Louise Strauss Endows the Rare Book Room

Louise Strauss’s commitment to the Katz Center, to its collections, and to the field of Jewish studies has continued the legacy of leadership and generosity begun by her mother Ione Apfelbaum Strauss and her father Hilary Strauss, and we are deeply moved by Louise’s decision to honor their memory by endowing the Center’s rare book room in their names. 

Ione Apfelbaum Strauss’s service to the University of Pennsylvania is historic. She was the first female president of Penn’s General Alumni Society—indeed, the first woman ever to head a major private university’s alumni society. She also served as an overseer for the School of Arts and Sciences, as a trustee for the University of Pennsylvania Press, and in many other capacities that earned her the university’s Alumni Award of Merit in 1971. At the Katz Center, Ione served as chair of its board of overseers, and she endowed the Louis Apfelbaum and Hortense Braunstein Apfelbaum Fellowship in memory of her parents, as well as the Erika A. Strauss Teaching Fellowship in memory of her and Hilary’s late daughter, Louise’s sister. In her roles as one of the Center’s longest serving board members, chair, and donor, Ione helped to lay the foundation for the Center’s success as the world’s preeminent research center in Judaic studies. The Center and the university are but two of many organizations strengthened by her and Hilary’s philanthropy, dedication, and leadership.

We are deeply moved that Louise has chosen to memorialize her parents by associating their names with the Center’s rare book room, a world treasure of texts in different forms that, collectively, tell the millennia-long story of the role of books as the heartbeat of Jewish civilization. In presenting Louise with this token of our appreciation, we seek to express our heartfelt gratitude to her for all she has done through her philanthropic efforts as well as her volunteer work. Indeed, beyond her generous financial support, Louise has invested in the Katz Center and its library something equally precious to us: her time and care. 

Louise began volunteering in the Library at the Katz Center in 2008. Over the course of the next decade, she worked with unbreakable perseverance to single-handedly catalog the Lenkin Collection of Photography, consisting of over 5,000 early photographs of the Land of Israel dating from 1850 to 1937. She cataloged each image into a specially designed template after careful, first-hand examination of the original photographs and consultation of the handwritten notebooks in French of the original collectors, Bertrand and Paola Lazard. She painstakingly revised her records multiple times before uploading them into an online repository where the public may now discover and freely download them. 

Louise also archivally processed several related Holy Land postcard collections, including the Paola and Bertand Lazard Holy Land Postcard Collection, dating from ca. the 1890s to the 1920s; the Shlomo Narinsky Holy Land Postcard Collection, dating from ca. 1910 to 1921; and the Baron Family Postcard Collection, consisting of four series of historic postcards from France, Italy, Mandate Palestine, and the United States, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s. Louise made a historic contribution to the modernization of our finding aids—including those of Cyrus Adler, Charles J. and Mary Cohen, Eduard Glaser, Ben Zion Goldberg, Isaac Leeser, Max Margolis, Joseph Medoff, Sabato Morais, Abraham Neuman, Joseph Reider, Nathaniel and Wilhelm Reich, Elias Shulman, and Mayer Sulzberger—by revising, editing, and converting them from their original format dating from the 1990s into more up-to-date archival digital forms. She also completed the archival processing and produced original finding aids of her own for the Binswanger/Solis-Cohen Family Papers, the Boonin Family Collection, the Samuel Tobias Lachs Collection, the Margy and Martin Meyerson Collection, the archive of Professor Svi Rin and Shifra Rin, the Albert J. Wood Collection, and the David Goldenberg Presidential Papers. The Wood Collection and Goldenberg Papers are especially significant for their historical importance to the institutional history of the Katz Center, and its genealogical connections to both the Annenberg Research Institute and Dropsie College. Louise’s contributions to the history of the Katz Center, to the preservation of and access to the cultural heritage that document that history, to the history of modern Jewish studies and to scholarship writ large will never be forgotten.

All this is in addition to Louise’s role as a member of the Katz Center’s board of overseers. In that capacity, she has remained steadfast in her support throughout transitions in leadership and in the face of many changes and challenges. Louise is an inspiring example of altruism at the highest level envisioned in Jewish tradition, seeking no attention for herself even as she opens the world of study and learning to so many others.