Collections Highlights

The Katz Ehrenthal Collection—acquired through the generosity of the Katz family—consists of over 900 individual objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the Medieval to the modern era, created and distributed throughout Europe, Russia, and the United States.

The experiences of deaf people in Nazi Europe constitute a neglected chapter in the history of the Holocaust. Deaf Jews faced the same traumas as hearing Jews, but Nazi policy also specifically targeted for persecution people with disabilities—including non-Jewish deaf people.

Claude Lanzmann spent 12 years locating survivors, perpetrators, eyewitnesses, and scholars for his nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah, released in 1985.

Increasing public interest in the fate of Jews of Spanish and Greek descent living in southeastern Europe has prompted the Collections Division to scout out new sources of material about these communities and reexamine older collections in order to identify those that bear witness to the experience of Sephardi Jews.

You can help the Museum and the International Center of Photography learn more about Roman Vishniac’s iconic photographs of Jews in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

A teenager in Berlin before he was deported to Auschwitz, Manfred Lewin created a keepsake book to memorialize his relationship with Gad Beck and the community of Jewish youth from which the two young men drew their strength and their solace.

Sobibor was one of five killing centers located in German-occupied Poland. The Sobibor Perpetrator Collection, donated from Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz, was initially owned by Johann Niemann and reveals the layout and design of the killing center, along with the mindset of the perpetrators.