This presentation explores the life and career of Ida Kaminska, a central figure in Yiddish theatre whose work spanned Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States. From performing as a child alongside her mother to leading major Yiddish theatres after the war, her story is closely tied to the upheavals of the twentieth century and the evolution of Yiddish theatrical tradition. The program incorporates personal artifacts, photographs, and archival materials to ground her career in lived experience. These objects reveal how Yiddish theatre functioned not only as performance, but as survival, memory, and community. Together, Kaminska’s story and the materials on view offer a fuller picture of Jewish cultural life during a period marked by loss and resilience.

Charlotte Apter, Assistant Curator, Collections at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, will be in conversation about Ida Kaminska with Adam Ginsberg, President of the Cedar Grove Cemetery Association and Deirdre Poulos, Director of the Legacy Foundation at Mount Hebron Cemetery.

Co-presented by the Cedar Grove Cemetery Association.

The Museum’s newest exhibition, Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk, focuses Szyk’s decades-long career during which he emerged as a powerful voice in the fight for freedom, justice, and democracy. Szyk’s stunning works, ranging from intricately detailed illuminated texts like his iconic Haggadah to decisively satirical political cartoons, reveal how creativity can be harnessed to fight for freedom and stand against antisemitism.

Join Irvin Ungar, the world’s foremost expert on the art of Arthur Szyk and the tireless force behind the Szyk renaissance, for a discussion of the new exhibition.

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’re 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. You may walk in on a first come first serve basis as well.

Museum admission is required to visit the center. Museum members are admitted for free.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one. 
 
Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds. 
 
Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive foreword by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror. 

Combining magical realism and evocative hand-drawn animation with revelatory interviews and verité footage, Among Neighbors examines the story of a small, rural town where Jews and Polish Catholics lived side by side for centuries before World War II. The film brings the Polish response to the Holocaust to life through the last living eyewitnesses, revealing both love and betrayal as it zeroes in on one of the last living Holocaust survivors from the town, and an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered there - not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash (Crime After Crime, Sundance Film Festival).

New York pianist Roger Peltzman's one-person show, Dedication, recounts his family's tragic history of fleeing the Nazis in war-torn Europe using drama, humor, powerful images, and musical performances of everything from blues to Chopin. 

Drawn into the story of people he never knew, Peltzman develops a "relationship" with his uncle, Norbert Stern, a brilliant pianist who was murdered in Auschwitz at age 21. Learning that Holocaust trauma can be inherited, Peltzman recounts his coming to terms with second generation survivor trauma and the role of music in helping to manage wounds that will never fully heal. 

Sons of Survivors, written by Aron Hirt-Manheimer and Marty Yura is a dual memoir that traces the colorful growing-up adventures of two sons of survivors through fast-paced alternating passages. Though the Holocaust formed the backdrop of their lives, it was only as older adults that they set out to try to piece together what happened to their families during the war -- and to bear witness.

For Aron, the most powerful revelations were contained in a nearly forgotten memoir written by his uncle fifty years earlier in Argentina. Marty’s breakthrough came after participating in a Zen Peacemakers immersion retreat on the killing fields of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Navigating through this haunted terrain together, the friends realized that the love they inherited from their parents transcends the trauma. Their joint memoir attests to a legacy of love against hate.

Hirt-Manheimer and Yura will be in conversation about their book with Dr. Michael Berenbaum.

Liliana is a documentary by Ruggero Gabbai that retraces the testimony of life senator Liliana Segre linked to her arrest, deportation and poignant final farewell to her father. The film is based on juxtapositions, cross-references and contrasts between the historical account and the contemporary portrait of one of the most important women on the Italian scene. The docu-film highlights lesser-known aspects of the senator, revealing a modern cultural and political figure who is passionate about conveying a message of freedom and equality to the younger generations. The voices of people close to her tell her story: her children, grandchildren, public figures such as Ferruccio De Bortoli, Mario Monti, Geppi Cucciari, Fabio Fazio, Enrico Mentana, and the carabinieri of her escort, allowing us to get closer to a more familiar and private Liliana. The result is a deep and detailed portrait, which gives access to the theme of the transmission of trauma and the importance of how history is told to future generations.

Run time: 84 minutes. 

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American Lyric Theater partners with the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust to present a concert of Tevye's Daughters - a new opera by Alex Weiser and Stephanie Fleischmann. 

Inspired by the darker, grittier stories by Sholem Aleichem not included in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye's Daughters centers on the tale of the beloved milkman's younger daughter Shprintse, who falls in love with a young man above her station. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse has no choice but to navigate her crisis in silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines - Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women - Tevye's Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, and even erased. The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine in 1907 and a summer cabin in the Catskills in 1964 as Tseytl, Khave, and Beykle, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Rose, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to remember Shprintse's traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present. 

Explore the layers of Jewish life that once shaped Seville on this live, interactive journey through one of Spain’s most storied cities. Wander the former Jewish Quarter, hear stories of scholars, merchants, and everyday families, and trace how Jewish culture, tradition, and resilience left lasting marks on Seville’s streets, architecture, and local customs. This thoughtful tour brings history to life while connecting past and present in real time. Co-presented with Wowzitude. 

Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage for the next part of our professional development miniseries, "The Holocaust: One Year at a Time," with an in-depth examination of 1941/1942.

Participation in this program is CTLE credit eligible. This program has a one-time tax-deductible fee of $18.00. The Educator Scholarship to cover the fee is available to those eligible. See below for details.

Educator Scholarship: This one-time scholarship is available to current educators, retired educators, and students currently enrolled at an academic institution. To apply for a scholarship to cover the cost of admission to the program, please email: ashon@mjhnyc.org

Join us for a Nowruz celebration honoring Persian culture and the Spring Equinox, featuring Persian music, food, and activities, with free Museum admission!

On this live, interactive Jewish Heritage tour of Prague, we will explore one of Europe’s most remarkably preserved centers of Jewish life. Walking through the historic Josefov quarter, we’ll see a rich collection of synagogues, courtyards, and public spaces that tell the story of centuries of community, faith, and resilience. Along the way, we’ll discuss how Jewish life evolved within the city’s walls, shaped by both periods of prosperity and profound challenge. We will also reflect on the legacy of Sir Nicholas Winton, whose quiet actions helped save hundreds of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. From medieval traditions to modern history, this journey offers a meaningful look at Jewish Heritage and memory in Prague today. Co-presented with Wowzitude. 

Saul Rubinek's novel All in The Telling - a somewhat true story, weaves together a true story of miraculous survival, a murder mystery, an operatic family drama, and undying romance. When Saul falls in love with a non-Jewish woman, he discovers his immigrant, Holocaust survivor parents are not as "cool with it" as he said they'd be. Their reaction is biblical. Desperate to fix his relationship with his parents, he lies and tells them he's writing a book about their story of love and survival. In chronicling their lives, Saul discovers their extraordinary loyalty and bravery - but also the lies, secrets, and deceptions buried in his family's past.

Rubinek will perform excerpts of his book. The reading includes clips from his documentary film So Many Miracles, in which Saul took his parents back to Poland in 1986 to have a reunion with the Polish farmers that had hidden them for two and a half years during the Holocaust.

Saul Rubinek's novel All in The Telling - a somewhat true story, weaves together a true story of miraculous survival, a murder mystery, an operatic family drama, and undying romance. When Saul falls in love with a non-Jewish woman, he discovers his immigrant, Holocaust survivor parents are not as "cool with it" as he said they'd be. Their reaction is biblical. Desperate to fix his relationship with his parents, he lies and tells them he's writing a book about their story of love and survival. In chronicling their lives, Saul discovers their extraordinary loyalty and bravery - but also the lies, secrets, and deceptions buried in his family's past.

Rubinek will perform excerpts of his book. The reading includes clips from his documentary film So Many Miracles, in which Saul took his parents back to Poland in 1986 to have a reunion with the Polish farmers that had hidden them for two and a half years during the Holocaust.

Rooms, choreographed by Anna Sokolow with a jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins, examines the psychic isolation and unfulfilled desires of characters isolated in their small, city apartments. The controversial and groundbreaking 1955 work breathes with the loneliness and alienation following the breakdown of wartime solidarity, when the threat of atomic annihilation, the 1952 polio epidemic, and the Red Scare hung like invisible contagions and created a mood of pervasive uncertainty and dread throughout the country. An enduring masterpiece, Rooms still conveys the anxiety and isolation of today.

This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival.

ASL Tour "Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk"

Thursday, March 12th at 6:00 PM

Join us for a Curator and ASL interpreter-led tour of the Museum’s newest exhibition of Szyk’s stunning works, Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk hosted at The Museum of Jewish Heritage– A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

Over his decades-long career as an artist, Arthur Szyk emerged as a powerful voice in the fight for freedom, justice, and democracy. As a Polish-born Jew and an immigrant to the United States, he advocated for European Jewry, calling the world to action during the Holocaust while his anti-Nazi illustrations rallied Americans to the war effort. 

This program is for deaf adults.

The program is free, but registration is still required.

Light refreshments to follow.