JDC Archives

06/04/2026

Join us on Monday, June 29th at 12PM (ET) for the webinar "The JDC Parcels Operation in the Soviet Union during World War II: The Paper Trail of Jewish Refugees" led by JDC Archives Fellow Na'ama Seri-Levi.

Register today: https://jdc-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3waS-MzTRRWaMzgel3JXNg #/registration

This lecture examines the parcels operation conducted by the JDC in the Soviet Union during World War II and its significance for the history of Jewish refugees. During the war, hundreds of thousands of food and aid parcels were sent to Jewish refugees and evacuees scattered across Soviet territories. The distribution of these parcels generated detailed lists that recorded the names, locations, and addresses of recipients. Although created for logistical purposes, these records preserve a remarkable documentary trace of the lives of refugees during the war. By transforming these administrative lists into a structured dataset and analyzing them with digital humanities tools, including database construction and spatial mapping, the lecture demonstrates how it is possible to trace the presence of refugees across the Soviet Union, identify local concentrations of displaced populations, and visualize the geography of wartime displacement. In doing so, the talk highlights how seemingly routine bureaucratic records can reveal the human landscape of Jewish refugee life in the Soviet Union during World War II.

Na'ama Seri-Levi is the Editor-in-Chief of Yad Vashem Publications. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation examined Polish-Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union during World War II and the Holocaust, focusing on their transnational networks and the ways in which their wartime experiences shaped their postwar lives. Her current research examines the trajectories of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union, using digital humanities tools to analyze and map refugee movements based on overlooked archival sources. She is the recipient of the 2025 Max and Cecil (Steuer) Chesin/JDC Archives Fellowship.

06/03/2026

In June 1940, as N**i Germany invaded France, JDC’s European Headquarters in Paris closed and Lisbon became the new center of operations.

From its wartime European HQ in Lisbon, JDC bought blocks of passenger space on transatlantic vessels for thousands of emigrants fleeing Europe, maintained refugees in transit and those remaining in Portugal, including those without valid visas detained by the government.

View photos from Lisbon: https://archives.jdc.org/project/portugal-lisbon-elsewhere/

06/02/2026

ICYMI: Rachel Deblinger's book talk is now up on our website: https://archives.jdc.org/rachel-deblinger-saving-our-survivors/

In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, Dr. Deblinger delivered a presentation highlighting her newly published book, "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust," which explores how American Jewish communities came to understand and respond to news of the Holocaust.

05/29/2026

"I have been greatly impressed by the effective efforts of The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to relieve the distress of the Jews in Europe who have suffered so cruelly at the hands of the N**is."

As we conclude Jewish American Heritage Month , we're proud to share a letter from the Archives that was sent by President Harry S. Truman to JDC Chairman Edward Warburg in 1945, expressing his praise for JDC's post-war relief effort.

05/28/2026

There is still time to register for our webinar on Monday!

RSVP today: https://jdc-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_epzSrOu8R76UwtsQXDERGA #/registration

Join us on Monday, June 1st at 12PM (ET) for the webinar "To Die Bringing Relief - The Travel of Israel Friedlander and Bernard Cantor in Ukraine: Insights From the JDC Archives."

Register today: https://jdc-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_epzSrOu8R76UwtsQXDERGA #/registration

This lecture will explore the story of Israel Friedlander, a world famous scholar, member of the JDC Board, and head of the JDC Committee on Russia (including Ukraine), and Bernard Cantor, a rabbi of the Free Synagogue in Flushing, New York and JDC volunteer assigned to Eastern Galicia in 1920. Both men were brutally murdered in Ukraine in July 1920 during their humanitarian mission to aid Jewish victims of the post-WWI crisis, famine, and pogroms in Eastern Europe. The talk will explore issues of historical memory surrounding the “Friedlander – Cantor mission”. It will reveal JDC’s attempts not only to hold a series of commemorative ceremonies in honor of Friedlander and Cantor in Ukraine (during the Polish period) in the early 1920s, but also to shape a broader culture of remembrance of their tragic mission. Finally, the lecture will examine how modern Ukrainian society both consciously and unconsciously remembers and forgets one of the most important attempts before the Holocaust to ease the suffering of Ukrainian Jews. It will highlight the specific way this piece of history is remembered, the challenges of forming a common, rather than divided, memory, and the issue of “Others” in modern Ukrainian history.

Kostiantyn Tkachuk is an independent researcher whose work focuses on Ukrainian Judaica and Ukrainian Polonistics of the 18th-early 20th centuries. He graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine), specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and since 2018 is the curator of Research Programs at the NGO Culture for the Future. Kostiantyn is the recipient of two non-residential scholarships: “Research in Ukraine” from the Juliusz Mieroszewski Center for Dialogue, Poland (2024) and “Emergency Assistance to Jewish Studies Scholars in Ukraine” from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, USA (2025). He is the recent author of two monographs in Ukranian: Despised, But Not Destroyed: the Largest Collection of Polish Ex libris in Ukraine From the Collection of the Prominent Pole and Kyivan Karol Bolsunowski and Judaica in the Journal «Kievskaia Staryna». Kostiantyn is the recipient of the 2025 Ruth and David Musher/JDC Archives Fellowship. He is currently researching the question of historical memory in modern Ukrainian history through the lens of one of the first humanitarian missions of the JDC in 1920.

05/27/2026

ICYMI: Tracy Slater's webinar on the Kobe Passage is now up on our website: https://archives.jdc.org/tracy-slater-the-kobe-passage/

This lecture examines the refugees’ experiences in Kobe and explores why the Japanese government allowed them to stay. Dr. Slater presents testimony and documents illuminating the escapees’ lives and drive to survive while in Japan, where they learned snippets of worsening news about relatives in Europe.

This program is part of the JDC Archives webinar series Across Oceans, Across Cultures: Jewish Refuge in East Asia and the Role of JDC.

Tracy Slater is an American writer from Boston based in her husband’s country of Japan. and the recipient of the 2025 Sorrell and Lorraine Chesin / JDC Archives Fellowship.

05/26/2026

We are pleased to announce that six new JDC Archives Fellowships have been awarded for 2026.

Learn about this year’s fellows and the impressive research being conducted in the JDC Archives by talented scholars from around the world: https://archives.jdc.org/2026-jdc-archives-fellows-announced/

Congratulations to:

Dr. Jacob Beckert, a postdoctoral fellow in American Jewish Economic History at the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience at Tulane University, is a recipient of The Fred and Ellen Lewis / JDC Archives Fellowship.

Maxime Daniel, a doctoral student at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, is the recipient of The Nathan and Sarah Chesin / JDC Archives Fellowship.

Jacob Forbes, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, was awarded The Ruth and David Musher / JDC Archives Fellowship.

Alexia Orengo-Green, a doctoral candidate at University of Southern California, was awarded The Sorrell and Lorraine Chesin / JDC Archives Fellowship.

Dr. Chiara Renzo, a project manager and researcher at the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC) in Milan, is a recipient of The Fred and Ellen Lewis / JDC Archives Fellowship.

Dominique Stringer, a doctoral student at Indiana University, is the recipient of The Max and Cecil (Steuer) Chesin / JDC Archives Fellowship.

05/25/2026

Today we commemorate the 35th anniversary of Operation Solomon, when JDC helped rescue 14,000+ Ethiopian Jews to safety in Israel in just 36 hours.

But how exactly did Operation Solomon work? Watch the video to find out.

05/21/2026

Tonight, the holiday of Shavuot begins.

Shavuot was originally a harvest festival but also commemorates the giving of the Law (the Torah).

For over a century, JDC has responded to both material and cultural needs, bound by the inextricable link between the physical and spiritual in Jewish tradition. That response included enhancing Jewish cultural activities and religious observances through the provision of Torah scrolls, books, and holiday supplies.

05/19/2026

During , join us on Wednesday, May 20th for the book talk "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews learned about the Holocaust" led by Rachel Deblinger.

Register here: https://jdc-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fc5TMdLvS86oShk6Ylk7ww #/registration

Drawing on previously unexamined archives and postwar cultural materials —including collections from the JDC Archives— Saving Our Survivors explores how American Jews constructed meaning out of devastation—and how humanitarian aid became intertwined with public memory. The book explores how American Jewish communities first came to learn about and respond to the Holocaust through communal campaigns, radio broadcasts, speeches, short films, and urgent calls to action. Rachel Deblinger highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and raises larger questions about how historical tragedies are narrated in moments of crisis.

Rachel Deblinger is the author of "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews learned about the Holocaust" (Indiana University Press, 2025). Her research focuses on Holocaust memory in America, media technology, and the intersection of philanthropy and representation. Deblinger is also the Director of the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) at the UCLA Library, a granting program that funds the digitization and preservation of at-risk cultural heritage materials from around the world. MEAP grants facilitate archival documentation and open access to diverse global collections. She holds a PhD from UCLA and remains a member of the UCLA Holocaust Research Lab and a contributor to the new book, Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory.