The Bay Area is home to the third largest Jewish community in the United States. Jews first settled in Northern California during the Gold Rush, and have since played a very significant role in the economic and cultural development of the Western United States.
The Western Jewish History Center (WJHC) was established in 1967 at the Judah L. Magnes Museum to collect, preserve, and provide access to archival and oral history documentation about the Jewish community in the American West.
The collections of the WJHC encompass the entire western United States beginning with the 1849 Gold Rush and continuing to the present, with a specific focus on the Jewish experience in California and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The WJHC occupies the top floor of the Magnes Museum, the former Jeremiah Thaddeus Burke mansion in Berkeley, California. The Museum is named after Judah L. Magnes (1877-1948), the first native-born rabbi from the American West and the first Chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Judah L. Magnes symbolizes the spirit of California’s Jews in their achievements and contributions to global humanity.
The holdings and the activities of the WJHC are unique, as they combine two distinct fields of research: the history of the American Jewish experience as well as the history of California and the American West. Descriptions and finding aids for the collections within the Western Jewish History Center are available online here.
The WJHC has published over twenty monographs and bibliographies based on its collection. These imprints include Taking Risks: A Jewish Youth in the Soviet Partisans and His Unlikely Life in California by Fred Rosenbaum (2004), winner of Forward Magazine's Book of the Year award, and The Jews of the West: The Metropolitan Years, edited by Dr. Moses Rischin (1979). The WJHC provided guidance and research materials to over a dozen fundamental studies in Jewish Americana such as Jewish Life in the American West by Dr. Ava Kahn (2002) and Pioneer Jews, A New Life in the West by Harriet Rochlin (2000).
Holdings
The WJHC collections include personal papers, photographs, historic newspapers and periodicals, oral histories, rare books, organizational records, and objects documenting activities of individuals, families, organizations, and communities. Please refer to the Collection Descriptions and Archival Finding Aids page for descriptions of the Magnes’ Western Jewish archival collections.
The WJHC actively collects reference books and periodicals; personal and family documents; institutional archives; art and artifacts. Highlights include one thousand reference volumes; sixty Jewish newspaper titles; thousands of photographs; dozens of paintings and works on paper; and fifty oral histories.
The archival holdings of the WJHC include:
- Archives of prominent western families including Sloss, Lilienthal, Gerstle, Haas, Brandenstein, Glazier, Zellerbach, Stern, Dinkelspiel and others.
- Records of historic self-help societies including the Eureka Benevolent Society and the Jewish Welfare Federation, Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center, the B’nai B’rith District Grand Lodge IV, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.
- Records of social service organizations including the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.
- Documents revealing the active role played by Jewish women in California, including papers of Congresswoman Florence Kahn, the San Francisco chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Emanu-El Sisterhood for Personal Service.
- Records of organizations dedicated to cultural missions and to the historical preservation sites of Jewish interest, such as the Commission for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks and the Jewish Arts Community of the Bay.
- The papers and artifacts of important congregations like San Francisco’s Emanu-El, Sherith Israel, and Ohabai Shalome. Besides documenting the religious life of the city and the activities of a congregation and its congregants, these collections also can contain a wealth of information on Jewish genealogy, often in the form of marriage and burial registers.
- Documents about the active role played by Jewish citizens in political and administrative affairs.
- The institutional records of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, founded in 1964, the third largest repository of Jewish art in the United States.
An increasing number of archival holdings held by Western Jewish History Center are described on the website of the Library of Congress Union Catalog of Manuscript Collection (NUCMC) and can be searched via OCLC Worldcat, following these directions:
- Go to the OCLC Worldcat (Manuscript Materials);
- Select option 4, Advanced Search Form;
- Enter nucmc/judah l. magnes in the Term 1 field;
- Select Author - Corporate Name from the pull-down list immediately to the right;
- Press Submit Query
Additionally, a growing number of Collection Finding Aids are included in the Online Archive of California.
The Research Library of the WJHC presents visitors with the largest collection of reference and research tools about the Jewish experience in the American West in the world, including:
- 1200 printed volumes about the Jewish experience in the American West.
- Oral History collection, which encompasses audio recordings and transcripts of circa 100 oral histories documenting the lives of Jewish individuals and families that settled in the San Francisco Bay Area from the U.S., Europe and Asia.
- Microfilm collection.
- 19th and 20th century Jewish Newspapers and periodicals.
- Clipping and obituary files for genealogical research.
- Vertical files organized by subject.