The Western Jewish History Center

The Bay Area is home to the third largest Jewish community in the United States.  Jews settled in Northern California since the Gold Rush and played a very significant role in the economic and cultural development of the West.  Western Jewish History Center is the world's largest repository of materials documenting the contribution of Jews to the life, experience, and history of the American West up to the present.

The Center collects reference books and periodicals; personal and family documents; institutional archives; art and artifacts.  Highlights include one thousand reference volumes; sixty Jewish newspaper titles; thousands of photographs; dozens of paintings and works on paper; and fifty oral histories.

Western Jewish History Center was founded in 1967 and placed under the intellectual leadership of Dr. Moses Rischin, one of the pioneers in the field of American Jewish history.  Supported by individual contributions and private foundations, including Koret Foundation, the Jewish Women's Archive, Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund, the collection has been stewarded over the years by such historians and archivists as Ruth Kelson Rafael, Susan Morris, Dr. Ava Kahn, and currently Aaron T. Kornblum.

The Center published over twenty monographs and bibliographies based on its collection.  These imprints include Taking Risks: A Jewish Youth in the Soviet Partisans and His Unlikely Life in California by Fred Rosenbaum (2004), winner of Forward Magazine's Book of the Year award, and The Jews of the West: The Metropolitan Years, edited by Dr. Moses Rischin (1979).  The Center provided guidance and research materials to over a dozen fundamental studies in Jewish Americana such as Jewish Life in the American West by Dr. Ava Kahn (2002) and Pioneer Jews, A New Life in the West by Harriet Rochlin (2000).

Western Jewish History Center is open by appointment only.  Contact Aaron T. Kornblum at akornblum@magnes.org or 510.549.6950 ext. 356.

An increasing number of archival holdings held by Western Jewish History Center can be examined on the Library of Congress National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) website.
http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc