(Credit: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee)
The massive archives from American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which chronicled Jewish migration and the Diaspora in the 20th century, will soon go online. The search-enabled index contains documents, 100K photos and record cards of 500K names.
From the collection, Leonard Bernstein conducts Rhapsody in Blue for concentration camp survivors at a displaced persons camp in Feldafing, Germany around 1948, the orchestra of former concentration camp inmates.
Harry Bialor, 82, a retired Brooklyn businessman who survived World War II with a sister by hiding on a Polish farm but who lost his parents, two brothers and a second sister, learned about the photographs of Leonard Bernstein from an article he had read and, since he had been at Feldafing as a teenager, wanted to see if his face appeared in some pictures.
“Conduct?” he said of Bernstein’s concert. “He played! He was at the piano playing! And it was hot. No air-conditioning. Bernstein said, ‘We’ll sweat together in Yiddish.’ He played marvelously on a lousy piano.”