Periodicals

The entire periodicals collection of the Library of the Leo Baeck Institute consists of nearly 1,600 titles, covering all fields of German Judaica. The rich holdings include early titles from the Enlightenment period of the late 18th century, an abundance of titles from the 19th and 20th centuries, and recently published titles, due to a revival of Jewish communities in Germany today. Among its rarities are an extensive collection of exile periodicals published in the 1930s and 1940s by German Jews in places such as Shanghai, South America, and New York (home of Aufbau, one of the most famous émigré newspapers), newsletters from displaced persons camps in Europe after WWII, Zionist journals, social, cultural, sports, and professional organizations as well as early 20th century newsletters from various Jewish communities in Germany, Austria, and other German-speaking areas (including parts of the present-day Czech Republic, Poland (Silesia, Posen), Hungary, and Romania). Many of the physical volumes in the Periodical Collection were salvaged from famous Jewish libraries that had been confiscated and dispersed during the Third Reich.

Access to the digitized periodicals of the Leo Baeck Institute

Compact Memory Collection of Digitized German-Jewish Periodicals

The periodicals digitized by Leo Baeck Institute complement the resources available through the Compact Memory Project, which encompasses more than 300 important German-language Jewish periodicals published in Central Europe from 1806 – 1938. Most of the periodicals in the Compact Memory database were digitized from the holdings of the Judaica Division of the University Library Frankfurt am Main and Germania Judaica in Cologne. The project was sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2000 – 2006.

LBI coordinates its periodicals digitization program with Compact Memory to avoid duplication of efforts, and the two projects have applied for funding to merge the portals and to digitize additional periodicals. As a first step, about 60 periodicals from the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute were added to the Compact Memory Portal in 2018.

Compact Memory