HIST W4604: Jews and the City: Primary Sources on Jews and the City

An online exhibition of materials from the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Cutlure. It features photographs, personal documents, posters, original artworks, and books on the New York Russian Jewish immigrant community.

The Community Service Society, a large, private, New York City social service agency. The society was established in 1939 from a merger of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and the Charity Organization Society, whose separate files make up most of the collection. Many of the poor were Jews, and the photographs show many images of poor Jews on the Lower East Side.

The main goal of the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture is to preserve and document the Russian and East European émigré heritage, as well as to serve the general curricular needs of the students and faculty of Columbia University. The Archive also plays a significant role as a rich source of information for scholars from the United States and abroad studying subjects related to the Russian diaspora and Eastern European émigré communities.
Note: A number of the emigrees included in the archive were Jewish.

The Special Correspondence Files of the Herbert Lehman Papers contain correspondence with nearly 1,000 individuals from 1864 through 1982. Beginning with letters from Lehman's family in the late nineteenth century, the series documents the range and scope of Lehman's long career in public service. In addition to family letters, the Special Correspondence Files contain letters from every President of the U. S. from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, as well as from notables such as Dean Acheson, Benjamin Cardozo, Paul Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, W. Averill Harriman, Harold Ickes, Robert F. Kennedy, Fiorello LaGuardia, Henry Morgenthau, Alfred E. Smith, Adlai Stevenson, and Robert Wagner, among many others.

This site contains a collection of Jewish newspapers published in various countries (including the US, Israel, North Africa, France, and others), languages, and time periods. The site displays digital versions of each paper, making it possible to view the papers in their original layout. Full-text search is also available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication.

The vast digital collection contains searchable text collections from 1914-1932, a detailed interactive timeline, historically-themed exhibitions, over 45,000 photographs, findings aids, educational resources, relevant archives news and more.

Includes finding aids from the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sefardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute (German Jewry), the Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO (Yiddish Language and Culture)

This is a guide to digitized Jewish newspapers across the internet. This site is useful if you have a specific citation that you're looking for, and need to find the newspaper. It is not a full text search, but a list of newspapers with links to their digital surrogates.

Founded in 1917, the JTA has been the primary source for specifically Jewish news until the present day. Their archives have been digitized and are completely searchable online.

Digital archive of the Times of London, from the years 1785-1985.

This thesis was written in 1914, studying immigration to the US in the twenty years prior.

a collaborative effort to chronicle the Jewish experience in 20th Century New York City, as reflected in the archives of five UJA-Federation of New York beneficiary agencies: 92nd Street Y, The Educational Alliance, FEGS Health & Human Services , NYANA (New York Association for New Americans), and Surprise Lake Camp

The New York Synagogue Bulletins Collection is a digital collection of historic bulletins published by several prominent Modern Orthodox synagogues in the New York City area. More than 2,000 bulletins, dating from the 1920s and assembled from the Yeshiva University Libraries’ archival holdings of synagogue records, have been digitized and are fully and freely searchable.

NOTE: This site is currently under construction, and so may not be available. The individual digitized archives may be available in other ways in the interim. Contact a subject specialist for more details.

Three significant Manhattan Jewish communities—Shearith Israel, B’nai Jeshrun, and Ansche Chesed—moved from the Lower East Side to Harlem, midtown, and the Upper West Side. The Kane St. Synagogue remained in its original neighborhood in Brooklyn and the Eldridge Street Synagogue stayed at its original location; the latter has been designated a National Historic Site. Each of the five communities was comprised of immigrant populations that arrived from Europe and settled in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The combined collections of these synagogues, from 1730 until the beginning of the 20th century, document the lives of people and communities that are all still vibrant today.

Mapping Jewish LA is a digital exhibition using primary source resources to document the changes in the Jewish community of Los Angeles from the 19th-20th centuries.