History and Culture

Love in the Collections

February 14, 2026

by Isabel Watkins

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today AJHS is celebrating with a look at a few of our favorite photographs displaying a spectrum of love and affection through the decades. Whether it’s the bond between a mother and son, a new husband and wife, a counselor and his campers or simply two people in love, we will take any chance we can to magnify the happy histories that live on in our collections.

Photographs of Family and Friends of the Adler Family, circa 1924-1926. Adler Family Papers (P-890).

Newly married couple!
Isidore S. Meyer Papers (P-905),

Sisters Jocheved (6) and Genia (8) Elkes newly arrived in the US on their way to Troy, NY in June 1954 after being displaced during WWII. Displaced Persons, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) collection (I-363).

Friends in the summer of 1923. Metz-Greene-Stone Family Papers (P-587).

Alice Jacobi and Arnold Schlossberg, Sr. embrace at the beach in July 1932. The couple eloped secretly on May 9 of the same year.
Jacobi-Schlossberg Family Papers (P-705).

Campers of Camp Wabenaki, Boys Brotherhood Republic. Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York photograph collection (I-42).

Isabel Watkins

Isabel joined the American Jewish Historical Society in October of 2024 as the Senior Manager of Donor Relations and Data. She holds a BA in Comparative Politics from the University of Kentucky and an LLM in Human Rights Law from the University of Edinburgh. Isabel lives in Brooklyn and loves reading and writing about art, history, textiles and culture. Her passion for historic preservation and dissemination is what led her to AJHS and she is overjoyed to be contributing to the organization’s advancement.