Center for Jewish History

So many of us are carrying questions we inherited, stories left unfinished, histories left untold. Marcia was brave enough to go searching for answers, and what she found brought her real closure.

This is why we do what we do.


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Happy Pride Month! 🌈

This month, we’re celebrating Jewish LGBTQ+ voices, stories, and creators with a few of our favorite picks from Ruth’s Bookstore.

📖 Just Shy of Ordinary by A.J. Sass follows a genderfluid Jewish teen navigating identity, friendship, and family history.
📖 People Without History Are Dust by Anna Hájková uncovers the often-overlooked experiences of q***r Jews during and after the Holocaust.
📖 The New Q***r Conscience by Adam Eli offers an inspiring call for community, solidarity, and action.
📖 Dinner Party Animal by Jake Cohen reminds us that gathering around a table can be an act of joy, connection, and celebration with 100 delicious recipes designed to bring people together.

Whether you're looking for history, memoir, fiction, activism, or food, stop by Ruth’s Bookstore or shop online at https://ruthsbookstore.cjh.org/ and discover books that celebrate the many ways our communities tell their stories.

Heidi never got the chance to ask her mother, Sally Schlange Bratt, about the life she lived before and during the war.

Sally, born in Pabianice, Poland, survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and several other concentration camps, walking out of a gas chamber as a child. She was the sole survivor of her family.

She rarely spoke of her past, and passed away in 1985 at just fifty-five. Heidi has been waiting ever since. We're honored to help her find the story her mother never got to tell.


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A name tells you who you are, but what happens when your family has two? 🔍🌿

David Frankel grew up with a quiet mystery woven into his family's story. His father's last name was Frankel. But it was also Korn. Depending on the document, depending on the setting, depending on the moment, a different name emerged. Two identities. One man. A lifetime of questions.

Which name was real? Where did the other come from? And why?

For David's family, these genealogical puzzles stayed for years unanswered.

Until now.

On June 11th, David finally gets the answer his family has been waiting for. But before we get to the revelation, we wanted to know what the wait has been like.

Here's what David had to say.


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As Jewish American Heritage Month draws to a close, we look ahead to the opening of our newest exhibit at the Center for Jewish History.

From Rubble to Roots: Six Stories of Survival and Resilience opens June 11, adapted from our podcast of the same name. It tells the stories of individuals and families who escaped the Holocaust and rebuilt their lives in America, refusing to let displacement be the last word on who they were or what they could become.

As the nation approaches the United States Semiquincentennial, these stories carry particular weight. The American story has always been shaped by those who arrived with little and built something lasting. These six lives are part of that history.

Visit the exhibit to meet the people behind the stories. And if you have a story of your own to share, explore The Stories of US by and add your voice.

Joan Nathan listens as Moriah of the Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History reveals the story of Maria (Sometimes referred to as Marie) Bernheim née Nathan, a relative she never knew.

Born in Ulm, Germany in 1873, Maria lived through the systematic destruction of her family's life under the N**i regime.

The Bernheim family's chemical factory was among the first Jewish-owned businesses in Germany to be Aryanized, seized by N**i authorities on the back of false charges of foreign exchange fraud and tax evasion leveled against Maria's husband Siegfried and his their sons.

The accusations were a fabrication, a calculated smear campaign designed to justify expropriation, but that did not stop the local press from running damning headlines that publicly vilified Siegfried and his family.

The charges were a lie, but the damage was real and permanent. W***y, one of Maria and Siegfried's three sons, bore the worst of it, wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for two years. Siegfried himself was spared prison but was fined and left humiliated, his reputation destroyed by a false narrative engineered by the N**i state.

The family was Maria and Siegfried were forced to quietly flee Augsburg, taking refuge in Munich. By 1938, all three of Maria's sons had escaped Germany, but Maria could not follow. On June 4, 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt, the ghetto-camp 30 miles north of Prague where prisoners aged 60 and above received the smallest food rations.


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