Survivors, advocates, and builders who turned witness into action.
After the Holocaust, the underground Bricha ("flight") network smuggled at least 150,000 Jewish survivors, by some estimates 250,000, out of Eastern Europe toward new lives.
Read the full story →In 1933 the American branch of the International Relief Association was founded at Albert Einstein's suggestion to help people suffering under Hitler. It grew into the IRC.
Read the full story →In September 1933 Albert Einstein wrote to Turkey’s prime minister asking him to employ German Jewish scientists dismissed by the Nazis. Hundreds of refugee scholars found posts in Turkey.
Read the full story →At the height of the Cold War, Albert Sabin shared his vaccine strains with Soviet scientists, and about 77 million Soviet children were vaccinated in 1959–1961.
Read the full story →On Sunday, April 24, 1960, Cincinnati began handing out Albert Sabin's oral polio vaccine for free, and about 180,000 local children were soon vaccinated.
Read the full story →When the global drive to eradicate polio began in 1988, about 350,000 children a year were still paralysed. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine became the campaign's main tool.
Read the full story →In 1882 Aletta Jacobs, the Netherlands’ first woman doctor, began giving poor women in Amsterdam free contraceptive advice and diaphragms, creating what is widely described as the world’s first birth control clinic.
Read the full story →In the middle of the First World War, Aletta Jacobs organised an International Congress of Women in The Hague that called for a negotiated peace and gave birth to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Read the full story →Alfred Adler urged that children be raised as equal members of the family, opposed corporal punishment, and argued early for women's equality in psychology.
Read the full story →In 1919 Alfred Adler started the first child guidance clinic in Vienna; he and his associates went on to open 28, making Vienna the first city to give schoolchildren free therapy.
Read the full story →Decades before the League of Nations, the self-taught Viennese Jewish journalist Alfred Fried argued that war was a symptom of international anarchy and could be ended only by permanent international organisation.
Read the full story →From 1941 to 1945 Anna Freud ran the Hampstead War Nurseries in London, giving foster care to children whose homes and families had been disrupted by the war.
Read the full story →In 1937 Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham opened the Jackson Nursery in Vienna for children under two from impoverished families.
Read the full story →Before becoming an analyst, Anna Freud was praised for her gift for teaching; in 1927 she helped found a progressive school whose staff included Erik Erikson.
Read the full story →Anna Freud's study of young orphans from the Theresienstadt camp, published in 1951, showed how children could find substitute affection among their peers.
Read the full story →During Kofi Annan's mediation after Kenya's disputed 2007 election, the Open Society Foundations led by Aryeh Neier provided a monitoring staff to track the peace agreement.
Read the full story →Baruch Blumberg gave his personal support to the Hepatitis B Foundation from its start in the early 1990s and served as its distinguished scholar until his death in 2011.
Read the full story →Baruch Blumberg and Irving Millman patented a new way to make a hepatitis B vaccine, then made sure it was licensed so drug companies could produce it for the public.
Read the full story →Ben Ferencz donated $1 million to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's genocide prevention work and pledged to leave his life savings to genocide prevention initiatives.
Read the full story →After Nuremberg, Ben Ferencz spent a decade in Germany setting up programs to return looted property and compensate victims of Nazi persecution, and helped shape the 1953 restitution law.
Read the full story →Bob Dylan donated all his royalties from his 2009 album Christmas in the Heart to Feeding America, the UK charity Crisis and the World Food Programme.
Read the full story →On 1 August 1971 Bob Dylan made a surprise appearance at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, the first major rock benefit concert, raising help for refugees.
Read the full story →At Live Aid in 1985, Bob Dylan suggested some of the money could help struggling American farmers, prompting Willie Nelson to organise Farm Aid for debt-ridden family farms.
Read the full story →When his fellow poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for a poem mocking Stalin, Boris Pasternak appealed to Nikolai Bukharin to intervene on his behalf.
Read the full story →During the Second World War, Boris Pasternak served as a fire warden in Moscow and in 1943 travelled to the front to read his poetry to soldiers.
Read the full story →In 1983 Carl Sagan co-authored the TTAPS study warning that a nuclear war could cool the planet, work honoured in 2022 with the Future of Life Award.
Read the full story →In 1930 Carrie Bamberger Fuld and her brother Louis Bamberger used the fortune from their Newark department store to found the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and insisted that no one be judged by race, religion or sex.
Read the full story →Drew Weissman has collaborated with Chulalongkorn University in Thailand to develop and provide COVID-19 vaccines for the country and neighbouring low- and middle-income countries.
Read the full story →In September 2006 Elie Wiesel appeared before the UN Security Council with George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, one of many causes he championed.
Read the full story →In 1985, when AIDS carried deep stigma, Elizabeth Taylor helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research, amfAR, and became its founding chairman and public face.
Read the full story →Elizabeth Taylor testified before Congress to win support for the Ryan White CARE Act of 1990, which became the largest federal programme for people living with HIV, and in 1991 she founded her own foundation to pay for direct care.
Read the full story →Emile Berliner advocated women's equality and created a research fellowship in his mother's name so that qualified women could continue scientific research.
Read the full story →Starting at her kitchen table in 1993, Evelyn Lauder built the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, which has since raised more than a billion dollars for breast cancer science.
Read the full story →In 1992 Evelyn Lauder and SELF editor Alexandra Penney created the pink ribbon, turning breast cancer from a disease women hid into one the whole world talks about.
Read the full story →From El Salvador's consulate in Geneva, George Mantello issued thousands of Salvadoran citizenship papers to Jews in Nazi Europe and in 1944 publicised the Auschwitz reports.
Read the full story →Gisi Fleischmann led the Bratislava Working Group, an underground Jewish rescue network that bribed SS officials and spread the Auschwitz report in 1944.
Read the full story →In Paris from 1935 to 1939, Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, and became its special agent for rescuing refugee children.
Read the full story →Henrietta Szold founded Hadassah in 1912 to bring modern health care to Palestine, then at 72 helped run Youth Aliyah, which rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Europe.
Read the full story →Under Henrietta Szold's leadership, Hadassah funded hospitals, clinics, infant welfare stations and soup kitchens in Palestine that were open to Jewish and Arab inhabitants alike.
Read the full story →In Baltimore in the late 1880s, Henrietta Szold established a pioneering night school to teach English and job skills to Jewish immigrants fleeing Russia.
Read the full story →Jack Greenberg helped shape new legal defense funds for Asian American and Puerto Rican communities and joined human rights missions from South Africa to the Soviet Union.
Read the full story →Before leaving Germany in November 1933, James Franck helped Frederick Lindemann of Oxford find posts abroad for Jewish scientists dismissed by the Nazis.
Read the full story →During World War I Joel Spingarn trained as an officer, served as a major and donated uniforms for one hundred Howard University students who enlisted.
Read the full story →In 1993 Joseph Brodsky and Andrew Carroll founded the American Poetry & Literacy Project to make poetry a central part of American life.
Read the full story →Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-Jewish physicist whose wife was murdered in the Holocaust, joined the atomic bomb project only to deter Hitler, and when it became clear Germany had no bomb, he became the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on grounds of conscience.
Read the full story →Joseph Rotblat showed in 1955 that a hydrogen-bomb test had released far more radioactivity than officially admitted, then built the Pugwash Conferences, credited with laying groundwork for the test ban and later arms-control treaties.
Read the full story →In exile in Paris after 1933, Joseph Roth helped aid refugees, including through the Entraide Autrichienne, while writing against Nazism.
Read the full story →In 2000 Joseph Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, and since 2005 he has chaired Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute.
Read the full story →To mark his 50th birthday in 1912, Julius Rosenwald gave away $687,000, including $250,000 for the University of Chicago, and kept giving about $500,000 a year.
Read the full story →In 1929 Julius Rosenwald built the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, 421 homes for African Americans in Chicago, investing $2.7 million for a modest return.
Read the full story →Julius Rosenwald offered $25,000 to any city that raised $75,000 for a YMCA for African Americans; between 1911 and 1933 he helped build 25 YMCAs in 24 cities.
Read the full story →In 2004 Kenneth Arrow chaired an Institute of Medicine committee that called for a global subsidy so that effective malaria drugs could reach the world's poor.
Read the full story →A 1987 speech by Larry Kramer in New York led to ACT UP, whose protests pushed the US Food and Drug Administration to speed the approval of new AIDS drugs and helped bring down the price of AZT.
Read the full story →In 1982 the writer Larry Kramer and five friends founded Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, one of the first organisations anywhere to care for people with AIDS.
Read the full story →Brooklyn gynecologist and psychiatrist Lena Levine helped run Margaret Sanger’s pioneering New York clinic, offering women birth control, fertility treatment and counselling, and worked to found the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Read the full story →In 1933 Leo Szilard helped found the Academic Assistance Council in Britain, which by 1939 had found places for more than 2,500 refugee scholars.
Read the full story →Leonard Bernstein took part in one of the earliest AIDS fundraisers in 1983 and later helped raise the first million dollars for amfAR's community-based clinical trials.
Read the full story →In 1985 Leonard Bernstein took the European Community Youth Orchestra on a Journey for Peace tour, performing at the Hiroshima Peace Ceremony on the 40th anniversary of the bombing.
Read the full story →During the Siege of Leningrad, Leonid Kantorovich calculated safe spacing for supply trucks crossing frozen Lake Ladoga on the Road of Life.
Read the full story →Although her work explained nuclear fission, Lise Meitner declined an invitation to join the British mission to the Manhattan Project, saying she would have nothing to do with a bomb.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”