The Center for Jewish History Genealogy Institute

The Center for Jewish History Genealogy Institute in New York City is an excellent resource for anyone researching Jewish ancestry. While located in New York City, the Institute collects records from all over Europe, North America, and elsewhere. The Institute provides reference and educational services.

The 125,000-square-foot facility houses five premier American institutions: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The holdings of these organizations represent a collection of 100 million archival documents, manuscripts, and photographs, 500,000 library volumes, and tens of thousands of artifacts and works of art.

The holdings include family histories, memoirs, correspondence, personal papers of prominent and less well-known individuals, and records of communal, cultural, political, and professional organizations. Among these sources are many documents with information about individuals and families. Many of the documents and books at the Center are in languages other than English, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Russian, Spanish, French, Hungarian, and others. Most of the document groups are not indexed.

The reading room is open to all. A number of computers are available for general use. The Lillian Goldman Reading Room also is equipped for wireless Internet access for patron laptop use.

The Genealogy Institute offers a series of fact sheets, listing the genealogical resources available at the Center and elsewhere, and explaining how to obtain them. The fact sheets cover such topics as:

City Directories
Immigration Records
Landsmanshaft Records
Naturalization Records
Synagogue Records
U.S. Census, 1900-1930
Vital Records
Finding an Ancestral Town in the Pale
Interviewing Relatives
Introduction to Sephardic Genealogy
Starting Your Family History Research
Computers & Genealogy
Finding Birth Parents
Finding a Burial Place
Rabbinnical Records at the Center for Jewish History
…and more.

These fact sheets are available to everyone at no charge at http://www.cjh.org/family/factsheets.cfm

The Center for Jewish History Genealogy Institute is located at 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011. You can learn more about the Center and its many services at http://www.cjh.org

Comments

[Robert Friedman]

Thanks very much for highlighting the resources available at the Center for Jewish History. However, I should point out that while the Reading Room and the many collections you described are all housed in the same building, the Genealogy Institute is only one department of CJH and does not actually collect records itself. The main role of the Genealogy Institute is to collaborate with the five partner organizations to answer inquiries and help researchers access materials of interest. Therefore we maintain a small library of reference books, periodicals, maps, and electronic resources, and, as you correctly stated, provide reference and educational services, such as our fact sheets, lectures, workshops, etc. For further clarification, please see the FAQs posted on our web site.

Robert Friedman
Director, CJH Genealogy Institute