Documents from the Ernst Drucker Collection in the Reading Room at the Center for Jewish History.
Leo Baeck Institute Archives preserve and catalog family papers, community histories, personal correspondence, genealogical materials, and business and public records that touch upon virtually every aspect of the German-Jewish experience.
These records, entrusted to LBI by individuals, families, and organizations, form the foremost repository of collective memory for Central European Jewry, but they also document key aspects of Europe’s modern social and intellectual development.
The archives offer insight into a number of themes, including Jewish religious scholarship, emancipation and assimilation, anti-Semitism, Jewish commercial life and entrepreneurship, the experience of persecution and emigration, the Holocaust, restitution, Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences, and the daily lives of German-speaking Jews.
Community histories and family records in the archives form an especially valuable resource for genealogists.
A unique collection of over 2,000 memoirs offers rare insights into the lives of German Jews from all walks of life from 1790 to the post-war era.
Visit digital.cjh.org to search archival collections.
Digitization
In 2008, LBI Archives began digitizing its holdings, a project that promised not only to help preserve the vital legacy of German-speaking Jewry contained in its well over 2,000 linear feet of archival boxes, but also to radically transform the way that scholars, students, genealogists, and the interested public engage with these collections.
Less than three years later, about two thirds of LBI’s archival holdings have been digitized. The remaining 1,000 linear feet of archival holdings that had not yet been digitized are the focus of Phase 2, which began in December of 2010. These holdings are digitized and transferred to microfilm simultaneously. The first 140 specially processed and digitized collections appeared on the world-wide web as of May 2011, and the remaining 6,000 collections will be complete within the next 24 months.
The Leo Baeck Institute Archives’ preservation microfilming program has been funded in parts by:
