Special Collections: Judaica

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. Progressive members of the Russian and Ukrainian intelligentsia came out in support of Beilis, who was eventually acquitted by the 14-member jury. The documents cover the two and half-year investigation, the trial itself, and the events around it. The collection contains proceedings of the court, forensic reports, testimonies of all 355 witnesses, speeches by the prosecution and the defense, materials of the investigation, and articles from newspapers.

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.

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. The collection of over 38,000 pages includes documents of the Jewish Emigration Society, as well as personal correspondence of the emigres.

The aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil wars brought outbreaks of anti-Semitic activities, particularly in Ukraine, where tens of thousands fell victim to Jewish pogroms during the Ukrainian-Soviet War of 1917-1921.  The collection of over 30,000 pages documents the activities of the Kyiv District Commission for Relief to Victims of Pogroms, including its work with orphanages, schools, hospitals, work centers, shelters, and refugee camps.  The records include correspondence, witness accounts, reports describing commissioners' and committee activities, records of individual investigations, refugee and victim lists and statistics, communications with Western relief organizations, and documents pertaining to Jewish emigration out of Ukraine.

A collection of vocal and instrumental music, with Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian words.

The Klement Family papers consist of “birthday books”- albums created by Anna Pachner Klement for her grandson, Tomaš (Tomi), beginning at age two, when he was diagnosed with Sydenham’s chorea. Albums depict stories of a young boy and his adoring grandmother and the life of one Jewish family in Prague during the 1930s. Two years after Tomi’s birth, Adolf Hitler came to power, and the albums begin to record the changing attitude towards Jews in Czechoslovakia. The last album was written in 1940 and in it Mrs. Klement describes how they are forbidden to go to the theatre or the movies. In July 1943, the Klement family was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp and fourteen months later they were shipped to Auschwitz where Tomi, his grandmother Anna, and mother Heda were gassed. Also included in the family papers are photo albums, photographs, Anna Klement’s diaries, poems by Anna Klement, family papers including obituaries, marriage certificates, etc., and Olga Klement’s diaries as well as her art work, autobiography, correspondence, notebooks and betacam tapes.

This collection reproduces the Tagebuch or journal of Dr. Hans Frank (1900-1946), the Governor-General of German-occupied Poland from October 1939 until early 1945. The journal is in typed format, in chronological order, covering all aspect of Generalgouvernment (GG) administration from its seat in the royal Wawel castle in Krakau (Kraków). The entries reflect administrative matters, rather than the spontaneous thoughts or feelings usually found in a diary.

The Electronic Archive “Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat” (PSDS) includes the database of Soviet samizdat periodicals, electronic editions of selected samizdat journals, illustrated timelines of dissident movements, and interviews with activists.

Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) is one of the most important Yiddish novelists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Her papers include drafts and proofs of The Tree of Life [Der Boym Fun Lebn]; Bociany [a novel about life in a Polish shtetl] and Of Lodz and Love; Survivors [translated from the Yiddish by Goldie Morgentaler]; address and daybooks; most of the printed manuscript of Briv tsu Abrashn; Bird of the Ghetto; correspondence with family, friends, authors, editors and publishers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, printer and publisher Israel London, Elaine Kalman Naves, and other material related to the life and work of author Chava Rosenfarb.

This collection consists of approximately 1,650 titles, of which about 800 deal with the Jews of the former Soviet Union, about 600 with Polish Jewry, and the remainder with the Jews of Hungary, Romania, the Czech and Slovak Republics, the former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Especially noteworthy is the Library's 400-volume collection of memorial books for Jewish communities destroyed during the Nazi Holocaust. These books, written primarily in Yiddish or Hebrew, but quite often including articles in English or other Western languages, are important sources for the study of Jewish history in Eastern Europe, and for the study of local community history as well.

The Czechoslovak born Otto Schneid (1900-1974) was a painter, sculptor, art historian, and writer. His collection consists of research materials for Schneid's unpublished book on 20th-century Jewish artists in Europe ("Der Jude und die Kunst" (1938)), manuscripts for his published and unpublished works, and galleys for his published writings. The research materials include correspondence with more than 120 Jewish artists, copies of their exhibition catalogues, and other published works, and photographs of their art. Most of these artists perished during the Second World War.

A digitized, fully searchable and hyperlinked repository of visual testimonies by almost 52,000 survivors of genocidal wars. The vast majority of the testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust (1939-1945), as well as other Holocaust witnesses, rescuers, and aid providers.

Among the main subjects discussed in the interviews are geographical locations, prominent figures, names of family members and other people, prewar Jewish life, religious practice, cultural life, acts of persecution and prejudice, camps and ghettos, deportations, massacres, means of adaptation or survival, resistance, rescue and aid efforts, and postwar emigration and immigration.

The collection consists of approximately 350 books and pamphlets in the Russian language, from the Yivo Library's Vilna and Elias Tcherikower collertions. Most of the books, pamphlets, and offprints contained in this collection were printed in Central and East Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries (all of them before 1940, and most before 1917). The topics covered in this collection are: Jewish religious traditions, Jewish history, the struggle for equal rights for Jews under the Tsarist regime, political movements among Jews in Russia, Jewish community organizations, intergroup relations in Russia and Poland, anti-Semitism, and emigration to America.