Leo Baeck Institute London

Boxes are open again! After several years in storage, archival materials and institutional records belonging to the Leo Baeck Institute London have arrived at our new base at Senate House in Bloomsbury. 

As we unpack and reshelve them, we are rediscovering items connected to the Institute’s history and its work documenting the history of German-speaking Jewry since the 1950s.​

Stay tuned for glimpses from the shelves, stories from the stacks, and highlights from material we are encountering again for the first time in years.

Yesterday, Wednesday 4 February, former Deputy Director of the Leo Baeck Institute London, Kinga Bloch, led a Library of Lost Books Search Day as part of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day event at the University of Sussex.

The session, titled ‘Forensics at the Library – What Can Books Tell Us About the Holocaust?’, invited pupils from Eastbourne Academy and their teachers to explore how library collections can reveal hidden stories of the past.

As the 120th anniversary of Alex Natan’s birth on 1 February 1906 approaches, the Leo Baeck Institute London invites people to discover his extraordinary life through our 2024 Lecture Series talk by Professor Kay Schiller. Natan was a gay athlete, antifascist thinker and sportswriter in Weimar Berlin who lived much of his life on the margins. He fled Nazi Germany, spent time as a refugee in pre-war London, was held in internment camps during the Second World War, and later worked as a teacher in the Midlands and as a journalist in post-war Britain and West Germany.

Edith Tudor Hart, born Edith Suschitzky (1908–1973), was an émigré photographer and covert agent for the Soviet Union. Originally from Vienna, she trained in photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1933 she married the English doctor Alexander Tudor-Hart and relocated with him to Great Britain to escape rising fascism. Tudor Hart viewed photography as a means of political engagement, using it to expose social inequality. In Britain, she focused on documentary work in London’s impoverished neighbourhoods and the coal-mining regions of Wales. A dedicated anti-fascist and communist, she also acted as a Soviet operative and played a role in recruiting members of the notorious Cambridge Spy Ring.

Holocaust Memorial Day is observed annually on 27 January to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet forces in 1945. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is ‘Bridging Generations’, emphasising the importance of the transmission of historical memory from survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides to subsequent familial and communal networks.​ 

Rabbi Daniel Lichman, PhD candidate at the LBI London, spoke at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ interfaith Holocaust Memorial Day, citing the recent movie Marty Supreme (2026) as an example of how Holocaust memory cannot be escaped.

Applications for the 2027 LBI Year Book Essay Prize in German-Jewish Studies close in one month, on 28 February 2026.

The prize supports early-career scholars researching the German-Jewish experience. The winner receives £500, publication in the LBI Year Book, and a free annual subscription.

Full details and submission instructions: 

https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/publications/yearbook/essay-prize

Final call for applications: the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme 2026/2027 (German academic year October 2026 – September 2027) invites PhD students working on German-Jewish history and culture to apply.​

The programme is jointly organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London, the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, and is open to PhD candidates worldwide.​

Applications close on 1 February 2026.​

For full details and information on how to apply, please visit: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/fellowship.