Archives

I had the pleasure (and honor) of a "guided tour" by the director of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People( http://sites.huji.ac.il/archives/ ). Convinced me that I should have been taught in high school to keep good records. The only direction on the subject that I remember was on the importance of lab notebooks. In the corridor are displays of facsimiles of minutes of community meetings from Morocco to Ireland, plus other registers and ledgers, but the importance of the archives is in the catalogued collection of records that mention Jews: copies of a letter, in Yiddish, to the Czar kept in the archives of Czar Nicholai I's secret police; a report from Barcelona, in Latin, signed in Hebrew; private documents and public from wherever anyone can find anything.

The organization would particularly like letters, or copies of letters, from Europe before World War II.

Copyright 2009 Jane S. fox