Carol M. Highsmith - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID highsm.11604

Library of Congress Collections

Judith S. Kestenberg papers are housed in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, provides unparalleled insights into Dr. Kestenberg’s life-work offering a resource for scholars and the general public alike. 

Access to the Judith S. Kestenberg papers is not available online through the Library of Congress (LOC) website as the collection contains “born-digital” files with privacy restrictions. To view these papers, users must request access to the born-digital files and use them on-site at the Library of Congress. For details on accessing these materials, visit Library of Congress. 

The best way to find the finding aid for the Judith S. Kestenberg papers is to search the Library of Congress’s (LOC) online finding aids tool. An announcement was made in early 2025 regarding the collection’s availability in the Manuscript Division. 

Search the Library of Congress finding aids

  1. Navigate to the main Library of Congress Finding Aids page at findingaids.loc.gov.
  2. In the main search box, enter “Judith S. Kestenberg”.
  3. To narrow your search, use the “Within Library of Congress Collections” drop-down menu and select “Manuscript“.
  4. Run the search. This will return the official finding aid for the Kestenberg papers, which is an Encoded Archival Description (EAD). 

Everywhere she travelled, Judith Kestenberg interviewed child survivors of the Holocaust. She trained a generation of interviewers in the psychoanalytic community to combine history and psychoanalysis. One of the treasure-troves Kestenberg found in Poland was the early depositions that Holocaust child survivors gave immediately after liberation. These early testimonies are analyzed by Sharon Kangisser-Cohen in the latest edited book on interviews from the Kestenberg archive, Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive (2017). The Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive is at Hebrew University, the Israel National Library, Yad Vashem, and online by request. Researchers are continuing to use the archive; new interviews are being added and new books are being published.

Fogelman, E. (2020). Judith Kestenberg: A psychohistorical advocate for Holocaust child survivors and their children. Clio’s Psyche, 26(3), 353-358. https://doi.org/10.70763/c157297d1a1ff043255bfb18530caaa2

See also: Eva Fogelman. Opening of the Judith S. Kestenberg Papers at the Library of Congress. 19 Jan 2025. evafogelman.com

Carol M. Highsmith - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID highsm.11604
Carol M. Highsmith – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID highsm.11604