Authority Work as Memorial to the Victims of October 7th and the Iron Swords war at the National Library of Israel

On the 7th of October 2023, Hamas terrorists staged the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Within days, the National Library of Israel (NLI), acting as an international memory institution of the Jewish people, began collecting materials associated with the attack and the ensuing war for a memorial project named Bearing Witness. This essay describes the work done by a small group of catalogers to create authority files for the fallen, working under pressure of deadlines, public scrutiny, and life in a war zone

JS/DH: Books and Computing

This column studies digital projects dealing with the study of the Jewish Book.&nbsp

The Freimann Square in Frankfurt am Main: Honoring Therese and Aron Freimann

This essay describes the lifelong achievements of Therese and Aron Freimann and the naming of the public square adjacent to the Frankfurt University Library after the couple. Therese Freimann (1882–1965) was a social activist whose initiatives benefited the residents of Frankfurt am Main and later New York City. Aron Freimann (1871–1948) was a renowned Wissenschaft des Judentums scholar and bibliographer whose work enabled and advanced the development of modern Jewish studies. His 1932 Judaica Catalogue of the Frankfurt Library collection played a key role in the survival of the collection during the Nazi era

The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project: A Case Study

In January 2022, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research completed the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, a major international initiative to virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar collection held by YIVO in New York and three Lithuanian institutions: the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. This project, which took seven years to complete and had a budget of nearly 7 million dollars, was the largest and most comprehensive digitization initiative YIVO had ever embarked on. This article chronicles the initiation, planning, and implementation of this major undertaking. It focuses on the success, setbacks, and lessons learned by the project team and how the procedures and workflows develop throughout the project now form the framework of YIVO’s subsequent digitization efforts

Scatter of the Literature, January 2023–December 2024

A list of citations of published studies related to Juaica librarianship and Jewish book history. Also availalbe on a free Zotero group, https://www.zotero.org/groups/5155481/judaica_librarianship_bibliography

Publishing the Holocaust: An Inside View from the Editorial Trenches

Over the course of an 18-year tenure as the Editor-in-Chief of The Jewish Publication Society, the author encountered numerous ethical dilemmas relating to publishing Holocaust manuscripts. These dilemmas concerned a book's provenance, authorship, distribution of royalties, authenticity, and appropriateness. In the article, the author presents several case studies of various Holocaust manuscripts and their disposition, describing the processes of vetting and debate pertaining to each problematic acquisition

On Publishing Holocaust Memoirs: An Interview with Liesbeth Heenk, Founder of Amsterdam Publishers

An interview with Liesbeth Heenk, founder of Amsterdam Publishers (2012), who is a major publisher of Holocaust memoirs written by second- and third-generation survivors.

Bibliyoṭeḳn: Yiddish Popular Book Series, 1890–1939

The article provides a general overview of a new phenomenon in the Yiddish book market at the end of the 19th century and developed in various directions until the outbreak of World War II. It was numerous initiatives and motivations to publish popular, yet instructive, Yiddish book series, better known as Bibliotekn (libraries) devoted to belle lettres, sciences, political ideologies, and literature for children. From the geographical point of view the article will concentrate in Eastern Europe (i.e. the Pale of Settlement, Congress Poland and the second Polish Republic). The overview will be mainly thematic with a general chronological order. &nbsp