MS 344 Papers of Dr Scheier Levenberg

Dr Schneier Levenberg

Schneier (or Schneer, Scheier, Schneier and Shneyer) Levenberg was born in Kursk, Russia, in 1907. At the age of 14, he fled to Latvia. He gained a doctorate in law at Riga University and it was while studying that he became a Zionist and became chairman of the Labour Zionist student’ association ‘Hashachar’. A few years later he became chairman of the Labour Zionist Movement in Latvia.

Levenberg settled in London 1936 and was asked to head the Jewish Agency’s research department. He was affiliated to the British Labour Party and for a number of years represented the national party on the Socialist International. He was a member of the Bureau of the Socialist International and of the British Overseas Fellowship and a long-serving President of Poale Zion. He was active in the English (later British) Zionist Federation.

Levenberg was a World Executive member of the World Jewish Congress and chaired the international affairs committee and the political committee. He was a founder member of the National Yad Veshem Committee. He was extremely active in the Anglo-Jewish community, including at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, as Vice President, Chairman of the Israel Committee and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Levenberg wrote several books and pamphlets on the Jews and Palestine, Labour Zionism, minority right and Soviet Jewry.

He died in 1997.

 

Arrangement of collection

The majority of Levenberg’s papers were loose items randomly heaped together, showing very few indications of their original arrangement. The material that was arranged in individual files has been left as such and is identified in the catalogue as ‘original file’. The remainder of the material has been grouped following a subject classification.

About the collection

The collection contains sections relating to Anglo-Jewry; anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism; the Balfour Declaration; biographical material about Jewish individuals; the British Labour movement; geographical specific material about countries; international law and human rights; Israel and Jerusalem; Labour Zionism and Jewish Labour; language, literature and culture; the Middle East conflict; personal material about Levenberg; the USSR; the World Jewish Congress and Zionism. There are also sections for more miscellaneous material: Levenberg’s original files, papers which discuss the Jewish peoples more generally.

The collection contains a large amount of typescript, printed and published material including newspaper cuttings, magazine articles and reports. Much material has no clearly identifiable date. The majority of the collection appears to date from the 1960s-90s, but it also contains a smaller proportion of material from the earlier part of the twentieth century. While the majority of the material is in English, a significant proportion is in Hebrew script and Russian as well as some papers in French and German.

Date range:

1920s-90s

Former references:

A2068

Size:

32 boxes

 

There is allied material at the London School of Economics and Political Science Archives (ref: LEVENBERG) for 1939-1991.