Leo Baeck Institute, New York
The Leo Baeck Institute in the Center for Jewish History on 16th Street in Manhattan
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 Location within New York City
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| Established | 1955 |
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| Location | 15 West 16th Street New York City, New York |
| Coordinates | 40°44′17″N 73°59′38″W / 40.738056°N 73.993889°WCoordinates: 40°44′17″N 73°59′38″W / 40.738056°N 73.993889°W |
| Director | Dr. William Weitzer, Executive Director |
| President | Dr. Ronald B. Sobel |
| Public transit access |
Subway: 14th Street – Union Square |
| Website | www |
The Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) is a founding partner of the Center for Jewish History and a research library and archive in New York that contains the most significant collection of source material relating to the history of German-speaking Jewry, from its origins to Holocaust History, and continuing to the present day.
The Leo Baeck Institute New York is one of three independent research centers founded by a group of German-speaking Jewish émigrés at a conference in Jerusalem in 1955. The other Leo Baeck Institutes are in Jerusalem and London, and the activities of all three are coordinated by the board of directors of Leo Baeck Institute International.
Under its first Executive Director, Max Kreutzberger, Leo Baeck Institute New York quickly established itself as the Institute’s library and archive. The library collection began with books that had been looted from Jewish libraries and collectors and were recovered by Allied forces and restituted to Jewish libraries. Later in the 1950s, Kreutzberger and his staff began acquiring books and manuscripts from New York booksellers and solicited donations of the personal papers and libraries of German-Jewish émigrés in New York. By 1960, when Leo Baeck Institute moved into a townhouse at 129 E. 73rd St. in Manhattan, the collection included some 30,000 books, 250 unpublished memoirs, and extensive archives.
Significant private donations secured in the first two decades of the Leo Baeck Institute's existence included the literary estates of Franz Rosenzweig, Constantin Brunner, Fritz Mauthner, and Joseph Roth.
By the 1990s, Leo Baeck Institute New York’s Upper East Side townhouse could no longer efficiently or safely accommodate its collections, and LBI president Ismar Schorsch began discussions with other Jewish centers of scholarly research in New York aimed at a partnership in a shared facility. In 1993, Leo Baeck Institute, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Yeshiva University Museum, and the American Jewish Historical Society announced plans to jointly establish the Center for Jewish History in the former American Foundation for the Blind building on West 16th Street in Manhattan. Leo Baeck Institute moved its administrative offices and collections to the Center for Jewish History in 2000. Today, Leo Baeck Institute shares library infrastructure (storage, reading room, digital and conservation labs, and information systems) as well as programming and exhibition facilities with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Yeshiva University Museum, American Jewish Historical Society, and American Sephardi Federation.
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