Salon Jewish Studies Blog

On the occasion of Tel Aviv's 100th anniversary also the journal Pardes which is published yearly by the Vereinigung Jüdische Studien e.V., presents a vivid view on "white city on the sands".

The issue PaRDeS : Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien e.V. [15 (2009)] = 100jähriges Jubiläum Tel Avivs includes following articles and essays:

Photographs from the Paul Trevor Collection are available online via VADS: "Academics and artists at London Metropolitan University worked with photographer Paul Trevor to make a selection of his images of East London digitally available to artists, students and researchers. The Collection includes 500 images (chosen from a total of 120,000) of the Spitalfields area from the 1970s to the 1990s, a period of rapid social and physical change." The online collection contains a few pictures documenting Jewish daily life in the area.

The comprehensive Eliasaf Robinson Collection on the history of Tel-Aviv at Stanford University Libraries includes a number of digitized books, brochures and serials that are now available online. The quality of the material in general is rather good. Some of it is "grey literature" that is hard to find in libraries. Most of the texts are in Hebrew, some in Yiddish. There are some German and English titles too. Some examples:

Hachaim Hajehudim is an internet photo library of over 15,000 pictures showing exteriors and interiors of synagogues, people, stained glass, Tallitot & Kippot, Siddurim & Toroth, Holocaust memorials, cemeteries as well as architecure details from 80 countries. All photos were taken by Jono David, "a British-American (born, May 1966) freelance photographer and writer based in Osaka, Japan." He wrote about the project on the website:

"In the autumn of 1987, I read an article about the Jewish community of Manaus, Brazil. A synagogue in the Amazon struck me as most unexpected. The story intrigued me enough to add a visit there to my South American travel itinerary during my year-end university recess.
My close friend, Heidi, and I managed to find the synagogue and a few members of the community. Later, I published “One Man’s Fight to Keep Judaism Alive in the Amazon” in the The Jewish Telegraph in the UK. Neither the text nor the photographs were well polished but I was thrilled to have documented for myself the Amazonian community I had been introduced to in a newspaper in Washington, D.C.
Those experiences unwittingly sparked a commitment to visiting and photographing Jewish communities of the world that continues to this day (please see Mission).
Perhaps my biggest discovery of all is this: While each Jewish community is unique, all are bound by common threads of cultural identity. Hence, a visit to a Jewish community in even the most unexpected places like Manaus is somehow familiar. With few exceptions, I have been warmly welcomed by these communities, even when I arrived unannounced. Such welcomes are testament to the ties that bind Jews the world over together.
It is a privilege to have a sense of belonging in places where I am otherwise a mere stranger. The remarkable people that I have met along the way have made that possible. They have generously given me their time, secured access to synagogues, cemeteries, and museums, guided me round their towns and villages, and fed me in their homes."

“It is important to keep the images available for public access for future researchers and historians,” Jono David cited in Photographer includes Portland in online library of Jewish images (Jewish Review, April 6, 2009)

A new podcast Leon Merrick: Importance of Work in the Lodz Ghetto is available on U.S. Holcaust Memorial Museum website.

"Everybody had to have a job. Because if you had a job you get an extra bowl of soup in the place of wherever you work. So my father worked in the main hospital, we had five hospitals in the ghetto. They were clinics before the war, but then the Jews came in when they formed the ghetto, so they made a hospital. And my father worked in the hospital and my mother got a job in the orphanage. And of course later on, in a couple years or so, I wanted to get a job too. I’d seen these young fellows going around with satchels delivering mail so I told my father, “Maybe I can do…maybe I can do this.”
But later on, so for the first year and a half I had no jobs. My mother worked, and from the place of employment she got an extra bowl of soup so she can share the remaining ration with us. My father he also worked, he also got some food." (fragment of the transcript)

(via USHMM@Twitter)

In 2005 the Stanford University Libraries aquired from the antiquarian bookseller Eliasaf Robinson a collection on the early history of Tel Aviv. By now, significant portions of this collection are digitized and accessible online. Concentrating on materials that date before 1948, the collection includes books, pamphlets, journals, documents, photographs, posters, maps, architectural plans, and ephemera relating to the history of the „First Hebrew City“. Part of the collection are also several Ottoman land deeds (kushans) for lots purchased in 1909 by the first Jewish settlers, who built Tel Aviv as a new Jewish suburb outside of the Arab city of Jaffa.

"The Charles Booth Online Archive is a searchable resource giving access to archive material from the Booth collections of the Archives Division of the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Senate House Library.The Booth collection at LSE Archives contains the original records from Booth's survey into life and labour in London, dating from 1886 [?] to 1903."
In the framework of this project the philanthropist's notebooks related to the Jewish community of London are available online (among others). Four notebooks originated from 1884 until 1987 can be viewed in PDF.

(picture above: Charles Booth in the Encycopedia Britannica)

Within the framework of the project Juedische Friedhoefe in Brandenburg, which was founded at Potsdam University (Germany) to document these important places of Jewish cultural heritage in the district of Brandenburg, comprehensive information on the Jewish cemetery of the city of Schwedt is available online now. Besides information concretely refering to the physical structure of the cemetery, the map of the cemetery, the allocation list of the tombstones and the tombstones themselves, you will also find additional information on the history of the cemetery and the Jewish community of Schwedt.
The Jewish cemeteries of Gross Neuendorf and Wriezen are also available.
For researchers the Epidat-project (temporarily under construction) at Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute at University of Duisburg might be also of a higher interest. (see: Blog-Post epidat - An epigraphical database of German Jewry)