Salon Jewish Studies Blog

From May 2009 two titles edited by the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute (Leipzig) will be published online:

1) Die rheinischen Juden im Mittelalter
2) Jüdische Friedhöfe in Deutschland – Eine Einführung für Lehrer und Schüler

For more information on the titles see section Mitteilungen of Kalonymos I, 2009

"The Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum have partnered to create an online collection of some of the most influential and important American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The goal of this project is to make these materials available to a wider audience. Digital images of the pages of each cookbook are available as well as full-text transcriptions and the ability to search within the books, across the collection, in order to find specific information." The online collection contains following historic Jewish cookbooks:

"Tuning Baghdad brings together a growing archive of rare video footage, audio clips and historical information on Iraqi Jewish musicians and the music scene that was displaced from Baghdad in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The last generation of Iraqi Jewish musicians who performed in Baghdad, now in their 70s and 80s, represent an era when an unusually large number of the Iraqi-Jews were composing and performing Arabic music. For decades, these musicians were the national teachers and beloved performers of Iraq’s traditional maqams and modern compositions on Iraq’s National Broadcast Station.
Many of these Iraqi musicians and enthusiasts now live in Israel, England or North America where they trade home-made cassettes and organize musical parties at which this international community comes together. The musicians continue to play and produce an Arabic repertoire of Iraqi folk songs, popular Egyptian and Lebanese songs as well as Iraqi-Jewish ceremonial songs at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs. The video chapters on this website feature intimate performances, conversations in Iraqi-Jewish dialect, and rehearsals with key musicians, fans, historians and ethnomusicologists. They also feature home-movies of ‘Charlghis’ from the 1970s until today. The podcasts and links accompanying each video act as tangents, providing an expanded layer to the performers, the songs, and their lyrics. To accommodate this complex scene, the audio/visual component will be regularly updated with donations of rare cassettes and footage."

Up to now, following podcasts including additional audio material are available in the categories (no direct links available) listed below:

1) Audiotopia ("various Arabic music jam sessions by Iraqi-Jewish musicians now living in Israel") - fifteen audio-tracks of Imam and Naim;

2) On the maqam ("records some attempts to explain the eastern scale of music called the ‘maqam’, to Western listeners") four audio-tracks of Yair Dalal, Elias Shasha and Abraham Salman;

3) Musicans in Iraq ("a chapter narrated by Yeheskel Kojaman one of the few ethnomusicologists who has first-hand experience and knowledge of the popular music scene in Iraq before the emigration of the Jewish population") two audio-tracks of Rashid Al-Qundarchi and Yakub Al-Imari

4) Life of the party ("a compilation of excerpts from home movies taken at ‘charlghis’ or house-parties in the [Jewish] diaspora from the 1970s until the 2000s")four audio-tracks (incl. mixed tapes) of Sol Basha and Abdel Halim Hafez

5) Other features a radio interview with Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda about Radio Baghdad as well as two recordings "Babylonian Selihot" produced by Yakhin Hakal

(tuningBaghdad.net via http://twitter.com/teruah)

"Yad Vashem has received an archival collection from Luxembourg, detailing the Holocaust’s affect on that country’s Jewish population.
The microfilms were presented Monday evening in Jerusalem by Center for Documentation on World War II director Prof. Paul Dostert, of Luxembourg, to Yad Vashem chair Avner Shalev.
The collection includes some 31,000 pages, covering daily life under German occupation, confiscations, restrictions, lists and orders of deportations to ghettos and concentration camps, as well as information on looted Jewish property, emigration to the US, declaration of Jewish assets, life in the Funfrunnen home for seniors, and information on some 60 mixed-marriage couples who managed to rescue their Jewish spouses." (via Tracing the Tribe)

The Archive of American Soviet Jewry Movement (1963-1990) was established by the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), New York. The movement has been a "worldwide effort to obtain freedom for Jews in the Soviet Union to practice their religion without state persecution or discrimination or to emigrate to Israel, the United States or elsewhere to seek the blessings of freedom, and to pursue lives of their own choosing."

The Archive comprises records of individuals, grassroots and national organizations. Besides information on the historical backround on the movement, the history of the movement itself and a list of archival holdings, a number of particular guides to selected record groups can be found:

The Jerry Goodman Papers will be available from April 2009.
A list of audio-recordings (PDF) is available online as well. Furthermore the Union Catalog of the Center for Jewish History (CJH) contains 34 posters from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

(Picture: Poster from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry "Let my people go")

The Israeli Left Archive is a private digitalization project, based on the collection of Dafna and Reuven Kaminer. The Kaminer collection is devoted to radical left and the women's peace movement in Israel during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It includes Pamphlets, Periodicals, Posters, Leaflets and circulars by different groups who were active outside of the framework of traditional party politics and whose legacy is therefore not covered by any official archive in Israel. Amongs these groups are: Women in Black, SIAH, SHASI, Committee Against the War in Lebanon, Mazpen, Yesh Gul, and The Black Panthers in Israel. Most of the material is in Hebrew, but there are also a number of documents in English. These are presented in a special collection.

The joint "project in progress" תמונות היסטוריות של ארץ ישראל - Historical photographs of the land of Israel (It is recommended to use the Hebrew homepage) documents in over 8.200 photographs -professionals and hobbyiest - Israels "characteristic landscapes and distinctive populace". The database (built with Digitool), set up and hosted by the Haifa University Library in cooperation with the Haifa University Department of Land of Israel Studies and the "Bitmuna"-Laboratory of Nadav Mann form Kibbutz Merhavia, includes 18 collections. Among them are the:

It is written on the homepage: "Over a period of many years, the Land was photographed from North to South by pilgrims, tourists and immigrants who were enchanted by the vision that greeted their eyes. Rare collections of photographs, stored in private homes, archives and assorted institutions, are in real danger of irreparable decay due to the ravages of time." According to this the project aims to preserve and present these unique photographs as part of Israeli cultural heritage.

The American Jewess (1895-1899) was the first English-language periodical targeted to American Jewish women. It has been assembled and digitized by the Jewish Women's Archive, an organization dedicated to uncovering, chronicling and transmitting the legacy of Jewish women in North America. The entirely searchable text is being hosted on the University of Michigan's Making of America digital library website.

The epidat database of the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institute for German-Jewish History serves the purpose of inventory, documentation, and representation of Jewish epigraphic material. The online edition covers 13115 epitaphs from the time between 1272 and 1940. From altogether 52 corpora, 47 are from the German-Netherlandish border region (Euregion Rhein-Maas-Nord) others are from Hamburg-Altona, Frankfurt/Main and other, smaller places. The search functions on the website contain the possibility of a full-text search in all the material or within a selection of corpora. In each case the original Hebrew inscription is documented alongside a minute German translation. Names are also searchable transcripted. Partially some historic and recent photographs of the epitaphs are available next to maps, locating them on the respective cemetery. [Language: German]

The Database Picture Australia, a project of the National Library of Australia, contains a huge number of photographs from great cultural institutions, documententing Jewish Life.

For example:
The search-term: "jew*" brought over 3.000 results.
The search-term: "israel*" brought over 700 result.