Exploring the Waco Jewish Community with the Texas Jewish Historical Society

By Paul Fisher, Processing Archivist

Texas  Jewish Historical Society members exploring display in Texas Collection reading room, 2015
Texas Jewish Historical Society members exploring display in Texas Collection reading room. The materials on display for society members to view included representative items from over nineteen collections documenting the life and faith experience of Jewish people in Waco.

On January 24, The Texas Collection welcomed the Texas Jewish Historical Society to a special display of materials on Jewish life and faith in Central Texas. Members of the society viewed many different kinds of materials, including:

  • a letter to a German Jewish family by the German secret police, warning them to leave the country (they later came to Waco, Texas),
  • an elaborate green velvet scrapbook with photographs from the 1800s of the Goldstein family in Waco,
  • photographs of Jewish-owned businesses in Waco, such as the Goldstein-Migel and Sanger Brothers department stores,
  • membership cards and past meeting pamphlets from the Texas Jewish Historical Society, and
  • photographs of Temple Rodef Sholom and Congregation Agudath Jacob in Waco from the early 1900s.
Photographic scrapbook of the Goldstein Family in Waco, Texas, from the early 1900s
Photographic scrapbook of the Goldstein family in Waco, Texas, from the early 1900s.

All together, The Texas Collection has more than 20 Jewish-related collections available for researchers to explore. Most of these collections are unprocessed, meaning they are not yet described through a finding aid in BARD or housed in modern acid-free boxes and folders. However, two Jewish collections have been processed recently, the De Cordova Family papers 1845-1956 and the Waco Chapter of Hadassah records 1928-2009, and we hope to process the rest of them soon. Stay tuned for more news about our Jewish collections!