Records of the New York Office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1933 - 1944

Selected records from the collection are available online at the JDC Archives database. This collection has been digitized. Microfilm copies of the entire collection are also available on 226 reels labeled according to folder range. This collection comprises 1,141 numbered files of JDC New York Headquarters records that chronicle the period between Hitler’s rise to power and the end of the Second World War. For the sake of narrative coherence, some records from the postwar period and beyond are also included in this collection. For the most part, these records describe the valiant efforts to support individuals and communities struggling for survival in Europe and in refugee havens across the globe and Nazis. JDC funded local welfare committees and communal organizations and worked with government agencies and other international organizations to set up programs and conduct operations in over 70 countries. In 1933, JDC moved its European headquarters from Berlin to Paris. When Nazi troops approached Paris in June 1940, the office was evacuated, and Lisbon ultimately became the site of JDC headquarters for the duration of the war. The 1933-1944 collection includes correspondence, cables, memoranda, and bulletins; minutes of JDC meetings and conferences and transcripts of proceedings; narrative, statistical, and financial reports; eye-witness accounts and diary entries; passenger lists, ship manifests, and inventories; and speeches, press clippings, news dispatches, and publicity materials. Highlights of this collection include:the struggle of Jews in Germany and the mounting emigration following enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, and the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland;the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany and the plight of the homeless in “no-man’s-land” along the Czech frontier and in Zbaszyn on the Polish border; the role of loan kassas in economic life;the saga of the St. Louis and other sailings from Portuguese, North African, and Japanese ports;relief efforts for Jewish refugees in Shanghai;emigration from Vilna via the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok and then Japan;the situation in French internment camps and the deportations of Jews from occupied and unoccupied France;the work of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee;the shipment of food packages to Theresienstadt and other concentration camps;the Teheran parcel service for refugees in Asiatic Russia. This collection is searchable by appointment through the textual collections portal of the JDC Archives. Researchers interested in visiting the JDC Archives to examine the collection in its entirety may complete an online research application.