Leonard N. Simons Jewish Community Archives
History in the Making
The Covid-19 Archives Collection
Future generations will wonder how we went about our daily lives while under so many restrictions, from stay-at-home orders to social distancing and limiting interactions. We have gone from gathering in large groups to learn, celebrate, and worship to keeping our distance and shielding ourselves behind masks and video calls. It is important that we document these times and the ways Michigan Jewish communities reacted, adapted, and innovated to the changing social and political landscape.
About the Archives
The Leonard N. Simons Jewish Community Archives was established in 1991 as a Federation department. We’re here to collect, preserve and share the records of Federation and our member agencies, the United Jewish Foundation, local Jewish community organizations and the personal and family papers of Detroit’s Jewry.
Our vast collection includes manuscripts, photographs, videos, an oral history section, artifacts, and a comprehensive cemetery burial index. Dive in. You never know what (or who!) you’ll find.
Collection Finding Aids
A Finding Aid is a document containing detailed, indexed and processed information about a specific collection of records within an archive. Finding aids are available for our collections and are linked below. In some cases, a collection that doesn’t currently have a finding aid may still be open to researchers. These collections are also listed. If a finding aid is not available for a collection you’re interested in seeing, please contact the archivist for more information. Our collections are housed in two locations: The Max M. Fisher Federation Building and the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs. If you’re planning to schedule a visit and are unsure where a collection is housed, please contact Robbie Terman at terman@jfmd.org.
Digital Collections
The Leonard N. Simons Jewish Community Archives holds more than two million documents, 25,000 photographs and 100 oral history interviews. We’re working to digitize our photo collection and publish finding aids for the entire archive. Today, our digital collection is a small but growing representation of our entire collection. So if you don’t find what you’re looking for, please contact us.
Oral History Archives
The oral history collection of the Leonard N. Simons Jewish Community Archives seeks to tell the history of Jewish Detroit through the recollection of those who lived it.
Friends of the Joan Meyers Jampel Center for Michigan Jewish Heritage
Friends of the Joan Meyers Jampel Center for Michigan Jewish Heritage help support the activities, conservation projects and outreach of the Jampel Center. Member benefits include exclusive tours, pop-up opportunities and program discounts.
We invite you to join the Friends of the Jampel Center at one of five membership levels.
The Irwin I. Cohn Jewish Cemetery Index
The Irwin I. Cohn Michigan Jewish Cemetery Index aims to record every Jewish burial in Metro Detroit.
The cemetery index was initiated in 1993 with the goal of constructing a master database with a record for every burial in Metro Detroit’s Jewish cemeteries, from the earliest recorded information to the present.
The bulk of the records are for individuals who died between the mid-1800s to 1999. We are currently working to update the records and are continuously adding to the database.
