Center for Jewish History

• 1. Introduction

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  The Center for Jewish History holds an original handwritten copy of Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem "The New Colossus" - the same poem that was later inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. That manuscript sits in a Chelsea neighborhood campus in Manhattan, alongside Sandy Koufax's Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, a letter from Thomas Jefferson to New York's oldest Jewish congregation, and the first Hebrew prayer books ever printed in America. How did a single building come to hold all of this? The answer begins with a mansion on 86th and Fifth Avenue and a chairman who realized that priceless archival materials were slowly decaying in an uncontrolled environment. What kind of institution could rescue them, and what would it take to bring five fiercely independent organizations under one roof?

• 2. One Idea, Five Institutions

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  Bruce Slovin was serving as chairman of YIVO in the late 1980s when the problem became undeniable. YIVO's home at the time was a mansion at 86th and Fifth Avenue - a grand address that was entirely wrong for archival work. The facility lacked temperature control, creating conditions that actively threatened the collection and made scholarly study difficult. Slovin's response was not simply to find YIVO a better building. He conceived of something larger: a unified center where several academic-focused Jewish institutions could share resources and infrastructure.

  The other organizations that would eventually join were scattered across the city and beyond. The Leo Baeck Institute occupied space at 129 East 73rd Street. The American Jewish Historical Society, which had roots in New York City before the early 1960s, had relocated to Waltham, Massachusetts, near Brandeis University. The Yeshiva University Museum was operating in the Washington Heights neighborhood uptown. The American Sephardi Federation rounded out the five. Each approached Jewish history, scholarship, and art from a different angle - and that difference, rather than being an obstacle, became the point.

• 3. Building the Center

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  After six years of construction and planning, the center opened its doors to the public in October 2000. The site it chose had its own history. The campus in Chelsea is made up of four buildings that previously served as the campus of the American Foundation for the Blind, along with two new buildings constructed for the center in 2000. The result is a four-building, 125,000-square-foot campus built around a courtyard, with its central entrance on 16th Street.

  Despite the ambition of the project, the center's first years were financially difficult. The five partner organizations each retained their own governing bodies and separate finances, collocating resources but not merging. In 2007, preliminary talks with NYU's Skirball Department for Hebrew and Judaic Studies explored a possible partnership, but both parties ultimately decided not to move forward. The construction debt remained a burden for years.

• 4. Retiring the Debt

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  By 2010, a decade after opening, the center accomplished something that had seemed uncertain: it raised $30 million to retire its construction debt entirely. The sum came from a group that included Slovin himself - identified as the chairman and founder of the center - along with co-chairmen William Ackman and Joseph Steinberg, the Fairholme Foundation, and 19 other donors. The fundraising effort cleared the accrued debts that had shadowed the institution since its opening.

  Two years later, in 2012, the nonprofit evaluation service Charity Navigator awarded the center its top rating of four stars. Then in 2013, the Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust gave the center a $1.5 million grant to establish a reference services division - a recognition that the institution had stabilized and was ready to deepen its scholarly mission.

• 5. A Collection of 100 Million Documents

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  The sheer scale of what the five partners brought together is difficult to grasp. The combined holdings include more than 100 million documents, 500,000 books, and thousands of art objects, textiles, ritual objects, music, films, and photographs. Most of these materials had previously been housed in the member institutions, where many were at risk of damage or destruction. A $670,000 grant awarded in 2007 helped create a centralized catalog covering all partner institutions' holdings.

  The collections span from the early modern era in Europe and pre-colonial times in the Americas through to present-day materials gathered from across the globe. Among the holdings are papers connected to Franz Kafka, Theodor Herzl, Moses Mendelssohn, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. The center also holds a 1478 record of the trial of Simon of Trent, artwork by Max Lieberman, and an object as personal and unexpected as Moses Mendelssohn's eyeglasses. Together, the partners' collections form the largest repository of the Jewish experience outside of Israel - a distinction that has led some to call the institution the Jewish Library of Congress.

• 6. Digitizing the Archive

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  In 2011, the center launched a two-year project called "Illuminating Hidden Collections at the Center for Jewish History," funded by a $229,600 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The goal was to surface materials that researchers might not know existed.

  In 2013, the center donated 600 high-resolution images to the Google Art Project, part of the Google Cultural Institute's initiative to bring cultural materials online. The center was one of four New York City-based institutions participating at that time, joining eight others from outside the city. The images were accompanied by rich metadata, making them useful not just for browsing but for research. The center's affiliate status with the Smithsonian Institution placed it within a broader national framework for the preservation and public access of cultural heritage.