Our Mission & Vision
About The Gunzburg Family Archive
The Gunzburg Family Archive is a collection of resources devoted to the history of the Gunzburg family. History, memory, and the transmission of available knowledge lie at the heart of the Gunzburg Family Archive project. The archives are primary sources for an extensive range of subjects: Judaism and Jewish life, economic and social history, tsarist Russia, French socio-political history, the history of art and art collections, philanthropy, the Russian revolution, the struggle against totalitarianism, the First and Second World Wars, the looting of art and property.
Mission & Purpose
The site’s objective in making these varied and unique resources available to the public is to shed light on a rich historical legacy. Beyond the members of the Gunzburg family, their collaborators and friends, the archive reveals a whole universe, rescued from anonymity, now no longer forgotten.
The documents made available online here comprise an unusual archive collection containing many thousands of items: private correspondence, official documents, bank papers, unpublished memoirs, drawings, paintings, photographs and recordings. They have been collected, photographed and digitised with a view to facilitating their conservation and their availability as part of the Gunzburg Family Archive.
The Archive’s catalogue allows readers to search for documents electronically. Access to any digital document in the Archive is simple, by clicking this link. The Archive offers open access to users via a choice of resources, including selected documents, a family chronology, individual biographies and photographic albums.
The Gunzburg Family Archive project is an initiative born from the desire of members of the family to share their legacy. The Archive is compiled and edited by Lorraine de Meaux with the collaboration of Julian Evans,translator, Jean de Gunzburg, Peter Halban amongst other members of the family and the educational organisation World ORT. Lorraine found extraordinary new material while she was writing The Gunzburgs: A Family Biography, translated from the French by Steven Rendall (Halban Publishers, London 2019; original French edition Une Grande Famille Russe: Les Gunzburg, Paris/Saint–Pétersbourg XIXe – XXe siècle (Editions Perrin, Paris 2018)).