Exhibition
Overview
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Jewish
refugee children, en route to Philadelphia, aboard the
liner President Harding, waving at the Statue
of Liberty.
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"Jewish
Refugee Children,"
New York, 1939.
©AP/Wide World Photos.
New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper
Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division |
From
Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America features
more than two hundred treasures of American Judaica from the
collections of the Library of Congress, augmented by a selection
of important loans from other cooperating cultural institutions.
The exhibition examines the Jewish
experience in the United States through the prisms of "Haven" and "Home." "Haven" opens
with a selection of pivotal documents expressing the ideals of
freedom that have come to represent the promise of America. This
section also explores the formative experiences of Jewish immigrants
as they struggled to become American. The "Home" section
focuses on the opportunities and challenges inherent in a free
society and the uniquely American Jewish religious movements, institutions,
and associations created in response. In telling the story of diverse
groups of Jewish immigrants who made the United States their home,
the exhibition examines the intertwined themes, and sometimes conflicting
aims, of accommodation, assertion, adaptation, and acculturation
that have characterized the American Jewish experience from its
beginnings in 1654 to the present day.
From Haven to Home is
a Library of Congress exhibition marking 350 years of Jewish life
in America. This exhibition is one of the commemorative activities
associated with the congressionally recognized Commission
for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History. The members of the Commission
are the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records
Administration, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the
Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. Commission
members are lenders to this exhibition and to other commemorative
exhibitions in Cincinnati, New York, and Los Angeles. These four
exhibitions will be presented between September 2004 and February
2006.
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