Judaica

Scattered around the world today are an estimated 12 million descendants of Jewish emigres who departed Ukraine for the United States, Canada, Europe and Russia between 1895 and 1917. From start to finish, this remarkable diaspora was managed by a single organization in Kiev—the Society for Adjustment of Jewish Emigration, later called the Jewish Emigration Society. The Society organized and managed the outflow of Jewish emigres and their destinations abroad before it was disbanded in 1917.

These German-Jewish periodicals published before World War II cover Jewish communities in many centres of German-speaking Europe from Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt to Vienna and Prague, and provide a vivid picture of the diverse aspects of German-Jewish cultural life. It includes contributions by such well known figures as Martin Buber, André Gide, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Koestler, and William Bullitt.

The collection contains documents relating to the trial of Mendel Beilis (1874-1934) held in September and October 1913. Beilis, a Jewish clerk at a brick factory on the outskirts of Kiev, was accused of murdering a young Ukrainian boy, Andrei Iushchynskyi. The identity of the real persons responsible for the crime were known by police but the government--at that time debating a draft law on abolishing the Jewish Pale of Settlement--sought to convict a Jew and thus to incite mass anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia.