Postcards from Home

In the years that preceded the end of World War II, the photograph served a very important function, not only for our families who were living in Europe at the time, but for those who decided to emigrate and start new lives in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Many families went to local or big city studios to take one last photo together before one of them left the town where they had probably resided their entire life. This photograph would often create perhaps one last visual memory that would remind them for the rest of their lives of the years they spent together as a family, as in all likelihood they would never see each other again.
Choose from hundreds of family photographs taken in pre-war Eastern Europe and read short stories about some of the subjects of these photographs and their families, some of whom emigrated and survived the war, and many who perished in the Shoah.

Holocaust Memorials
OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY

Windows in Time
A SUMMER'S JOURNEY TO EUROPE AND
THE MIDDLE EAST 1913

The Cemetery Project

The matzeva, or gravestone, is often the source of important genealogical information to those who are searching for information about their ancestors. Please visit this exhibition and search for the surnames or towns that you are interested in learning more about. Also, the Society Gates exhibition displays photographs and lists the names of the many society officers and members who once ably served their landsleit. These landsmanshaftn would provide their members with various forms of assistance, one of which was to provide plots for their eventual burial. The gates described stand at the entrance to some of the more than 10,000 society burial plots that grace the New York-New Jersey landscape.

Living in America

The American experience for millions of Jews was one fraught with great hardships. Many came to countries such as the United States with little money in hand and were forced to find what work they could in order to survive, even if it meant working long hours in unsafe conditions for low wages. Many tried to save what money they could in order to pay for the passage of other family members still living in Europe who also wished to emigrate. At the same time, the new immigrants were forced to acclimate themselves to a culture that was very foreign to them, while at the same time trying to maintain their Jewish identity and their value system.

From the Pale to the Golden Land
HOW OUR FAMILIES CAME TO AMERICA

From such areas as the Pale of Settlement in Russia, over two million Jews, once confined and subjected to pejorative treatment, left the country of their birth and traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. There, they hoped to begin life anew--a life filled with more opportunities to better themselves, in a society that would allow them to enjoy a greater religious, economic and political freedom than they had previously known.

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