Plunderer is a feature-length documentary that focuses on the career of Bruno Lohse, a Nazi art dealer who served as Göring’s art agent in Paris and headed the ERR, the Nazis’ clearinghouse for confiscated art in France. Captured and interrogated by the Monuments Men after the war, Lohse served a brief prison sentence. Following his release, he profitably dealt in stolen art for sixty years, selling to collectors, galleries, and major museums. The film includes stories of Holocaust survivors working to reclaim their families’ lost artworks and examines the continuity between the post-war era and the contemporary art world and its secretive culture.
Following the screening, there will be a talkback with producer John S. Friedman, journalist Michelle Young, producer Dr. David Milch, and executive producer Charles Knapp.
From Berlin to the Bronx, from Holocaust survivor to American success story, Georgette Bennett's new book Half-Jew, Full Life traces the extraordinary life of Gary “Pips” Phillips who defied the odds at every turn. With an Aryan mother and Jewish father, Pips could have escaped much of the Holocaust’s horrors. Instead, he made a fateful decision at age 13 to become a bar mitzvah just as the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, effectively choosing to be labeled a Jew under Nazi rule. Pips’s wartime experience is marked by daring escapes, improbable rescues, and survival while hiding deep within Nazi Berlin. Captured four times, he escaped thrice, choosing to remain in Nazi custody the fourth time as there was nowhere to run in bombed-out Berlin. At his place of confinement, he met his future wife, Olga Horvath, who had been imprisoned after surviving Auschwitz and the Death March to Bergen Belsen. After their marriage in chaotic post-war Berlin, they emigrated to the USA to start a new life.
Arriving in New York with nothing, Pips rose from waiter to co-owner of the world’s largest photo agency—despite never owning a camera. Unlike Pips, Olga was unable to escape the shadow of her Holocaust experiences, and in a horrifying twist, she threw herself off the roof of their gleaming luxury high-rise after more than 50 years of marriage, leaving Pips grief-stricken, but also able to reinvent himself one more time. This dramatic story brims with chance, love, loss, resilience, and reinvention, culminating in a poignant exploration of Jewish identity, memory, and legacy.
Bennett will be in conversation about the book with award-winning singer-songwriter, Judy Collins.
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.
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.
Museum Members
Visitors have access to all exhibitions at the Museum at any time during opening hours. Click here to see all exhibitions on view.
To reserve free admission, please select your ticket type below and Add to Cart. You may visit at any time between 4-8PM on the day of your reservation.
COVID-19 Safety Guidelines: Please review our Health and Safety page before planning your visit for more information on COVID safety requirements and our visitation guidelines.
Sign in at the top right corner of this page. If you do not already have an online account with us, please create an account using your member email. Your Member discounts will be reflected in your cart at checkout.
Not a member? Join today or email membership@mjhnyc.org for assistance.
We provide free admission to Holocaust Survivors, active members of the military, first responders, and NYC DOE K-12 students. If this applies to you, please contact us at 646-437-4202 to schedule your visit.
We also accept the Sightseeing Pass and the Go City Pass, please bring your pass to the Museum for free admission.
Groups of 15 or more must book through the Group Tours page.
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.
Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Center for Jewish History for the next part of our professional development miniseries, "The Holocaust: One Year at a Time," with an in-depth examination of 1944.
In this virtual program, we will explore the story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a Holocaust survivor who played in the Auschwitz orchestra. Through primary sources, testimony, and lesson plans, we will explore pedagogy for bringing this into your classroom.
Participants will receive CTLE credit.
The program is free, but pre-registration is required by May 5.
"Szyk’s once-celebrated illustrations—art both deeply Jewish and strikingly universal—powerfully exposed the devastating harms of fascism, racism, and antisemitism. This compelling, fascinating, and timely memoir now amplifies that call, championing artistic freedom while celebrating art’s indispensable inspiration to resist tyranny and sustain democracy and liberty across the globe." - David Saperstein, Former US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom
During World War II, the Polish-Jewish immigrant Arthur Szyk became America’s leading anti-Nazi artist. His art was so effective that Adolf Hitler reportedly put a bounty on his head while the US military declared him a “citizen-soldier” of the free world. Szyk steadfastly fought for the rescue of European Jewry during the Holocaust, creating artworks like De Profundis, which imagines Jesus sharing the suffering of countless lifeless Jews. His civil rights art challenged segregation, and his illuminated Declaration of Independence resides in the Library of Congress. Szyk’s masterwork, an illustrated Passover Haggadah, is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful books ever produced by human hands.
Once world-famous, Arthur Szyk was all but forgotten after he died in 1951. Reviving the Artist Who Fought Hitler recounts Irvin Ungar's decades-long journey to restore Szyk to public consciousness and become the principal collector, dealer, scholar, and promoter of Szyk’s art in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Richly illustrated and full of forgotten history, this memoir is an inspiring story of artistic passion and an invitation to commune with a heroic advocate for all humanity.
We’re hosting the biggest Jewish mah jongg festival ever — and you’re invited!
Whether you are a complete beginner to the game, a seasoned expert player, or someone who just wants to learn some history and have some fun, you’ll enjoy this one-of-a-kind celebration of all things mah jongg. It’s all presented in partnership with Kveller and two of the country’s most respected teachers — Dara Collins and Donna Kassman, the founders of Modern Mahjong.
If you would like to attend Day 2 of the Festival, on Monday, June 29th, which will include a tournament of intermediate and advanced players, please register here.
Keep the fun going at Day 2 of the New York Jewish Mah Jongg Festival!
Join a tournament of intermediate and advanced players that will award mah jongg-themed prizes.
Tickets to Day 2, which ends at 1:00 p.m., will include snacks but not a full lunch.
Ladino love songs, ballads and folk music recall the lives of Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1942 and took their music with them as they spread throughout the Mediterranean basin. These songs would have faded into history if not for the heroic efforts of musicians such as Sarah Aroeste, an international singer, songwriter and author who draws upon her family roots in Greece and Macedonia (via mediaeval Spain) to help share Judeo-Spanish culture with new generations. Aroeste will tell the story of Ladino music and explore the stories and meanings behind beloved traditional songs and perform a few of her own contemporary Ladino songs. In conversation with Nadine Epstein, editor-in-chief and CEO of Moment Magazine. Co-presented by Moment Magazine.
Soundtrack of the Jewish People—is an ongoing series exploring the history of Jewish contributions to the world of music—with musicians, scholars and music lovers, based on Moment’s years-long undertaking to explore music with Jewish significance.
Torn from her home, alone, and unsure of where she was headed, Hanna left Germany on a transport bound for England at just 7 years old.
She would come to learn that she was part of an epic rescue effort that would save nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Hitler’s Nazi regime. Hanna’s parents, Markus and Amalie however, would not make it to safety.
In the film i was 8814, Hanna sits down at 92 years old to personally narrate her story in breathtaking detail. She recounts the childhood experience of seeing Hitler parade through her hometown, the heartbreaking journey of discovering her parent’s fate, facing the bitter truth, and turning her vengeful hatred to forgiveness.
Following the screening, there will be a talkback with directors David Peters and Kathi Peters.
This professional development program is aimed at educators located in the NY Tri-State area who are currently engaged with Holocaust education. It is being hosted in partnership with TOLI, an organization dedicated to empowering teachers to make Holocaust education relevant for today's students. TOLI programs are recognized for their distinctive approach—one that reaches teachers on a personal level, fostering self-reflection, critical inquiry, and a deeper awareness of their own roles and responsibilities as educators. Rather than treating teachers as passive recipients of information, teachers are engaged as active participants in a transformative learning process. This session would be appropriate for educators who have several years of experience teaching about World War II and the Holocaust.
Please note: This program is exclusively for current Holocaust educators.
Participation in this program is CTLE credit eligible. This program has a one-time tax-deductible fee of $36.00. The Educator Scholarship to cover the fee is available to those eligible. See below for details.
Educator Scholarship: This one-time scholarship for this program is available to current Holocaust educators. To apply for a scholarship to cover the cost of admission to the program, please email: education@mjhnyc.org
Todd Diamond's new book Pass the Trauma, Please is a comedy-drama Holocaust memoir where scandalous secrets about a father’s survival as an orphan and a soldier who fought for Israeli independence come to light over an unforgettable Sunday night Chinese dinner.
But it’s not just stories that were passed down from a survivor to his children: Genetically Inherited Holocaust Trauma hitches a ride, resulting in his son’s dysfunctional relationships and dubious behaviors.
Like other books about the Holocaust, Pass the Trauma, Please addresses loss. But you’ll also find drug smuggling, attempts to reverse a circumcision, brothels, kibbutz ambushes, divorce, death camp visits, decadent nights at Studio 54, and tales of lost virginity.
This original, provocative, and irreverent memoir presents us with a unique second-generation Holocaust survivor viewpoint that is worthy of a film script. It helps us fathom the unfathomable and even manages to make us laugh along the way. This is not your typical Holocaust story in any way, shape, or form, and therein lies its strength.
Mishpachah Festival
Sunday, May 31, 2026
The Hebrew word Mishpachah means family – we invite you to join ours! This day-long festival celebrates and explores Jewish genealogy, heritage, and immigration along with, the Museum’s Jewish Genealogical Research Division and other partners, who are celebrating their 40th anniversary. Engage with your family’s genealogy using the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Center’s new user interface, learn about historical immigration, and reflect on how we tell our individual and collective stories.
Please select 1 ticket for your entire party.
Appointments are free. A suggested donation will help us preserve Jewish history.
Be sure to arrive on time for your appointment.
Beginning in the early 1980s, popular, commercial video games made it the player's task to kill Nazis. If these games were inspired by the history of World War 2, why didn't Jewish characters appear in them, whether as victims, as Allied soldiers, or as resistance fighters? And why, after three decades, did Jewish characters suddenly begin appearing in such games, starting in 2014? Josh Lambert argues that there was a rough generic distinction between "serious Holocaust fiction" and entertaining Nazisploitation that game creators understood they could transgress only after seeing the success of Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009). Tarantino showed that one could center Jewish characters while glorying in sensational Nazisploitation tropes, and be applauded for doing so. Examining entries in the Wolfenstein series from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s, and touching briefly on Call of Duty: WWII (2017), this talk demonstrates the profound influence of Tarantino's film on the medium of video games, and explains the appearance of Jewish characters as one of its most noteworthy effects.
Out of the horror of the abyss, the narrow places of his family’s history, Menachem Rosensaft has written a Book of Psalms that laments, accuses, rages, weeps and yet, somehow, still addresses God. The son of two Auschwitz survivors, Rosensaft imagines the voice of his older brother, Benjamin, who perished in the gas chambers before Menachem was born. His 150 psalms are masterful recreations of the original texts, turning praise into dirges, festivals into mourning – until subtly suggesting a hint of comfort through the mere fact of their existence.
Rosensaft will be in conversation with Jack Kliger, President and CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, about Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.
Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage for a screening of Hester Street and a discussion with author Dr. Julia Wagner and filmmaker and Columbia professor Ira Deutchman.
Joan Micklin Silver's groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (Carol Kane), a young, Orthodox Jewish woman who arrives in New York City from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Reunited with her already-assimilated husband, Gitl finds they now have little in common and she is forced to adjust to a new way of life in the Lower East Side. Hester Street defied expectations on its release, and shines today as a triumph of independent, feminist filmmaking that changed the face of Jewish American cinema.
Marking the film's 50th anniversary, Dr. Julia Wagner's landmark BFI Film Classics book about Hester Street is the first to focus exclusively on Micklin Silver's film. Wagner will introduce the film and following the screening, she will be in conversation with Ira Deutchman about Joan Micklin Silver’s legacy and the importance and impact of Hester Street.
Signed copies of Hester Street will be available to purchase after the screening.
The Hebrew word Mishpachah means family – we invite you to join ours! This day-long festival will celebrate and explore Jewish genealogy, heritage, and immigration with JewishGen, the Museum’s Jewish Genealogical Research Division and other partners. Engage with your family’s genealogy, learn about historical immigration, and reflect on how we tell our individual and collective stories.
The Pickled City takes a glorious deep dive into the history of the iconic brined cucumber by tracing the pickle's journey from ancient Mesopotamia to Eastern Europe to Manhattan's Lower East Side, unearthing a hidden world of family stories and economic contributions that helped shape New York's cultural, culinary, and literal foundations.
Authors Monique Mulder and Paul van Ravestein will be in conversation about their book.
Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage and author Michael Kimmel for a virtual book talk on Kimmel’s recent book Playmakers.
In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear―bound by clothing scraps, stuffed with sawdust, and given button eyes with a sad, longing expression―in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfeld brothers of Hasbro, Ruth Moskowicz and Elliot Handler of Mattel, and Joshua Lionel Cowan of Lionel Trains.
From Barbie and G.I. Joe to Popeye, Superman, and Mr. Potato Head, Playmakers reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty. For much of the twentieth century, every part of the American toy business was largely Jewish―the company founders, executives, and designers, as well as the factory workers, wholesale distributors, retail outlets, and armies of salesmen. A descendant of the founders of the Ideal Toy Corporation, Michael Kimmel shows how these poor, often Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling children of immigrants invented a world they never experienced for themselves. Along with the toys and Jewish toymakers that climbed the ladder of success, Kimmel also portrays the rise of an entire culture focused on children, led by Jewish comic book creators, children’s authors, parenting experts, and child psychologists.