Archives

The Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives: General Information

The Ghetto Fighters’ House archive holds over 2,500,000 objects, including letters, certificates, diaries and testimonies (written, audio and video), films, photographs and displays. The archive collections comprise the history of the Jewish nation on all five continents during the first half of the 20th century and cover a wide range of areas such as the spiritual life, traditions and religion, society, education, economics, Holocaust and resistance, and the nation’s revival in the Land of Israel. This rich spiritual and intellectual collection is available to Holocaust researchers, teachers, students, and the general public. All are welcome to contact the archive staff for advice and assistance.

The archive staff has made objects accessible through the on-line archive. To date, over 250,000 objects are available on line, including albums of rescued children (Coordinatsia Collection), as well as other Holocaust related albums, the Holland archive, the Adolf Berman Collection, which documents the underground rescue operation of Polish Jewry after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The archive continues to collect objects from the Holocaust period, from Europe, Asia and North Africa that will contribute to Holocaust research: letters (in all languages), diaries and memoires, certificates confirming his having fought the Nazis, forges “Aryan” identification certificates, medals, weaponry, ghetto currency, maps, tools and house ware, and all other objects .

We are also interested in archival material from all Jewish communities that existed during the period between the two world wars, as well as after WWII.

To the Ghetto Fighters' House Archives website

The computerization and digitalization of the Archives is supported by the Claims Conference

For more information:
04-9958032
04-9958031
04-9958025

If you are interested in meeting with the Archive staff, we recommend that you call beforehand in order to make an appointment.

Contact us

Selected items from the Ghetto Fighters' House museum:

From the Ghetto Fighters' House Archives: A dispensation for eating hametz during Passover in the Bergen-Belsen camp, 1944

One of the artifacts featured in the Haggadah exhibition at the Ghetto Fighters' House this Chol Hamoed is a dispensation for eating hametz during Passover at the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1944. Written in Hebrew, this makeshift permit is testimony to the spiritual and religious dilemmas faced by the Jewish inmates of the camp.

Hasia Bornstein-Bilitzka donates her Zionist Coordination albums and other documentation to the Ghetto Fighters' House

The Ghetto Fighters' House holds the largest collection of documents, certificates and albums that deal with the Zionist Coordination in Poland. Hasia Bornstein_Bilitzka has graciously donated to the museum's archive the documentation that she has kept and guarded over the years on the children's orphanage and the children who were under her care. Among the materials donated are photographs from the orphanage she directed in Lodz, the children who were at the displaced persons camps in Germany and the "Children's Kibbutz" that Hasia directed at the deportee camp in Cyprus after the war.

Pieces of Memory

Just before being transferred to Auschwitz, Anneliese Borinski and her friends, all members of the "Gesher" group, divided the group's flag into pieces and promised to each other that when they meet again in the Land of Israel, they would put the flag together again. The pieces held by Boriniski were donated to the Ghetto Fighters' archive by her.

A Family Handbag

A sliver handbag that belongs to Sara Lifchitz, the mother of a Jewish family in Paris. The entire family part variously in the anti - occupation resistance for which they recieved many metals.

Remembering a Prayer

On the eve of Yom Kippur 1944, a Kol Nidre prayer took place at Bergen - Belsen in the presence of Rabbi Paul Weiss (d. August 1998) and other rabbis. The prayer was transcribed from memory for those Jews who couldn't remember it well.

Daronet Web Building