The Shoah Visual History Archive is largest database of first-person Holocaust testimonies, founded by Steven Spielberg. With over 50,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors and liberators, carefully indexed in short segments for ease of searchability and use, the VHA is a tremendous resource for the history of the Holocaust. Recently, the VHA has expanded to include […]
Tag: Primary Sources
Crowdsourcing Yiddish transcription/translation
As anyone who has done research using Yiddish newspapers can tell you, it's not easy to find primary sources, especially those from newspapers, in the digital world. While Yiddish newspapers contain critical information about the labor industry, immigration, the Jewish day-to-day environment, and so much else, finding these materials is not easy, and often requires […]
New Resource: Early New York Synagogue Archives
Synagogue records, as records of a particular community in a particular place, can contain tremendous gems for scholarship in Jewish history. Thanks to a wonderful collaboration between the The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the American Jewish Historical Society, the records of five of the most important synagogues in New York City are […]
Updated Resource: The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
"The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) were established in 1939. They hold the archives of hundreds of Jewish communities, as well as of local, national and international Jewish organizations and the private collections of many outstanding Jewish personalities. The Archives now hold the most extensive collection of documents, pinkassim (registers) […]
Digital Exhibition: Leaving Europe: A New Life in America
Cambridge, MA, USA / The Hague, Netherlands, 18 December 2012 – To mark the beginning of a unique digital collaboration, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Europeana are pleased to announce the launch of Leaving Europe: A new life in America. The all-new virtual exhibition tells the story of European emigration to the […]
New Acquisitions: Bookdealers and Sabbateans
I am pleased to announce two new acquisitions for the Judaica collection at Columbia: 1) A small collection of materials from Judaica bookdealers around the world in the first part of the 20th century. A brief description: Collection of letters and ephemera relating to the Judaica book trade, most from 1926-1955. The collection includes […]
Digitized Newspaper: Herut
The Jewish Historical Press has just posted a new newspaper to their freely available website of full-text newspapers: "Herut", the daily newspaper of the main opposition party during the first years of the State of Israel. The newspaper was published in Tel-Aviv between 1948 and 1965. The JPRESS website now offers the issues between 1949 […]
Important upgrades: RAMBI and Bar Ilan Responsa
Ladies and Gentlemen, drumroll please – we have fantastic news about updates from two of the most important resources in Jewish Studies: 1) RAMBI, the Index to Articles in Jewish Studies, profiled here, sent the below email yesterday: "Subject searching in RAMBI, The Index to Articles in Jewish Studies, is being changed so that searching […]
Online Resource: JDC Archives online
The Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has been helping Jews around the world since its inception at the onset of World War I in 1914. Its archives have long been a resource for scholars researching Jewish immigration, anti-semitism, Jewish aid, geneology, and many other topics. Now, for the first time, the JDC Archives from 1914-1932 are […]
More Yiddish…Haynt digitized and online
I wrote last year about the incredible resource that is the Historical Jewish Press. In a further effort to make Jewish newspapers available freely online, the HJP has now digitized its first Yiddish paper,Haynt. Haynt was a seminal Jewish newspaper in Eastern Europe from 1908-1939, and is a critical resource for day to day news […]