Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History New York, United States

The Center for Jewish History is a partnership of five Jewish history, scholarship, and art organizations in New York City: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute New York, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Together, housed in one location, the partners have separate governing bodies and finances, but collocate resources. The partners' collections make up the biggest repository of Jewish history in the United States. The Center for Jewish History serves as a centralized place of scholarly research, events, exhibitions, and performances. Located within the Center are the Lillian Goldman Reading Room, Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and a Collection Management & Conservation Wing. The Center for Jewish History is also an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.

Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) was founded in 1955 and named for the rabbi who was the last leader of the Jewish community in Nazi Germany. Rabbi Leo Baeck survived the concentration camp Theresienstadt to become the first president of the Institute. LBI began as, and remains, an effort by German-Jewish émigrés to document the vibrant culture of modern, assimilated German Jewry that was destroyed in the Holocaust. It has also grown into a vital resource for understanding the roots of that tragedy and for highlighting German-Jewish community members’ breakthrough developments in the arts, science and philosophy. More than 50 years after its founding, LBI continues to add significant new materials to the world’s premier research library devoted to the history of German-speaking Jewry.

The Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) is a founding partner of the Center for Jewish History and a research library and archive in New York that contains the most significant collection of source material relating to the history of German-speaking Jewry, from its origins to Holocaust History, and continuing to the present day.

The partners' collections include more than 100 million documents, 500,000 books, thousands of art objects, textiles, ritual objects, music, films, and photographs. Most of which had been poorly housed in the member institutions and were at risk of damage or destruction. The Center is heavily involved with the preservation of records that define moments in Jewish immigration to New York City. A $670,000 grant awarded in 2007 helped with the cataloging of these materials.


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