JDC Digitization Donors Featured in Wall Street Journal

Drs. Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky, who provided the lead $1 million gift for the JDC Archives digitization project, have been featured in todays Wall Street Journals Donor of the Day column. Bennett and Polonsky are visionary leaders and major philanthropists in the field of archival digitization around the world.

The grant to the JDC Archives has enabled the digitization of 1.8 million historic documents, and the development of the JDC Archives website. The historic records digitized include topics as significant as JDCs liife-saving medical work fighting epidemics in Poland and Soviet Russia as a result of poor medical conditions during World War I, JDCs role helping find safe haven for Jews aboard the S.S. St Louis, and the partnership between JDC and the government of the Dominican Republic to found an agricultural settlement for German Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.