Reconnecting with a fugitive collection: a case study of the records of JDC’s Warsaw Office, 1945–1949

Abstract

Having operated in Poland from 1914 to 1941, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) returned there in 1945 only to be expelled in 1949 after the Polish Communist government closed down most Jewish institutions. Polish authorities confiscated JDC’s records, subsequently depositing them at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they remain. This article describes the post-Second World War activity of the JDC in Poland, the content of this fugitive collection of more than 520,000 pages of documents, and the efforts the JDC Archives took to reconnect with this material through digitization.