The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), popularly known as the “Joint,” was established in 1914 to provide aid to destitute Jews, primarily in what was then Palestine and in Eastern Europe, where Jews were often living in deplorable conditions caused by persecution, poverty, the Russian Revolution, and the upheavals of World War I. The Joint has continued to provide rescue, relief, and reconstruction to needy Jewish communities up to the present time. Its archives offers a unique window into Jewish communal relief, development, migration, and resettlement in the last century. Especially valuable to genealogists are the so-called remittance records to be described below.
An example of a document relating to the author’s family illustrates the holdings in this collection. Figure 1 is a card from JDC’s Transmigration Bureau showing that Maurice Pappenheim, the author’s grandfather, deposited funds with JDC to assist relatives in Vienna.
JDC Archives
The JDC Archives holds the organizational records dating back to its inception and represents the breadth and scope of the organization’s work. The archives is one of the most important repositories of both modern Jewish history and of voluntary humanitarian aid to Jewish communities and individuals. At the outset, the Joint brought relief funds and critical supplies to the devastated Jewish communities of Palestine and Europe, set up medical and welfare programs, and rebuilt community institutions. JDC’s activities over the years include the Agro-Joint resettlement program in the Ukraine and Crimea in the 1920s and 1930s; the establishment of loan kassas (credit cooperatives) and vocational training programs in Central and Eastern Europe; childcare and funding for summer camps for tens of thousands of orphaned and at-risk Jewish children; emigration aid for Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia; and support for refugees seeking safe havens in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the Far East. In the period following World War II, the JDC Archives chronicles Malben (Hebrew acronym for Organization for the Care of Handicapped Immigrants) and its effort to resettle the needy in the fledgling State of Israel, immigration of Jews from Arab lands in the late 1940s and early 1950s, assistance to communities in North Africa, and assistance in Europe in the postwar period to the present day.
Archival collections are housed in two repositories, one in New York and one in Jerusalem. Records for the period 1914–54, which are organized by country files, subject matter, and organization files, have been microfilmed and may be viewed in either location. The files include field staff reports on conditions in the Jewish communities overseas; statistical reports on needs, services, and allocations; extensive correspondence; and reports from agencies and institutions that received technical and financial assistance from JDC. Names of individuals are scattered throughout the collection, including community leaders and staff, clients, and JDC staff members.
Most of the microfilmed collections have been catalogued in detail, allowing for searches using keywords and dates. The archives currently is engaged in a mass digitization project to link digital images of records, the catalogued information, and the digitized photograph collection. Cataloguing work continues both in New York and Jerusalem to make the information contained in this rich archives more accessible to researchers.
Remittance Lists
Of special interest are the so-called remittance lists. In its earliest years, the Joint operated a service that enabled Western Jews to send payments to their relatives in Europe and elsewhere. As a result, the archives has records of payments deposited by Jews in the United States and elsewhere to be paid to relatives overseas. Figure 2, a list of remittances to Poland in 1916, shows the name and address of the remitter in the U.S. and the amount deposited for the payee, usually a close relative or friend in Poland. Deposits on this list range from $5 to $100. These lists are especially valuable to genealogists because they include the two bits of data without which no pre-emigration genealogical research can continue, that is, pre-emigration family name and place of residence. These lists may be found in the Joint’s archival collections for the years 1914–18 and 1919–21 and are housed in the JDC Archives in New York. We estimate that most of the original lists remain in these collections. The Transmission Bureau was extremely active and numerous lists appear in the records.
With some 100,000 Jewish refugees and 10,000 Jewishprisoners of war in Siberia in dire need of aid following
World War I, the Joint organized welfare committees, arranged for mail and information services, provided hospital treatment for the seriously ill, funded repatriation activities, and secured transportation services. The earliest archival collection includes a card index (Figure 3 shows a sample card) and lists of prisoners of war who received assistance from JDC. Photographs are attached to many of the cards along with personal data. Some of the cards (if not all) correspond to names on the lists, which provide additional genealogical material, as is the case with the sample featured here.
Considerable information is available relating to the World War II period and its aftermath. Significant genealogically relevant materials from this period include lists of Polish refugees in Vilna and Russia and lists of clients in Shanghai. Available on Ancestry.com are JDC Transmigration Bureau index cards showing funds deposited by relatives in the U.S. to help relatives in Europe, as was the case with the author’s grandfather (see Figure 1). The JDC Archives includes passenger lists for some sailings and ships chartered or paid for by the Joint during and after the war to help Jews escape from the horrors of the Nazi period.
Additional passenger lists are available for ships such as the S.S. Nyassa, S.S. Mouzinho, S.S. Guinea, S.S. Colonial, S.S. Exeter, the Manila Maru (which sailed from Kobe, Japan, to South Africa in May 1941), and many others. The archives includes passenger lists from both the World War II period and the post-war period.
Client cards (8,220 clients served) from the Joint office in Barcelona are available on Ancestry.com, as are the 76,928 cards of displaced persons from the postwar period, assisted by the Joint’s Emigration Service in Munich and Vienna. One such example (Figure 4) is the card of Adolf Schwartz, originally from Czechoslovakia, who was seeking the Joint’s assistance to emigrate to France.
Survivor lists compiled by the Central Location Index (CLI), an umbrella organization that numbered the Joint among its members, are examples of many survivor lists from the post-World War II period. The archival collection includes many lists published by the Joint in Israel in Hebrew immediately following the war.
JDC Photo Archives
Another resource is the JDC Photo Archives, whose holdings date back to 1914. The organization is in the process of digitizing its 100,000-photograph collection. To date, more than 28,000 photographs have been digitized and entered into a database that is open to researchers who are interested in visual documents of Jewish life and the work of JDC around the globe. For example, the collection includes photos of refugees during World War II; displaced persons camps; Agro-Joint; Malben facilities for the handicapped, aged, and chronically ill in the early years after the establishment of the State of Israel; and Jewish life in North Africa from the late 1940s.
In some cases, a photograph can be connected to a document in the text collection with additional family information. One 2009 researcher inquired about whether JDC had any archival records on his relatives, with whom the family had lost contact and, who may have passed through Portugal in the aftermath of the Austrian Anschluss. The JDC Archives was able to locate photographs of a relative, Dr. Bernhard Bretschneider taken in 1938 in a refugee camp in Switzerland. After confirmation that this was indeed a relative, a further search produced a 1940 document in which the same relative, Dr. Bernhard Bretschneider, is mentioned.
How To Use the JDC Archives
The JDC Archives in New York welcomes outside researchers and family historians to explore its archival holdings. JDC working hours are 8:45 p.m.–4:45 p.m. daily, Monday–Friday. To arrange a visit, e-mail <archives@ jdc.org> to receive a research application and schedule an appointment. Research staff will then direct you to files that might have relevant information.
For those unable to visit the archives, a number of small collections or record groups can be searched by a member of the archives staff. Interested persons may e-mail the archives with their request, and a response will be sent saying whether this is feasible.
The JDC Archives is a rich repository depicting Jewish life since 1914. The JDC played a major role in rescue, relief, and reconstruction efforts in World War I, World War II, in Israel from pre-State years to the current period, and in North Africa primarily since the late 1940s and 1950s. The text and photographic records of JDC constitute a valuable and unparalleled historical collection. A digitization program has opened up many of the treasures of the archives and offers the potential to reunite documents with photographic images leading to more comprehensive understanding of the historical record. This material is a valuable resource for those persons researching their Jewish family histories. Unfortunately, in most cases, the information is not yet searchable by name, although efforts to index lists of names have begun. JDC is seeking experienced volunteers to work on this project, and interested parties should contact <archives@jdc.org>.
Note
*The numbers within the captions refer to JDC’s archival collections, organized chronologically. For example, the number 33/44 refers to the 1933–44 collection. Additional numbers refer to specific files in the collection.
Linda G. Levi is Assistant Executive Vice-President for Global Archives at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and is responsible for archives centers in New York and Jerusalem. Levi is a graduate of New York University and received her MA in Contemporary Jewish Studies from Brandeis University.
