Western Jewish Americana
In 1967, the Judah L. Magnes Museum established its Western Jewish History Center, which was the first regional Jewish history center in the U.S., and remains the largest archive of this kind in the Western United States. In time, the holdings of the Western Jewish History Center evolved into the Western Jewish Americana Archives, which center on the history of Jewish immigration and community engagement in the San Francisco Bay Area since the Gold Rush, and expand across the thirteen Western States.
The circa six hundred collections in the Western Jewish Americana Archives have many correspondences in the objects found among the Museum and Library holdings of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, and together offer a unique resource to students, scholars and family historians.
The collections of the Western Jewish Americana Archives are presently being processed and integrated with the UC Library catalogs. Upon completion of this process, access to these collections will be provided at The Bancroft Library.
The holdings of the Western Jewish Americana Archives are unique, as they combine two fields of research that have often been investigated in separate ways: the history of the American Jewish experience and the history of California and the American West.
Current descriptions and finding aids for the collections of the Western Jewish Americana Archives are available in this website, as highlighted by the entries that appear in this page. These collection descriptions may be browsed by Creator name. Individuals and family creators are listed by last name (for example: Kahn, Julius or Lilienthal family). Institutional creators are listed by full name (for example: Eureka Benevolent Society or Jewish Council of 1933). Congregational records are listed under the proper name of the Congregation (for example: Emanu-El or Beth Israel). The descriptions of collections that have fuller collection guides or finding aids also include links to those documents (in PDF format). In order to view these guides you may need to download Adobe Reader at http://get.adobe.com/reader. Please note that the collection guides (or finding aids) are in varying stages of completion. Some collections have fully realized finding aids and others only simple container lists.
The archival collections are also integrated with the Museum and Library holdings, and the broader cultural context resulting from this integration can be reconstructed by searching our online database.
To go directly to a specific entry, begin typing a name (e.g. "Haas," "Jewish Community Center," or "Emanu-El") in the filter box below. To search for a name or term that may not be included in a collection's title, use the search box at the top of this page, or go to the advanced search page.
UPDATE: Western Jewish Americana Collections Begin to be Available to the Public at The Bancroft Library
Many collections from the Western Jewish Americana archives of the Magnes are now available to researchers, and can be accessed in the reading room of the Bancroft Library.
Collections listed below are (or will soon be) open to researchers. Check the record for each collection for availability status.
Many of these collections are stored off-site and must be requested a few days ahead of your visit to the Bancroft Library. Please check UC Berkeley's Library Catalog, OskiCat, for each collection for locations and details on access.
You can request information about these materials by submitting an online research request form.
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Bella Hurst (Herscovich) Aaron was born in Canada and immigrated to Utah via Montana as a young child. She grew up in Ogden, Utah, the eldest daughter of eight children. Her elder brother, ...
Rahle Abals settled in California shortly after the Gold Rush.
Collection consists of a letter that Rahle [Pahle?] Abals sent to his brother-in-law, Isidore, from Stockton, California in 1858. ...
Aleph Zadik Aleph was a boys organization created and supported by B'nai B'rith.
Charter membership certificate for Aleph Zadik Aleph's Monterey Bay Chapter, Number 355 in Santa Cruz, California.
Hal Altman was active in public relations in Sacramento and interested in promoting awareness of California Jewish history; served on the board of the Northern California Region of the Union of ...
The American Jewish Congress (AJC) was founded in 1916 and reorganized in 1920 and 1938. The groundwork for the Northern California Division was laid in the 1930s by Rabbis Saul White of Beth ...
Israel's Missionary Society of San Francisco, founded circa 1910, was a women' s organization consisting of local Christian women interested in performing missionary work in the local Jewish ...
Ruth Frey Axe was the secretary, for thirty years, of Henry R. Wagner, a historian of the West. She taught in Los Angeles public schools for fifteen years and was a contributor to scholarly ...
The Eleanor Roosevelt Chapter No. 1165 of B'nai B'rith Women was organized in 1962 in Oakland, California. Its members engaged in social, cultural, civic, and educational activities.The collection ...
Simon Bachrach was born in Richmond, Virginia and settled in Oakland, California in the early 1880s. Before he died, he served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1908.
The ...
Julius Balzer married Augusta Marks in 1888, and Beatrice Joyce Balzer married Arthur Annis in 1910.Photographs; pages from a family photo album; wedding invitations; and the ketubah of Julius ...
Julius Baumann was born in Germany and arrived in the U.S. in time to volunteer for service in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. He enlisted under the name of John Bowman and served in the West ...
Mona Bazaar (May 22, 1904 - March 7, 1992) was the author of several self-published books: Exotic Recipes for a World Without War (1963); Free Huey: Or the Sky's the Limit (1968); The Trial of ...
Julius Francis Behrend (b. in Hamburg, Germany, 2 Aug. 1863; d. in San Francisco, June 1954) immigrated to New York in 1879 and moved to Arkansas City, Kansas in 1884, where he operated a ...
Berkeley Jewish Senior Citizens was a group of senior citizens who met weekly at Temple Beth El in Berkeley, California for fellowship and to work on political issues related to ...
An undated menu for Bernstein's Fish Grotto, which shows that the restaurant served a variety of seafood, including shellfish.
Gertrude Block (originally Bloch) was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1893 to Salomon Bloch and Bertha Buhler. She immigrated to England in 1939 and then to the U.S. in 1940 and settled in ...
In 1906, Jacob Blumlein became a partner in San Francisco’s S & W (Sussman-Wormser) Fine Foods.An 1862 engagement agreement for Jacob Blumlein and Phillipine Hellman and a document providing ...
Boris Bogen was a social and Jewish communal worker as well as an editor and author. He was born in Moscow and immigrated to the U.S. in 1888. For a time, he worked as an instructor at the Baron ...
Max J. Brandenstein was born in San Francisco on February 2, 1860. His parents were Joseph Brandenstein and Jane Rosenbaum Brandenstein. He married Bertha Weil in 1885 and had four children. In ...
Edward Bransten was born in 1906 to Edward Brandenstein (b. 1870-d. 1948) and Florine (Haas) Brandenstein (b. 1881-d. 1973). Edward spent 56 years working in the family's coffee business (MJB ...
San Francisco resident and shoemaker who worked in an army goods store. His wife, Katie Keyle Braverman, was involved with the Workmen's Circle.Poetry written by the Bravermans; songbooks and ...
Boris Bresler was born in 1918 and raised in a Russian émigré Jewish community in Harbin, China. He immigrated to the United States in 1937 and in 1946 joined the faculty in the Department of ...
David Michael Bronstein was born in the Ukraine in 1880 and learned the tailoring trade from his father. He immigrated to the United States in 1900 and found work making ladies' clothing in ...
Rachel Bubes attempted to bring her brother-in-law, Haim Stankkevich, and his family to the U.S. Eventually, the Stankkevich family was able to immigrate to the U.S., after first moving from ...
Elliot Burstein served as a rabbi for San Francisco's Congregation Beth Israel for forty-two years (1927-1969). Before that, he served as a rabbi for congregations Montefiore in Salt Lake City ...
Hiram Bushell, born in Russia in 1882, arrived in Sacramento, California in the 1920s and opened a small hardware store. In 1934, during the Great Depression, he went to the Yankee Hill Work ...
Organized in 1921 to assist Jewish college students, particularly those at the University of California at Berkeley.
Collection consists of records of the California Alliance of Jewish Women, ...
Michael Caminetsky was born in Russia. In 1882, he immigrated to and settled in Winnipeg, Canada. He was a founder of two synagogues in Winnipeg: Shaarey Zedek (1890) and Rosh Pina (1892).The ...
Chevra Shaare Refooah was a society organized in 1890 in San Francisco to provide relief for sick members of the Jewish community and their families and to see to it that dying members of the ...
Chi Phi Sigma was an Oakland, California club for Jewish girls between the ages of 16 and 18. The club was organized in 1937 for social and philanthropic pursuits.
The collection consists of ...
Harriet Ashim (1843-1925) was the daughter of California pioneers Morris B. and Rachel Ashim. She married Isidore Nathan Choynski, prominent San Francisco antiquarian bookseller. Harriet was born ...
Sara Cogan worked as a bibliographer for the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah L. Magnes Museum from 1967 through the mid-1970s. She compiled three annotated bibliographies during her ...
Jewish scholar and resident of San Francisco, Calif.Three letters written by Mordecai Simon Cohen in Yiddish with Hebrew quotations and traditional messages for the New Year (Rosh Hashanah). One ...
Wolf Cohen, an immigrant from Lithuania, was a businessman in San Francisco, Calif.Collection includes family genealogy; a copy of a 1980 newspaper article about the family reunion of the Cohen ...
Henry Cohn was born in 1831 in Dobrzyn, a town on the Polish-Prussian border. He came to the United States in 1852 and settled in Saint Louis, California and Poker Flat, California, both of ...
Mary Cohn was born in China; she also lived in Hawaii and in San Mateo, California.
The collection contains Mary Cohn’s papers and a few photographs of her and members of her family.
The Commission for the Preservation of Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks was formed in 1962 to assist in the preservation of pioneer Jewish cemeteries located in the California Mother ...
Beth Israel was founded in 1860 as the first conservative congregation west of Chicago. Its first building was on Sutter near Stockton. The congregation was in its fourth building at Geary and ...
San Francisco's Congregation Sherith Israel has its roots in the Gold Rush era immigration and migration of Jews from Prussia, Bavaria, England, France and the East Coast of ...
Morris Corinson was born in Poland. He immigrated to the U.S. and arrived in San Francisco in the 1850s. Morris' son, Jacob, later joined with Arthur H. Sanborn to form the Sanborn and Corinson ...
D. N. & E. Walter & Company was founded in San Francisco in 1858 by brothers David Nathan, Emanuel, Isadore, Herman, Moritz, and Isaac Walter. The company established itself as an ...
Lloyd William Dinkelspiel Sr. was an attorney and a partner in the San Francisco law firm of Heller, Ehrman, White, McAuliffe. He also served as a president of Stanford University's Board of ...
The collection consists of a flyer, in both Yiddish and English, for a performance of Dus Pintele Yud that was then playing at the Ebell Hall at 1440 Harrison Street in Oakland, California. The ...
The collection consists of a letter written, in 1855, by Julius Eckman, the rabbi of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El, to Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who served as the official photographer of ...
Harold Edelstein was president of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company in Berkeley, Calif.; member of the Advisory Committee of the Office of Price Stabilization and served on the Berkeley War ...
Louis Elkus (1826-1904) was an early pioneer and merchant in the Sacramento area, as well as a president of Sacramento's Congregation B'nai Israel (1861-1890). The merchant Albert Elkus was a ...
The Emanu-El Sisterhood for Personal Service was founded in 1894 as a neighborhood center and settlement house. Within a year it offered employment assistance, relief, sewing classes, a Working ...
Probable survivor of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, 1906.Typed copy (four pages) of a letter Epstein wrote and sent to his father describing his experience in the 1906 San Francisco ...
Letter that Epstein wrote to Rabbi Isaac Leeser, announcing the establishment of B'nai Hashalom, a new Hebrew congregation in Sacramento, Calif.
Ethel Fein was the past president and hospitality chairwoman of the Sisterhood of San Francisco's Congregation Beth Sholom. The Sisterhood was formed in the 1930s and its first president was ...
The Eureka Benevolent Association, one of San Francisco's earliest philanthropic organizations, was formed in 1850 "[to] afford aid and relief to indigent, sick, and infirm Jews; to bury the ...
Fanny Jaffe came from a small town in Russia and, in 1889, immigrated to the U.S. After she worked in a clothing factory in Philadelphia, she married Ben Sharlip, the brother of her best friend, ...
Anne Ackerman Finnie (1911-1995) was the daughter, and second child, of Louise Sloss Ackerman (1888-1982) and Lloyd Stuart Ackerman, Sr. (1882-1968). Louise was the eldest child of Bertha ...
Philanthropic organization founded in San Francisco most likely in 1849. Its members were primarily Jewish immigrants from Poland and England and its stated purpose was to provide "relief of ...
Fishman was born in 1924, in Petaluma, Calif., to Russia immigrants. He graduated from the University of California, at Berkeley, and, during World War Two, he served in the U.S. Navy. He worked ...
Belle Fligelman Winestine (1891-1985) was a Montana feminist, journalist, author, and supporter of the arts. In 1916, she became an administrative assistant to Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. ...
George F. Malone was a resident of Oakland, Calif.
The collection consists of anti-communist and other right-wing literature that was distributed in the U.S. from the late 1940s through the ...
James Mack Gerstley and Elizabeth Lilienthal married at the home of Madeleine Russell in Atherton in 1934. In the mid-1930s, James Mack Gerstley started working for the Pacific Borax Company in ...
Gertrude (Gertie) Lapidaire was born to Emil and Bertha Lapidaire in Virginia City, Nevada in 1882. In 1902, she married Louis M. Getz (1873-1916), who was the son of Max and Hattie Getz of San ...
Samuel Ghinsberg was born in Romania and immigrated to the U.S. in 1900. He served as the first executive director of the Oakland Jewish Welfare Federation (1918-1922) and as a district manager ...
Brothers Isaac and Simon Glazier, who were both born in Austria, immigrated to the United States and settled in Marysville, California (1851). There, they opened the Old Corner Cigar Store, a ...
A. Goldberg lived in Yolo County, California in the late 1850s and early 1860s. He was named in a land deed from Yolo County, as an individual who "improved land section" and purchased a lot in ...
J. Goldberg and L. Lebenbaum were fruit merchants in the Utah Territory in the 1870s. Goldberg-Bowen and Company of San Francisco and Oakland, which became known as a gourmet grocery chain, was ...
Richard Goldman (1920-2010) was born to Richard Samuel Goldman (from San Francisco) and Alice Wertheim (from Great Falls, Montana). Richard attended the University of California, Berkeley and ...
Solomon Goldman was an important conservative rabbi in Chicago, Illinois and Cleveland, Ohio.Five letters from composer Ernest Bloch to Rabbi Solomon Goldman that express Bloch's dissatisfaction ...
Estelle Goodman Levy was born in El Paso, Texas, where her father, Aaron, owned the Lion Grocery Company. Her grandfather, Parez Levy, was an optician in Nashville, Tennessee. She attended ...
Gray (Harry) collection on the San Francisco Jewish Community Center's production of The Golem, 1936
Long a central character in Jewish folklore, The Golem is a creature created by magic to serve the creator's needs and desires. The Golem figure has been popular in Jewish arts and letters for ...
Postcard sent to Gust Tsangario, of Helper, Utah, from the firm of Greenebaum, Weil & Michels (located on 740 Mission St., San Francisco) for the selling of Crown Army Shirts. Card postmarked ...
Alice Grossman was born in 1909 to Louis and Ida Grossman. She had three sisters, Dora, Molly, and Anna. During World War II, Alice served in the U.S. Women's Armed Forces and after the war she ...
Abraham Haas (1847 -1921) was born in Reckendorf, Bavaria and immigrated to Portland, Oregon at age 16 to work in a grocery store established by his cousins, Charles, Samuel, and Kalman Haas. ...
Bertha Greenebaum Haas was the wife of prominent San Francisco merchant William Haas and mother of Charles, Alice, and Florine Haas.The collection consists of a bound volume and sheets of loose ...
Elise Stern Haas was born in San Francisco on Oct. 29, 1893, the only child of Rosalie Meyer and Sigmund Stern. Her father was president of Levi Strauss and Co., and nephew of Levi Strauss, who ...
William Haas was born in Bavaria and immigrated to San Francisco in the 1860s. He worked in the wholesale grocery business, first under the name of Loupe and Haas, before establishing Haas ...
Consists of individual portraits of member of the Haas and Lilienthal families, photographs of weddings, and other family gatherings (in Lake Tahoe and on Mount Tamapais), and photographs of ...
Charles and Kalman Haas founded Haas Brothers, Inc., a prominent wholesale grocery business in nineteenth-century California. The profits from the business were invested in mining, utility, and ...
The Haas family, which originated in Reckendorf, Bavaria, established itself as one of the leading Jewish families of the Pacific Coast. Koppel and Fanny Haas had seven children (four boys and ...
he Hakoah Athletic Club of San Francisco, a Jewish athletic club, was founded in 1946 and boasted of 300 members by 1953. The organization sought "the physical and cultural development of Jewish ...
Alice Sachs Hamburg was born in 1905 in Wilton, South Dakota to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. She came into the world at the Wilton Coal Mining Company Hospital. Her parents arrived in North ...
Born in Vilna, Lithuania; immigrated to the U.S. and lived briefly in San Francisco, before settling in Oakland (1903). She went to work at an early age to help support her family. She ...
Samuel Harris was the son of Moses and Libby Harris of Oakland, California. Samuel's brother Melbourne Harris was a Rabbi and long-time resident of Ohio.The collection includes a photograph of ...
Abraham Haselkorn achieved recognition for his service as a chaplain during World War II, and particularly for his work with displaced persons and war orphans. After the war, Haselkorn spent a ...
Hashomer Hatzair, initially founded in 1913 in Austria, is the oldest Zionist youth movement still in existence. Marxist-Zionist in its early history, the organization was inspired by the works ...
August Helbing was born in Munich, Germany in 1823 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1844. He moved to San Francisco in 1850, shortly after the discovery of gold in California, and founded the firm ...
An 1862 engagement agreement for Jacob Blumlein and Phillipine Hellman and a document providing details about the power of attorney.
Agnes Heyman was born in Czechoslovakia in 1923 and was a Holocaust survivor. She worked as a San Francisco City Controller and was a San Francisco City Guide. Heyman was also an active volunteer ...
Marjorie Himmelstern was a grand neice of prominent playwrite, producer, and theatre owner David Belasco, who was born in San Francisco in 1853 to Humphrey (1830-1911) and Reyna (b. 1830) ...
Samuel Hirsch was an orthodox rabbi and educator who was the son of another San Francisco rabbi, Mayer Hirsch. Mayer Hirsch, leader of San Francisco’s congregation Anshe Sfard, was born in ...
Seligman Hoffman emigrated from Germany to the U.S. He first settled in North Carolina, where he became an American citizen. Eventually, he settled in San Francisco and had three children: ...
Samuel G. Holcenberg was an attorney; (1899-1978); born in New York City; he and his family moved to the West Coast when he was a child; he became the executive director (1926-1939) of the San ...
The House of Love and Prayer was founded in 1967 in San Francisco, California as a Jewish center that combined Hasidic Judaism with the prevailing counter-cultural trends of the 1960s and 1970s. ...
Contains an 1873 San Francisco ketubah and marriage certificate for Hyman Wolf Hyman and Rose Friedlander in oversize folder); naturalization papers; and a resolution (1874) from B'nai B'rith's ...
Also known as Chevra Kadusha, Israel Golden Gate Lodge in Oakland, California was founded in 1886 to provide its members and their families with medical assistance and to help pay for their burial ...
Julius Jacobs (Alfred Henry's father) was born in Prussia, in 1840, and relocated to California in 1853. Initially, he worked in a firm concerned with tobacco and then a general merchandise store, ...
Adele Solomons was born in San Francisco on November 7, 1868, the daughter of Seixus and Hannah Marks Solomons. She received an M.D. in homeopathy from Hahnemann Medical College of the Pacific. ...
Thérèse Jelenko was born Theresa Ehrman in 1884. The daughter of Jennie Rosenthal Ehrman and Herman Ehrman, Thérèse grew up in San Francisco, where she nurtured her talent as a pianist. ...
The Jewish Community Center of Berkeley was first a branch of the Oakland Jewish Community Center founded in 1951. It was initially located at Berkeley's Congregation Beth El before it made ...
The Jewish Council of 1933, Inc. was created by a group of refugees from Nazi Germany in San Francisco to reaffirm their faith in democracy and to help each other acclimate and assimilate. It ...
The Oakland Jewish Relief Federation was founded in 1918 in an attempt to centralize Jewish relief work in the East Bay. The organization later became the Jewish Welfare Federation (JWF) of ...
The Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region was created in 1921 and incorporated in 1948. It was preceded by the United Jewish Welfare Fund (1934-1948) and the Jewish Community Council ...
Johanna Mayer was born circa 1831 in Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany to Edward Mayer and Amalie Ettinger. She had five brothers: Bernhard (b. 1835), Henry (b. 1836), Maximilien Edward (b. 1840), Leopold ...
Abraham Jonas was born in Rogasen, Posen, Germany in 1855 to Rev. Joachim and Amalia (Dresner) Jonas. He immigrated to the United States when he was 18 and moved to Oakland, California in 1875. ...
The Judeans was a Jewish young men's club founded in Oakland, California in 1908.
Collection consists of records, ephemera, and photographs of the Judeans dating from 1908 to 1949. Among the ...
Julius Kahn was born in Germany. After immigrating to the U.S. with members of his family and being raised in Calaveras County, Calif., Kahn worked as both an actor and attorney. In addition to ...
The collection consists of copies of various materials that Kenneth Kann compiled and used while doing research for his books about the Jewish community in Petaluma, Calif., including the titles ...
Israel Kahn (1822-1883), who married Sarah Bauer (1828-1888), founded Kahn's Department Store in Oakland, Calif.The collection consists of genealogical and family history information and ...
Edith Falk was born in 1904 in Berlin. In 1933, she married Eugen Schoenberger (1871-1970) and moved to Mainz. Schoenberger ran a successful sparkling wine business called Schoenberger Cabinet. ...
J. M. Kelber, whose family came from Russia, lived in Northern California. Kelber served as the chairman of the Israel Committee and of the Israel Bond Drive (1954-1961). He also assisted ...
Emanuel Kline was the first judge and prosecuting attorney in Jarbidge, Nev. (1910). He established the Pacific Coast University College of Law in Los Angeles (1927) and served as its ...
The Knights of Pythias is a fraternal organization established to promote friendship, charity, and benevolence. J.H. Rathbone founded it initially in 1864 to heal hatred caused by the Civil War. ...
Born in Chicago, Ellis B. Kohs was the son of Samuel C. Kohs. His early music training was at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at New York City's Institute of Musical Art. He received a ...
Montefiore Koshland was born in 1868 to Simon Koshland and Rosina Frauenthal. Simon came to Sacramento, California from Bavaria in 1850. In 1862, driven out by flood, Simon moved to San Francisco, ...
Harry Kushner was a Jewish businessman; he played a prominent role in Los Angeles's Merit Products Company.
The collection contains business correspondence between Harry Kushner of Merit Products ...
L. Lebenbaum and Company was a nineteenth-century grocery, wine, and liquor importer in San Francisco, California.The collection consists of an undated price list for various grocery items, wines, ...
Virginia Hoppe Ladensohn was born in San Francisco to Herbert Hoppe (April 10, 1883-July 1, 1961) and Bertha Neumann (October 3, 1885-January 24, 1936) in 1909. She graduated from Girls' High ...
The Ladies United Hebrew Benevolent Society was an organization founded in San Francisco in 1855 and then incorporated in 1862 to aid and assist needy Jewish women.
Consists of a resolution ...
In 1892, Levy Lenchner, a gilder (mirror maker), and Toba Asna Kler were married. They had both left Russian Poland and relocated to Montreal, Canada. By 1906, they and their children were in San ...
Leopold Lerner was a business executive and Jewish community leader. He was born in Russia and arrived in the United States in 1907. By 1943, he was settled in San Francisco. He owned and ...
Robert Levinson was a noted scholar of the Jews of the American West. He is best known for his book The Jews in the California Gold Rush. Julius Basinski was a Jewish merchant in Montana and ...
Robert Levinson was an historian, educator, and author who specialized in the history of Jews in the western United States. His doctoral dissertation, "The Jews in the California Gold Rush", was ...
Born in Berlin as Sonia Wolff, Levitin immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Moraga, Calif. She is the author of "Journey to America", which was based on her ...
The collection consists of material relating to E.R. Levy of Folsom, California and his family. Included are biographical materials, business correspondence, legal documents regarding Levy's ...
Myer Solomon Levy was born in London on 16 January 1852. Before immigrating to the United States, he served as the rabbi of a congregation in Australia. He served as the rabbi of the community ...
A lithograph print probably from a plate used to produce De Pue and Company's 1879 Atlas of Yolo County, California. The print includes four images of Madison, Yolo County: one of Wolf Levy's ...
Ernest Lilienthal (b. 1910-d.1993) was the son of Samuel Lilienthal and Alice Haas. He served, for a time, as president and chairman of the board of Haas Brothers.
The collection consists of ...
Samuel Lilienthal was born in Munich, Germany, and became a pioneer American homeopathic physician. After he immigrated to the U.S., he was employed as Professor of Mental and Nervous Diseases ...
Sophie Gerstle Lilienthal was the daughter of Lewis (Lob) Gerstle and Hannah (Johannah) Greenebaum of San Francisco. On 27 Aug. 1879, she married Theodore Max Lilienthal. Lilienthal was the ...
The Lilienthal family came from a valley in Schnaittach-Huttenbach, Germany, near Munich. The original family name was Seligmann. In 1814, Loew Seligmann registered his surname as Lilienthal ...
Lily Podvidz (1915-1981) was born in San Francisco and lived in Petaluma, California during the 1920s. She later worked in Washington, D.C. She was an educational administrator, author, editor, ...
Henry Linker, a member of Richmond's Congregation Beth Hillel, was a delegate to the Synagogue Council of the East Bay for approximately ten years, and for many of those years he served as that ...
The collection consists of materials relating to the Lipman, Harris, Lesser, Hirshfeld, Bibo, Levy, and Salmonson families, including the following: a booklet written by Rowena Lipman, "The ...
Residents of San Francisco, Calif.; partners in Livingston Brothers Department Store in San Francisco.
The collection consists of photographs of members of the Livingston family, including ...
Louis H. and Emma (nee Loewy) Blumenthal played central roles in Jewish communal life in San Francisco during the middle of the twentieth century. Louis Blumenthal (1893-1959) served as ...
Simon Lubin, son of David Lubin (1849-1919), was a labor and agricultural economist, social worker, and educator. He graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1903, after having studied ...
In 1850, Morris Greenberg left Paris, France, accompanied by his wife and two children; they reached California in 1851. In 1854, he established the "M. Greenberg, Eagle Brass Foundry," at 58 ...
Beatrice Lowenstein was born in 1879 in New York City to Benedict and Sophia (Mendelson) Lowenstein. Benedict (1831-1879) was born in the Rhineland in 1831 and immigrated to the United States in ...
Collection consists of invoices and checks (and one letter) from Jewish-owned Arizona businesses dating from 1868 to 1900. Businesses represented are from Tuscon, Tombstone, and Yuma, Arizona.
Collection consists of invoices and checks from Jewish-owned businesses in nineteenth-century San Francisco, Sacramento, and Grass Valley, California.
The collection consists of photocopies of obituaries and biographies for that appeared mainly in Western US Jewish newspapers and newsletters between the early 1970s and the late 2000s. The ...
Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro was born in 1830, in Aachen, Prussia. After immigrating to the United States, he moved to San Francisco in 1850. After starting as a merchant, Sutro planned and ...
When a group of San Francisco's Jews met in 1849 to participate in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, the end result was the formation of San Francisco's congregations, Emanu-El and Sherith ...
In 1864, some disaffected members of San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El broke away and established Congregation Ohabai Shalome, when they objected to the modification of the ritual in the ...
David Lubin was a Polish immigrant whose contribution to California agriculture and practical application of Jewish ideals of ethical behavior and compassion made him a world figure. He ...
Ernest Bloch was a celebrated composer, conductor, and educator. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1880 and educated in various European cities. Bloch came to the United States in 1916 and ...
Judah L. Magnes occupied himself with many endeavors. He was a rabbi; an educator; an organizational leader; an independent-minded social activist and humanist. Although Magnes was born in San ...
Levi Strauss, known as the world's largest clothing manufacturer, was founded by Levi Strauss, who arrived in San Francisco in 1850. Strauss started his business making sturdy trousers for ...
In 1940, inspired by Louis D. Brandeis, Dr. Shlomo Bardin founded the Brandeis Camp Institute to teach secular Jews about Jewish culture and the Jewish religion. In 1977, this Jewish retreat in ...
The American Council for Judaism was an anti-Zionist organization formed in 1943 with regional chapters in Richmond, Dallas, Chicago and San Francisco. It was committed to the principle that ...
Marks and Company was a general merchandise firm in ninetheenth-century Oakland, California.Collection consists of ten invoices (billheads) sent to nineteenth-century Oakland general merchandise ...
Lillian Mattimore was born in the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai, a community made up of refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. After her parents, Gerhard Schaie and Anita Gerson, decided to leave ...
Daniel Meyer (1824-1911), Bavarian immigrant and San Francisco pioneer, established the Bank of Daniel Meyer with his brothers Jonas, Moritz, and Mathias in 1857. Meyer was a noted ...
In 1906, Isaac Meyer Handelsman (later Isaac Meyers) emigrated from London, England to Montreal, Canada. By 1908, Meyers was in Warren, Michigan, where he worked as a farmer. Eventually, he made ...
Oakland's Modern Day School was founded in 1957, an outgrowth of the Hebrew day school movement. Its purpose was to introduce grade school children to a new curriculum that combined Jewish and ...
Hattie and Minnie Mooser were sisters and hostesses who were a part of the bohemian and theatrical life of San Francisco. They (along with their brothers George and Leon) were born in Nevada to ...
Helen Motto was born in Warsaw, Poland and immigrated to the United States as a child. She married Jacob Motto and moved to Santa Barbara in 1923. In time, she became a central figure in that ...
Hospital in Denver, Colorado established in 1899 to help "consumptives" (i.e., people suffering from tuberculosis).Collection consists of mostly ephemeral materials from the National Jewish ...
Elliot Navon was born on 10 Mar. 1890, in Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire; in 1906, he and his family emigrated to the U.S. After he finished agricultural college at Rutgers University, he ...
Congregation Netivot Shalom was founded in 1989 in Berkeley, California as an egalitarian Conservative congregation. Its founding Rabbi was Stuart Kelman.The collection consists of Congregation ...
Correspondence that Bernhard Neustadter (who lived in California in the late 1880s) received from his family in Berlin and Posen (now Poznań, in Poland) and a letter which he sent to his wife, ...
Ira Nowinski is a photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The collection contains photographs of six pioneer Jewish cemeteries of the California Mother Lode that Nowinski took in 1984 ...
Fred Phillips was born in 1882 into the Wartelsky family, which immigrated to the United States from Russia around the turn of the century. Fred Phillips, who in 1904 went by the name Phillip ...
Adolph Pinto was born in Prussia in 1817 and immigrated to California in 1852, during the Gold Rush. Adolph set up business as a tailor in Sonora, Tuolumne County, California and made a home ...
Sigmund Rader was a violin teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was born in 1894 in Pietrokov, Poland and studied music at the Budapest Conservatory of Music. He came to San Francisco in the ...
Pioneer San Francisco merchant, who emigrated from France and arrived in San Francisco in 1855. Within three years, he had become a partner of the J.W. Davidson Dry Goods Store. By 1885, the ...
Herta Silbermann Rapp fled Germany in 1939 with her first husband, Walter Fabian, and went to Bolivia. While in Bolivia, Herta met her second husband Martin Rapp. They married in 1946 and, ...
Reuben Rinder served as the cantor of San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El (1913-1959) and as its cantor emeritus (1959-1966). He discovered and promoted musical prodigies and liturgical works, ...
Matthew Ritchie was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1907. From 1946 to 1960, he served as an internal revenue agent in Phoenix, Ariz. He then became a technical advisor in San Francisco's Appellate ...
David Robinson was born in Portland, Oregon. Although he had a law degree and started working first as a lawyer, he later served his community more prominently by working as an organization ...
Aaron Rogat was a member of the Furriers Union in Los Angeles. His son, Yosal, became an attorney. This collection consists of some family documents, photographs, as well as some materials ...
Jacob Rosenberg was born in 1834 in Fordon, Prussia. At the age of fifteen, Rosenberg trained to be a tailor and found work in cities and towns throughout Prussia. After immigrating to the ...
Abraham Rosenberg, who was born in Jenny Lind, Calif., was in the shoe business before he and his brothers, Adolph and Max, started a successful dried fruit and nuts export business called ...
Born in Minsk in the mid-1890s, Bashe Rosenbloom emigrated to Petaluma, Calif., where she became active in the Jewish Music Alliance, the Jewish Culture Club, the Jewish Folk Chorus, and the ...
Ida Poriss was born in Berezna, Russia. Her family entered the U.S. in 1902 and then moved to California in 1907. She eventually graduated from Oakland Technical High School and married Joseph ...
Daughter of Pepi Sophie Lilienthal and Louis Tilden Samuels; maiden name: Margaret Victoria Samuels; married Richard Frank in 1944.Diary describing the social life of a wealthy San Francisco Bay ...
George Samuels was a judge of the Superior Court for Alameda County, Calif., and of the Police Court, in Oakland, from 1903 to 1920. M.A. Samuels was a photographer.Collection consists primarily ...
San Francisco's Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA) was formed in 1877, and the city's Young Women's Hebrew Association (YWHA) was formed in 1914. They combined in 1924. In 1933, the YM-YWHA ...
San Francisco's Schuetzen Verein, a German-American shooting and social club, was established in 1859. It also served a public safety and militia function.
Collection consists of a Golden Jubilee ...
Contains various materials collected by William Schwartzman about the violinist Isaac Stern, including newspaper clippings; copies of photographs; and a letter Stern sent to the cantor of San ...
The collection consists of James Shideler's research materials on the development of farm cooperatives in California in the early twentieth century, especially in California under the leadership ...
Shivtei Shalom was founded in 1982, in Eugene, Or. to create a land-based, rural Jewish community, camp, and retreat center. In 1983, it established Moshav Shivtei Shalom (Tribes of Peace) in ...
George Simmons was born in England, around 1861. In 1891, he settled in San Francisco before moving to Nome, Alaska, where he planned to trade furs with the Eskimos. In 1904, he staffed the Alaska ...
San Francisco's Chevra Kadisha was founded in 1901 by San Francisco's Eastern European Jews to provide burials in accordance with Jewish law. In 1919, a founder, Abraham Sugarman, proposed that ...
Frank Sloss was born to Judge Marcus Caufman Sloss and Hattie Hecht Sloss in 1908. His siblings were SImon, Margaret, Richard, and Sally Sloss. Frank married Eleanor Lieberman (b. 1913), daughter ...
Contains various photographs of members of the Sloss family, including portraits of Leon Sloss, Sr., Hattie Hecht Sloss, M.C. Sloss, Margaret Sloss, and Richard Sloss. Also includes a photograph ...
Lucius Levy Solomons was an attorney, orator, and writer, based in San Francisco; also an officer in B'nai B'rith and the Romanian Relief Society; he married Helen B. Frank in 1896.Genealogies of ...
Seixas Solomons was an accountant who was very active in journalism and in Jewish affairs. He arrived in San Francisco very shortly after the California Gold Rush.An official signed certificate of ...
Sarah Spiegelman was a graduate of San Francisco's Mission High School. The collection consists of a decorative album for graduation (1914) that contains notes and autographs, photographs, and a ...
Piroska Dormann and Erwin Simonovits (a.k.a. Stanton) and their daughter Eva emigrated from Austria in September 1938 and settled in Alameda County.The collection contains mostly documents ...
Rosalie Meyer Stern was a civic and social leader of San Francisco. In 1892, she married Sigmund Stern, the president of Levi Strauss and Company. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and ...
Samuel Stern emigrated from Germany to the United States, eventually settling in California.Items include Stern's permit to leave Germany (1851), and his American naturalization papers which were ...
William Stern served as a rabbi of Oakland's Temple Sinai from 1934 to 1965. Before serving at Sinai, he was a rabbi at Congregation United Hebrew in Fort Smith, Oklahoma, and at Temple Beth El, ...
In 1950, eighty women formed the League of Jewish Women to help bring together the growing Jewish community of Contra Costa County, Calif. They organized a religious school and launched a campaign ...
Ryhim Ahoovim, which translates to "beloved friends," began in 1851 as a Hebrew benevolent society in Stockton, Calif., and shortly thereafter acquired a cemetery. The cemetery, which was formally ...
Elie Jacques Tennenbaum was born in Krakow in 1917 to Leon Tennenbaum and Rose Stern. At the age of 22, driven by the restrictions on Jews studying medicine in Poland, Elie left his home for ...
Collection consists of receipts, deeds, and correspondence regarding Brunswick and Ormand family plots in sections of two San Francisco area Jewish cemeteries: Hills of Eternity (Sherith Israel) ...
The United Hebrew Benevolent Association was founded in Helena, Montana, in 1885, to promote Jewish principles of "charity and benevolence," by helping the sick and needy, by defraying members' ...
Henry Vidaver was a prominent nineteenth-century American rabbi with pulpits in Philadelphia, St. Louis, New York, and San Francisco. He served as rabbi at Congregation Sherith Israel in San ...
In 1882, Moses Wahrhaftig emigrated to the United States from Russia. He worked as a printer in California and Oregon, before being admitted to the California bar in 1897. He was the first Russian ...
Regina Waldman was Executive Director of the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews (BACSJ) from 1970 to 1981. Born in Libya, Waldman was forced to flee to Italy with her family in the wake of ...
Harris Weinstock (1854-1922) was born in London, England, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1855. He relocated to California in 1869 and became a San Francisco merchant. With David Lubin, he ...
Ben J. Weiss, of Oakland, Calif., was, for a time, the secretary and treasurer of Oakland's Temple Beth Abraham. He also helped the Jewish community in the Bay Area raise money, serving as the ...
Rabbi of San Francisco's Congregation Beth Sholom from the time of the building's completion in 1935 to 1983. He was born in Kolno, Poland, and immigrated to the U.S., in 1920. He graduated from ...
Motitz Winter was a rabbi in Germany for twenty-eight years. After the Nazis burned down his synagogue, he went to Shanghai, China and served the refugee Jewish community there for two years. In ...
Bertram Wolfsohn was a president of B'nai B'rith San Francisco Lodge, No. 21. In his professional life, he worked as a dentist. His uncle, Richard E. Gutstadt, was the national director and ...
Emanuel Wotiz immigrated to the United States from Europe. In 1856, he enlisted for five years as a soldier in the U.S. Army.
Letter that Emanuel Wotiz wrote and sent to members of his family in ...
Invitations to the Young Men's eighth and twelfth soirees in 1859 at Assembly Hall in San Francisco and 1860 at Tucker's Academy of Music in San Francisco. The 1859 invitation is addressed to a ...
Guenther Zimmerman immigrated to San Francisco via Shanghai after leaving Germany.Includes the German school report cards of Zimmerman's parents (Betty Blum and Manfred Zimmerman) and photocopied ...
John Zucker served as a rabbi for a reform congregation in Reno, Nev., and while he was there, he performed many marriages. After he left Reno, in 1947, he became the rabbi of San Leandro's Beth ...
