Vivian G. Prins Foundation Awards the Center for Jewish History $225,000 Grant to Support Fellowship for Emigrating Scholars

The Center for Jewish History, the largest repository of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel, has received a $225,000 grant from the Vivian G. Prins Foundation to support Post-Doctoral fellowships for Emigrating Scholars, who seek permanent teaching and research positions in North America.

"The Center continues to function as a professional resource for scholars," says Bruce Slovin, CJH Board Chair. "It provides avenues in which they can present new research findings, receive guidance from experienced professionals, coordinate with other researchers, share new perspectives, and find sources of support for research. The Prins award validates the importance of the Center's intellectual resources, and will allow it to engage research communities across the scholarly world."

The award will support two 12-month fellowships each year for two foreign scholars, who are at the beginning of their careers. Fellows will be provided with an annual stipend of $35,000 to conduct original research at the Center's Lillian Goldman Reading Room and utilize the vast collections of its five partners: the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The partners' collections total more than 500,000 volumes and 100 million archival documents.

Elisheva Carlebach, Chair of the Center's Academic Advisory Council and Salo Wittmayer, Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, explains, "The Center is unique in that, unlike libraries containing books in multiple copies, the archival materials housed at the Center include letters, photos, artifacts, and unpublished manuscripts, constituting a unique and significant repository of sources. It is the 'national archive' of the Jewish people, the only one in the US."

Entering its second decade, the Center for Jewish History has re-structured its academic program with a variety of new initiatives for scholars at various levels. A recent award from the National Endowment for the Humanities supports 12-month fellowships for senior scholars. "This award allows the Center to serve as the gateway for the best and brightest emerging scholars seeking to begin a new academic life in the US," concludes Michael S. Glickman, COO, Center for Jewish History.

The Center for Jewish History is located at 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011. For information, call 212-294-8301 or log on to www.cjh.org.