AMI Resolution
Dear Sir:
I have been charged to submit for your action a resolution passed at the general session of the 1985 national meeting of the American Military Institute:
Resolved: The American Military Institute is deeply concerned at the disruption of Session 37, “Turning the Old Corps into the New Corps,” at the 1984 meeting of the American Historical Association. The American Military Institute urges the American Historical Association to take proper steps to ensure an appropriate academic environment in its sessions. Enforcement of the common rules of academic procedure and academic civility should prevent the repetition of these unfortunate attempts to restrict free speech. The AMI requests that this resolution be published in the AHA newsletter.
Dennis E. Showalter
The Colorado College
Leo Baeck Institute
The Leo Baeck Institute was founded in 1954 by the Council of Jews from Germany. It was established at the suggestion of a group of Jewish scholars and intellectual community leaders, who had fled from Nazi persecution. They included, among others, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Rabbi Leo Baeck, former Senior Rabbi of Berlin and president of the representative organization of the Jews of Germany prior to his deportation to the Terezin concentration camp. Leo Baeck survived and became the Institute’s first international President.
The LBI New York is a research and study center, utilized by students and scholars from around the world, a library and archives, a lecture center, and a museum. While all LBIs: New York, London, and Jerusalem, foster research and publication, only the New York LBI houses a library, numbering over 50,000 volumes and a comprehensive archive that is considered the outstanding documentation center of its kind in the Western Hemisphere and carries out active lecture, exhibit, and seminar programs. American as well as European scholars consider the LBI “the central library, archives, and research institute . , . for the history of German speaking Jews in the modern era” (Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 1983, Vol. 3). The LBI reaches out to the general public, as well as to those with a particular interest in Jewish and European history, literature, and art. Further, it has fostered and encouraged a growing scholarly community. It sponsors research projects, hosts scholarly symposia, and in conjunction with commercial publishers, has published over 100 books in English, German, and Hebrew.
For 30 years the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute have been collecting manuscripts and personal papers, official documents, photos, and other materials in German Jewish history. Its collection covers all aspects of German Jewish life: family history, cultural history, history of communities, organizations and institutions, the history of emigration of various periods, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the history of every day life, religious life, Jewish art, etc. These archival collections are made accessible to scholars as well as to a general public interested in family history and the history of German Jewry.
The aim of the LBI is to complement its archival holdings. The coming years are crucial for this task. The LBI would like to appeal to German-Jewish refugees and to their children to donate material to the LBI archives, where it will be preserved and protected, and where the history of Germany Jewry is researched am studied. The kind of material the LBI is seeking includes: diaries, letters and other correspondence, memoirs, manuscripts, certificates concerning births, marriages, divorces, circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, family trees and notes for them, educational diplomas, professional certificates, visas, emigration documents, documents of cultural and recreational activities like membership cards, brochures and other records of sports clubs, cultural associations, community organizations and related activities, local newspapers, clippings concerning specific events, prayer books, rabbinical documents, documents of religious organizations and schools, books of customs, photos, pictorial material, etc.
Please feel free to consult the LBI archivists regarding the material you may think of donating.
