LBI News: a publication of Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin

This fall, LBI News accompanies Renate Evers, Director of Collections, on her visit to the German Literature Archive in Marbach, reflects about scholar rescue in conversation with Henry Kaufman, talks to Roger Cohen from The New York Times about the relevance of German-Jewish history to the Syrian refugee crisis, and hears from Kerry Elkins and Chris Bentley (both LBI) about the making of the Edythe Griffinger Art Catalog. Julie-Marthe Cohen presents a new provenance research handbook for Jewish ceremonial objects, David N. Myers, new president & CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York, shares about his personal connection to Germany, we learn about the delicate process of digitizing more than 60 periodicals preserved by LBI, and, finally, we travel to India, where we follow the colorful footsteps left by Austrian artist Walter Langhammer during his time there in exile.

In our winter issue, we present a number of LBI-related projects in Germany: “German and Jewish” is a traveling exhibition that features selected items from our archives that are returning for the first time to the land that their owners left the better part of a century ago, among them chocolate cups from Albert Einstein; the Israel Jacobson Network promotes the Braunschweig region as a cradle of Modern Jewish Studies; the reconstruction of the Freimann Collection at the Library of the Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt reached a new milestone; and two conferences in Leipzig and Berlin take a fresh look at chapters of German Jewish history—forced migration, specifically in the year of 1938, and Jewish life in the GDR. Furthermore, we present to you the Moses Mendelssohn Awardee 2016, Historian Susannah Heschel; we highlight some of the calendars preserved in our archives and we present a new digital music portal which makes the music and the musicians’ stories contained in collections more accessible. Finally, we give an insight into the processing of our archival collections and feature one of them, the new Hans and Eleonore Jonas Collection.

In this issue, we look back on the Leo Baeck Institute Award Dinner with Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, Michael A. Meyer gives the 58th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture and receives the Moses Mendelssohn Award, and field archivist and researcher Julie Dawson reports about her wrap-up of several months of archival survey in Bucharest, Romania.