Germany

The largest record group at the CAHJP, containing archival material from over 1000 communities, societies and institutions. For some, only several files remained, for others, many more. However, the size of some of these collections at the Central Archives does not necessarily correspond to the size and prominence of those communities before World War II. Some of the German material dates from the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the majority of the files date from the 18th to the 20th centuries. They relate to all aspects of communal activities, such as community leadership, relations with other communities and with the authorities, legal status, financial affairs, taxes, ritual matters, civil registry, education, culture and philanthropy. Until the first half of the 19th century most of the documents are in Yiddish or Hebrew and sometimes in German with Hebrew characters. By 1850 most records were conducted in German. The material arrived at the Central Archives from a variety of sources, among them files relating to 400 communities from the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden. In the mid 1980’s the CAHJP initiated a major project to recatalogue the German communal material according to a uniform scheme, in order to unite all the material from each community in one single collection and facilitate thematic searches. Read more