Few archivists can compete with Brigitte Freed when it comes to preservation and attention to detail. For the half-century that Leonard Freed photographed — and in the nine years since his death — Mrs. Freed has amassed, organized and protected the contact sheets, diaries, binders and prints that comprise her husband’s legacy, which began long before he joined Magnum in 1972.

So it was no surprise when in 2012 a curator from the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam visited the archives in Garrison, N.Y., surrounded by some 2,500 negatives of outtakes from one of Mr. Freed’s earliest books, “Joden van Amsterdam” (“Jews of Amsterdam”).

“They were the very first pictures I ever printed,” said Mrs. Freed, who processed and printed her husband’s work for years.

Although Mr. Freed is known mostly for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement, his “Jews of Amsterdam” — published in the late 1950s with just over 50 images — caught the attention of the museum’s curators because of their new initiative to document more history of Jews in postwar Holland.

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The museum promptly acquired 80 vintage prints from Mrs. Freed and later 150 new ones. The curator Bernadette van Woerkom put together an exhibition of Mr. Freed’s work and compiled a book of 150 photographs along with Schilt Publishing called “After the War Was Over: Jewish Life in Amsterdam in the 1950s.” In addition to displaying the photos, the book describes Mr. Freed’s own Jewish upbringing: His parents were Jews from Minsk who settled in New York shortly after World War I. His mother arrived safely with her family, but his father’s family stayed behind.

“Leonard came home one time and his father was banging on the floor with his fists, crying that his family was all destroyed,” Mrs. Freed said in a phone interview. “So, for Leonard, it was very important to find out what had really happened in Europe.”

Although he went back to Europe as a young man to visit the Dachau concentration camp, it took Mr. Freed a year and a half to tell his wife — then his girlfriend — that he was Jewish. It came up only when Mrs. Freed, who is German, surprised him one Christmas with decorations.

“I always wanted to have Christmas,” he said to her, bursting into tears.

When Mrs. Freed replied, “What kind of parents did you have that didn’t make you a Christmas tree?,” that’s when he told her for the first time, “I’m Jewish.”

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When the Freeds moved to Amsterdam in the late 1950s, Leonard Freed immediately gravitated toward the local Jewish community, which had seen three-quarters of its population wiped out in the war. The survivors had to recover their homes, finances and belongings. They had to mourn loved ones, rebuild synagogues and reclaim their identity.

Working alongside a young reporter, Max Snijders, Mr. Freed spent a year photographing their daily lives. He photographed the bar mitzvah of Naftali Schipper, whose parents had escaped to England just days before the German invasion in 1940. When they returned to the Netherlands in 1947, the father built a successful business as a jeweler and diamond merchant.

Mr. Freed photographed Eli Abrahams, who sold herring and flowers on the streets. Mr. Abrahams had faked a psychiatric disorder during the war and was admitted to a general psychiatric hospital, where he survived (the rest of family was killed in Auschwitz).

And he photographed Shabbat at the Moskovits family home. Here he staged some images, as photography is forbidden on Shabbat.

At the opening for Mr. Freed’s exhibition in Amsterdam, Mrs. Freed recognized one of the visitors.

“Oh, you are the Moskovits girl!” Mrs. Freed said to her, to which the woman replied, “I can’t believe you remembered my name!”

“But,” Mrs. Freed said, “all the people in the photographs have names — to me.”

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