Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Center for Jewish History is a partnership of five Jewish history, scholarship, and art organizations housed together in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. The campus spans 125,000 square feet across four buildings arranged around a courtyard, with its main entrance on 16th Street.
The five partner organizations are the American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute New York, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Each maintains its own governing body and finances while sharing the facility.
Bruce Slovin, then chairman of YIVO, originated the concept in the late 1980s after recognizing that YIVO's uncontrolled storage conditions at its mansion on 86th and Fifth Avenue were damaging archival materials. He later served as chairman and founder of the center.
The center opened to the public in October 2000, following a six-year construction and planning phase. It was built on a site that previously served as the campus of the American Foundation for the Blind.
The center holds an original handwritten copy of Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem "The New Colossus," Sandy Koufax's Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, a letter from Thomas Jefferson to New York's oldest Jewish congregation, and the first Hebrew prayer books printed in America. Papers connected to Franz Kafka, Theodor Herzl, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein are also among the holdings.
The combined collections of the five partner institutions include more than 100 million documents, 500,000 books, and thousands of art objects, textiles, ritual objects, music, films, and photographs. This makes it the largest repository documenting the Jewish experience outside of Israel.