamin Butler. Documents include correspondence, minutes, committee reports, memorials, announcements, surveys, some printed material including clippings, and a 1932 Rabbinical thesis on the Delegates by Allan Tarshish.

Collection contains correspondence relating to the committee's fund-raising efforts throughout the United States to aid survivors of the Russian pogroms, both in Russia, and in the United States, with particular focus on orphaned children. Contains information on the condition of the Jews in Russia and Roumania during and after the pogroms; on the relief and removal activities in Europe, in general, and Russia, in particular; on the self-defense movement and defense fund; immigration procedures and work of the Industrial Removal Office; and some financial and executive committee reports.

The officers of the Committee were Oscar Solomon Straus, chairman, Jacob Henry Schiff, treasurer, and Cyrus Leopold Suizberger, secretary.

This Collection contains the almost complete estate of Constantin Brunner (a.k.a Leo Wertheimer) as well as a comprehensive collection of documents and especially letters from the Brunner circle and those pertaining to the Brunner reception.

Emigration 1864-1952: This collection - encompassing about 90 years - contains papers about the situation and persecution of Jews in Eastern European countries (Russia, Poland, Roumania, Bulgaria, Lithuania). Papers describe the activities of various relief organizations. There are more than 170 papers (ca.900 pages), about half of them written in German, about 30 each in French or English, over 20 in Yiddish and some in Polish. A printed appeal of the Reichsausschuss fuer Russisch-Juedische Fluechtlingshilfe, Berlin (1929) carries among others the signatures of Leo Baeck and ALbert Einstein. (VI, 16).

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.

This collection documents the education, immigration, and professional life of the physician Karl Rubner (born 1906), covering his early life in the Bukovina (part of Austro-Hungary), his studies in Vienna and Paris, and his later career in New York City. Materials include school and university records, vital records, correspondence, identification papers, articles, licenses to practice medicine, and photographs.

The Laura Rubin Family papers are comprised of four generations of family photographs and certificates of marriage, birth, and death for members of the Rubin-Simpson family of Brooklyn, New York and the Simpson-Bernstein family of Schenectady, New York.

Manuscript of the memoirs of Vera Zaslavska. Manuscript of the memoirs of Misha Fishzon, titled Untern forhang fun yidish teater (Behind the Curtain of the Yiddish Theater). Playscripts. Photographs of Vera Zaslavska, Misha Fishzon, Jewish actors in Russia and Romania, the Lyric Theater in New York. Clippings, including obituaries.

The collection documents the life and work of the poet Moses Rosenkranz. It includes correspondence, manuscripts, general notes pertaining to his work, private photographs, and clippings.

The bulk of the collection holds manuscripts, correspondence and clippings pertaining to the work of the industrialist Nathan Eidinger in achieving emancipation for Romanian Jews after World War One. Also included are documents related to his and his family’s plight in Switzerland and France during World War Two.

This collection consists of restitution claims submitted to OMGUS, the Office of the Military Government for Germany (United States), which administered the United States occupation zone and the U.S. Berlin sector during the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II. Restitution claims routinely originated with the Military Mission that represented the county from which property was looted, stolen or destroyed under German occupation during World War II. These cases were forwarded to OMGUS for investigation and resolution.

This collection consists of photographs and negatives of World ORT conferences and congresses, various individuals connected with ORT, and ORT vocational programs and activities, including in Displaced Person’s camps, in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Cuba, and North and South America.

This collection consists of photographs of OSE programs, OSE conferences and congresses and various individuals connected with OSE and its programs, mainly dating from World War II and the years just following. Many of these photographs are related to the work OSE does with children’s health and nutrition but there are also numerous pictures of leisure activities, care homes, vocational training, and education.

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.

The bulk of the collection consists of transcripts of Paul Josephthal’s memoirs 1916-1918 during World War I in Romania, when he commanded a unit of German soldiers as an ‘Etappenkommandant’ (Rear Echelon Commander).

This collection contains original compositions and printed and handwritten sheet music collected by Al Glaser as well as Glaser’s own arrangements of traditional Hungarian, Romanian and Jewish music.

This collection contains the administrative records of the Hebrew Actors’ Union (HAU), the professional union of Yiddish theater performers, which was based in New York City. Materials include correspondence, membership materials, financial records and members’ dues information, meeting minutes, and a great deal of sheet music and play scripts of performances from the Yiddish theater. A majority of these performances were in New York City, but there are also materials from Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as various locations in Israel and South America.

The Industrial Removal Office was created as part of the Jewish Agricultural Society to assimilate immigrants into American society, both economically and culturally. It worked to employ all Jewish immigrants. The collection contains administrative and financial records, immigrants' removal records, and correspondence. A database has been constructed to search for persons removed by the Industrial Removal Office.

This resource is a list of all of the landsmanshaftn for which there are records at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The list is organized by ancestral town (that is, the town from which the founders of the organizations originally immigrated from).
YIVO has the records of over 1,500 individual landsmanshaftn. Some landsmanshaftn records comprise stand-alone collections with their own Record Group numbers. Some records are in a folder that is included in a larger collection.

Once you have identified organizations you’re interested in, check the “Physical Location” note for information on which YIVO Record Group contains the material. You can then use the ArchivesSpace toolbar to search for that record group and get more information about the contents of the collection.

Typewritten diary by Sigwart Cahnmann, describing a trip with his military unit of the Bavarian army in 1917, travelling primarily by train through Rumania. He details the villages that he passed through, commenting on their residents, their behaviors, looks, and ethnicities, as well as local events and food.