#OnThisDay in 1939, the S.S. St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, to Cuba, where its passengers were denied entry.
JDC representatives deliberated with various European governments, promising to guarantee the maintenance costs of those passengers who would be accepted. Eventually, in June 1939, JDC successfully secured the immigration of passengers to Belgium, England, France, and Holland, but tragically, all of these countries except for England would eventually fall into the hands of the Nazis.
This rare footage documents the desperation and short-lived triumph of the passengers.
The Committee of Passengers cabled Morris Troper on June 15, 1939: “The 907 passengers of the St. Louis dangling for last thirteen days between hope and despair received today your liberating message of the 13 June that final arrangements for all passengers have at last been reached…”
#MyJAHM #JewishAmericanHeritageMonth #OurSharedHeritage
Did you know that Julius Rosenwald was also a major donor and founding member of JDC?
JDC founded agricultural settlements and promoted an agrarian lifestyle for Ukrainian and Crimean Jewish families in the newly established Soviet Union with the creation of Agro-Joint in July 1924, an endeavor which Rosenwald supported.
#MyJAHM #JewishAmericanHeritageMonth #OurSharedHeritage
📸: Colony named in honor of Julius Rosenwald who gave the first 1,000,000 to the United Jewish Campaign, Soviet Union, ca. 1925.
Today is #VEDay or Victory in Europe Day!
V-E Day commemorates the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, marking the end of World War II in Europe.
📸: Smiling refugees give the “V” for victory, knowing they will soon depart Tangier, May 1945. Photograph: Nicolas Muller. JDC Archives (NY_72409)
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.”
Click the #linkinbio to register.
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 the 2025 Ruth and David Musher/JDC Archives Fellowship.
As Jews around the world celebrate the festival of Lag BaOmer, we share these photos of varied global Jewish celebrations of the holiday — with song and dance from bonfires to parades.
📷1 + 2: A large crowd at a Lag BaOmer Hilloula (Aramaic for festivity), a Jewish celebration marking the anniversary of the death of a Jewish sage or tzaddik, Ouezzane, Morocco, 1953.
📷3: Jewish youth celebrating Lag BaOmer at the Hochland Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Germany, 1949. Photographer: Al Taylor
📷4 + 5: Elderly Yemenite Jews celebrate Lag BaOmer at JDC-supported Malben Home for the Aged, Shaar Menashe, Israel, 1960. Photographer: Israel M. Vrotzlavsky
During #JewishAmericanHeritageMonth, join us on Wednesday, May 20th for the book talk “Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews learned about the Holocaust” led by Rachel Deblinger.
Click the #linkinbio to register.
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.
#OurSharedHeritage #MyJAHM
On #InternationalDanceDay go backstage with the dancers featured in our virtual exhibit “Morale-Boosting Tours: Post-Holocaust Healing Through the Performing Arts:” #linkinbio
This exhibit explores JDC cultural activities in the displaced persons (DP) camps of postwar Europe, by profiling the international performing artists who toured the DP camps as part of JDC’s morale-boosting tours.
Featuring footage of DP camp performances as well as photos, text documents, and first-person accounts, the exhibit illustrates the enormous impact of these shows.
📸 1: Paula Padani dancing in costume, Bad Reichenhall, Germany, 1948 (NY_14573).
📸 2: Hassia Levy-Agron performs for DPs as part of her JDC-sponsored tour, Rome, Italy, 1948, Photographer: IPP-International Press Photo-Rome (NY_53523).
📸 3: Katya Delakova and Fred Berk dance on the beach; Germany or Italy, 1948 (NY_02601).
On #YomHaatzmaut, we share the story of the Jewish survivors who set sail on the SS Exodus for Haifa in 1947.
In the aftermath of World War II, thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors found themselves stranded in displaced persons camps across Europe, dreaming of rebuilding their lives in Mandatory Palestine.
On July 11, 1947, in France, over 4,500 survivors boarded the SS Exodus bound for Haifa, only to be intercepted by British forces before arrival. JDC stepped in to provide food, medicine, and relief supplies for children to the trapped passengers. Sent back to camps in Germany, JDC’s staff worked tirelessly to support the Jewish refugees through months of hardship and uncertainty.
Our Topic Guide, The Odyssey of the SS Exodus, explores this remarkable chapter of Jewish history through original photographs, press releases, letters and more from the JDC Archives. Click the #linkinbio for more.
Thank you to Angelina Palumbo (@angepalumbo ) for her integral role in the creation of this Topic Guide.
#SSExodus #JewishHistory #AliyahBet
📸 1: A Jewish refugee from the SS Exodus holds a baby in front of Nissen hut. Germany, 1948. Photo: Ursula Litzmann. JDC Archives (NY_50484)
📸 2: Jewish refugee children from the SS Exodus with food rations provided by JDC. Germany, 1947. Photo: Ursula Litzmann. JDC Archives (NY_13820)
📸 3: Jewish refugees aboard the SS Runnymede. Port-de-Bouc, France, 1947. Photo: Al Taylor. JDC Archives (NY_12593)
On Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day), Israelis and Jews around the world remember those who sacrificed their lives for Israel’s independence and continued existence.
📸: Yemenite Jews commemorate Yom HaZikaron, Ein Shemer, Israel, ca. 1957. JDC Archives (NY_10802)
Join us on Monday, May 4th at 7pm (EST) for the webinar “The Kobe Passage: Jewish refugees in Japan and the hidden history of the Holocaust’s most surprising escape” led by Tracy Slater.
Click the #linkinbio to register.
While the story of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara has attracted much attention—how he gave transit visas to thousands of Jewish refugees feeling Nazi Europe, for which Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations—the historical record of the refugees’ escape remains incomplete. What remains untold, outside of a few scholarly publications, involves perhaps the most fascinating part of this history: When from 1940-1941, the refugees lived and found safety in Kobe, Japan, among a population whose government was officially aligned with the Nazi forces exterminating the families and communities the escapees had left behind.
This lecture will reveal crucial parts of the “Kobe Passage.” Relying on extensive JDC documentation, Dr. Slater will discuss the refugees’ experiences in Kobe and why the Japanese government allowed them to stay. She will present 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. Dr. Slater will also share Japanese testimony, newspaper reports, historical accounts, and official documents that reveal local views of both the refugees and Jews in general.
Tracy Slater is an Ashkenazi American writer from Boston based in her husband’s country of Japan. Her work focuses on the intersection of Jewish and Japanese culture and history, and her current project uncovers the story of Jewish refugees who found temporary shelter in Kobe, Japan, during World War II. She is a recipient of the 2025 Sorrell and Lorraine Chesin / JDC Archives Fellowship.
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. We commemorate the 6 million Jews who were murdered, honor the survivors, and pay tribute to the resisters, rescuers, and liberators.
We also remember the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and their valiant efforts to resist.
Click the link in our bio to read an excerpt of a letter written by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, a department head of JDC's Warsaw office, who describes the heroism he saw in the Warsaw Ghetto.
