Jewish and Israel Studies

The Center embodies the partnership of five major institutions of Jewish scholarship, history and art: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The Center serves the worldwide academic and general communities with combined holdings of approximately 100 million archival documents, a half million books, and tens of thousands of photographs, artifacts, paintings and textiles - the largest repository documenting the Jewish experience outside of Israel.

The collection contains the records of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the largest and most influential organization created by the American Jews to coordinate efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews, which survives today as NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia. The bulk of the collection covers the activities from the early 1970s through late 1980s. The collection includes minutes of meetings, memoranda, correspondence, newsletters and publications of the NCSJ and its precursor, the American Jewish Committee on Soviet Jewry (1964-1971). Among other materials are individual files Refuseniks, prisoners of conscience and Jewish immigrants. The collection also includes a considerable number of reports from the visits to the USSR by Soviet Jewry Movement activists and other.

The JNL's Manuscripts and Archives Department currently holds some 400 personal archives, chiefly of Jewish figures who were active and influential in a variety of spheres: Zionist leaders, rabbis, scientists, philosophers, writers and poets, journalists and critics, musicians and others. The contents of the majority of the archives are documented, but the descriptions are not uniform due to the different periods in which the material arrived and was sorted.