Jewish Center Gets Gift for Rare Books
A $2.5 million gift from the David Berg Foundation will be used to establish a rare books room at the Center for Jewish History in New York.
The center, which announced the gift earlier this month, houses the collections of the the American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
The room will provide the center’s partners with a state-of-the-art facility in which to showcase some of their most important printed materials, including seminal first editions and a cross-section of rabbinical literature, Jewish philosophy and intellectual history that dates back hundreds of years.
Scheduled for a fall opening, the room will be named for the late Berg, a real estate lawyer who immigrated to America from Russia in 1904. It will be open to the public.
Previous contributions from the Berg Foundation to the museum include a $300,000 gift in 2010 to bring more visitors to the center and a $75,000 grant to help fund the its History of Genocide Initiative.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
