The final session investigates the afterlife of the Uprising and how an act of desperate military resistance became a foundational pillar of Jewish memory. Over the decades, the story of the ghetto fighters has been interpreted—and sometimes instrumentalized—differently around the globe. We will contrast the shifting narratives across three distinct landscapes: in Poland, where the uprising is integrated into a broader history of national martyrdom and resistance against totalitarianism; in Israel, where it was heavily woven into the ethos of the “sabra” fighter and the state’s establishment; and in the United States, where it often serves as a universal symbol of the triumph of the human spirit against tyranny.

Research Assistance at the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center

The Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center is the physical presence of JewishGen, the genealogical research division of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Our professional genealogists, who are experts in family history research, are here to guide and assist you, whether you are just starting your search or digging deeper into your family tree. With unlimited access to JewishGen’s powerful online tools and many other essential resources, the Kalikow Center is your personalized launchpad for discovery.

Here, your family’s past comes to life. Genealogical research—especially Jewish family history—can be a fascinating but complex journey, filled with hidden details, unfamiliar languages, and elusive records. That’s where we come in.

Come with questions. Leave with stories. Your history is waiting—let the Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center help you discover it.

The center is open on:

Wednesdays at 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Thursdays at 12:00 – 4:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Sundays 10:00 am – 12:30 pm & 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

We encourage you to make a reservation. Walk-ins are also welcome on a first-come, first-served basis.

Museum admission is required to visit the center.

Free for Museum members.

Free Admission Thursday, 4–8 PM. Contact: 646.437.4202 or kalikow@jewishgen.org.

One ticket per appointment. For additional guests, please book another spot here or visit the Museum Admissions Desk.

Please feel free to complete this optional form to help us better prepare for your visit.

Bessarabia has a unique history within the Pale of Settlement, shaped by its time under the Ottoman and Russian Empires and a Jewish presence dating back to the 15th–16th centuries. Most genealogical records, such as vital records, revision lists, and burial records, begin in the 19th century, with additional 20th-century materials including deportation records and memorial sources. Many of these have been translated and made available through JewishGen, along with Yizkor books and personal memoirs. In this webinar, Yefim Kogan will share how to research Jewish history and genealogy in Bessarabia.

About the Speaker:

Yefim Abram Kogan is the Leader and Coordinator of the JewishGen Bessarabia Division. Born in Kishinev, Moldova, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989 and has since conducted extensive genealogical and historical research. He holds a Master of Jewish Liberal Studies from Hebrew College in Boston, focusing on Eastern European Jewish history. In 2011, he founded the JewishGen Bessarabia SIG and developed its website, along with several KehilaLinks sites. His major projects include the Bessarabia Revision List, with over 300,000 records, and the Bessarabia Cemetery Project, documenting more than 90 cemeteries and 75,000 burial records. He is a frequent speaker at Jewish genealogical societies and IAJGS conferences and, in 2025, published Jewish Families in Shtetl Kaushany, Bessarabia with JewishGen Press.

Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family suburban home, the repository of many families’ long-term wealth. While the man who did the most to make the automobile a mass commodity—Henry Ford—is well known, few know the story of the man who did the same for the suburban house.
 
In Perfect Communities, Edward Berenson describes the remarkable career of William Levitt, who did more than anyone else to create the modern suburb. In response to an unprecedented housing shortage as veterans returned home from World War II, his Levittown developments provided inexpensive mass-produced housing that was wildly popular—prospective buyers would camp out in line for two days for the chance to put down a deposit on a Levitt house. He was a celebrity, a life-changing hero to tens of thousands, and the pitchman of a renewed American Dream. But Levitt also shared Ford’s dark side. He refused to allow Black people to buy or rent in his developments and doggedly defended this practice against legal challenges. Leading the way for other developers who emulated his actions, he helped ensure that suburbs nationwide remained white enclaves. These legacies are still with us. Levitt made a major contribution to the stubborn wealth disparity between white families and Black families, and his solution to the housing crisis of the 1940s—the detached house and surrounding yard—is a primary cause of the housing crisis today.
 
As a person, Levitt was a strangely guileless and tragic figure. He accumulated vast wealth but, after losing control of his building company, surrendered it all through foolish investments and a lavish lifestyle that included a Long Island mansion and a two-hundred-foot yacht. Just weeks before his death, as a charity patient in a hospital to which he had once given millions, he was still imagining his great comeback.

Join the Museum for a screening of Who Will Write Our History in coordination with our new exhibition Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. 

Now, for the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon – the truth – and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

Run Time: 90 minutes

Following the Civil War, prominent fire insurance companies in the United States issued instructions to their agents to deny Jews fire insurance policies because of their alleged proclivity to arson. In the years that followed, the stereotype of the Jewish arsonist spread throughout the United States, appearing in fire insurance manuals, cartoons, songs, and silent films.

Jewish Firebugs presents the first detailed exploration of both the accusations and the realities of Jewish arson from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. Drawing on such diverse records as fire department reports, insurance records, newspapers, trial transcripts, and humor journals, Jeffrey Marx delves into the social forces that created and then sensationalized the caricature of the Jewish arsonist, investigating how and why Jews became the only racial/ethnic group to be targeted this way in the United States. The book critically assesses how these antisemitic representations were solidified in the American imagination–from the spread of jokes and cartoons, to vaudeville performances across the country.

In addition, Marx also investigates the various factors that led to arson criminal activity in Jewish neighborhoods, the unique way that Jewish “arson gangs” were organized, and how the fire insurance companies actively supported their efforts. Jewish Firebugs illustrates the socioeconomic realities of Jewish immigrant life at the turn of the nineteenth century, and details what the Jewish arsonist trope reveals about the dynamics of antisemitism in the United States.

Research Assistance at the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center

Meet one‑on‑one with a professional genealogist during a 45‑minute in‑person session. They will help you explore your family history, answer questions, and guide your research.

The center is open on:

Wednesdays: 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Thursdays: 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm

Sundays: 10:00 am – 12:30 pm & 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

We encourage you to make a reservation. Walk-ins are also welcome on a first-come, first-served basis.

Pricing:

First‑time visit: $18 includes Museum Admission

Free for Members

Returning visit –: $72 includes Museum Admission

$54 for Members

Three-Visit Package $195

$150 for Members.

One ticket per appointment. For additional guests, please book another spot here or visit the Museum Admissions Desk.

Free admission for first‑time visitors on Thursdays from 4–8 PM. Contact 646.437.4202 or kalikow@jewishgen.org

Please feel free to complete this optional form to help us better prepare for your visit.

Americans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tolerance in the United States. But antisemitism and racism went up-not down-after the war's end. Violence broke out in cities across the country, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled from 1940 to 1946. In this shocking account of a resurgence of White Supremacy in America, celebrated historian Steven J. Ross reveals how four key leaders-Emory Burke, J. B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell-worked together to “finish the job Hitler had begun,” launching deadly attacks on Jews and African Americans and building a network of terrorists across the U.S. In response to this “war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defamation League, George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, and James Sheldon of the Non-­Sectarian Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a multipronged effort: They infiltrated, monitored, and undermined these hate groups, putting their own safety on the line and scoring important victories that, today, have been all but forgotten.

Tracing the extraordinary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate provides a groundbreaking reconsideration of the legacy of the “Good War,” and essential reading on how America today can beat hate once again and build a just and united nation.

Boy on the Run tells the gripping story of Paul Galan, who recounts the unbelievable story of his survival in the Holocaust as a child. He shares how, at the age of six, he was compelled to wear a distinctive gold star on his clothing, as per the oppressive Nuremberg Laws, when the Nazi regime took control. Amidst numerous close calls with death, he and his family eventually found themselves in a labor camp in Slovakia, where they were liberated during an uprising. Soon after, they embarked on a perilous journey across the Sudetes mountains, disguised as Lutherans with falsified documents, desperately seeking refuge from kind-hearted strangers. Boy on the Run vividly recounts this extraordinary journey, including a tense night when he and his family found themselves sharing quarters with a Nazi soldier.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers of Boy on the Run, Brianne Berkson and Miguel Gluckstern.

This fascinating new biography recounts the life and legacy of a titan of American banking, Louis Graveraet Kaufman (1870–1942). Also known as LG, he was a Gatsbyesque figure born in Michigan's Upper Peninsula who married into great wealth and then amassed far more of his own. Under LG, New York's Chatham Phenix National Bank and Trust Company became one of the nation's largest banks and the first in New York to boast a network of branches. When he was denied entry into the exclusive, Protestant, old-money Huron Mountain Club, LG responded by building his own retreat: the world's largest log lodge, a 26,000-square-foot behemoth near Marquette, Michigan. Christened Granot Loma, it became the site of lavish Prohibition-era parties, attracting many celebrities who came in private rail cars to enjoy jazz and liquor chez Kaufman. A darling of the press, LG became a household name, making news by coordinating the famous takeover of General Motors in 1916, narrowly escaping death in the Wall Street Bombing of 1920, and financing the Empire State Building during the Great Depression. Author Ann Berman highlights Kaufman's remarkable journey from "barefoot boy" to trailblazing branch banking giant, proving LG was not just a man of his time but one worth reading about over a century later.

Berman will be in discussion about the book with Jason M. Barr, professor of economics at Rutgers University-Newark. 

Join the Grünbaum Fischer Foundation (GFF) and the Museum for GFF’s Fifth Annual Gala and Awards Ceremony, featuring the World Premier of Dead City III, an original jazz composition by Domo Branch, as well as musical and other performances by 2026 GFF Scholars. The Gala and Awards ceremony honor the life and legacy of “Fritz” Grünbaum, a legendary cabaret artist who dominated the stages of Berlin and Vienna, also bringing his virtuosity to radio and numerous films that he wrote, directed, and acted in. When Hitler arrived in Vienna in March 1938, Fritz was at the top of the Nazis’ target list of cultural enemies and was immediately deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp. There, he continued to give performances until two weeks before his death in January 1941. Funding for the GFF comes from restitution and sales of Fritz’s art collection, which included Egon Schiele’s Dead City III, the inspiration for Branch’s jazz composition. GFF is honored to celebrate this important occasion at the Museum, which will also serve to remember and honor the work of MJH Co-Founder Robert M. Morgenthau, whose own work in support of Holocaust era restitution, including Dead City III, was monumental. 

In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.

This highly readable book charts how spending time abroad enhanced American Jewish women' s status and often challenged conventional gender roles by expanding their autonomy. Moreover, it explores how going abroad reinforced their Jewish identity, particularly in the face of unsettling encounters with antisemitism. Drawing on a treasure trove of previously unexamined diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, periodicals, scrapbooks, and photographs, Jewish Woman at Home in the World provides an engaging analysis of travel as a crucial mechanism for solidifying a diasporic identity, allowing American Jewish women to create and maintain connections with Jews worldwide.

Klapper will be in discussion about the book with Kirsten Fermaglich, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.

Join the Manhattan Jewish Historical Initiative and the Museum for a celebration of Landing Day, the day when 23 Sephardic Jews arrived in New Amsterdam and created the first Jewish community in the city, through the photographs of pioneering photographer Joan Roth. Roth, along with several subjects of her photos, will discuss her photos of Jewish women from around the world to celebrate the 372nd anniversary of Landing Day.