Exhibition Overview

	Jewish refugee children, en route to Philadelphia, aboard the liner President Harding, waving at the Statue of Liberty.
"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.