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

Abstract

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