Abstract
Throughout 2000 years of exile, Jews amassed documentation reflecting their creativity and organization wherever they lived. Communal archives dating since the Middle Ages have survived. In addition, documentation about Jews is found in archives of rulers, governments, and cities. Conditions changed in the twentieth century due to new developments: the rise of the Jewish national movement, leading to the establishment of the State of Israel, and the destruction of thousands of communities and their cultural possessions in the Holocaust perpetrated against European Jewry by the Nazis. The centrality of Eretz Israel and Israel in Zionist ideology led to the concept that it should be the locale for Jewish archives. Thus, for example, in 1933 the archives of the World Zionist Movement were transferred from Berlin to Jerusalem. The situation became more acute after WWII: If entire or partial archives of destroyed communities survived, to whom do they belong—the states in which they were created or the Jewish people? This dilemma also faces existing communities without archival consciousness. Should everything be concentrated in Israel? In recent years, there has been a change in the paradigm of Israel–Diaspora relations. In a global transnational world, with constantly developing technical means, archives can remain in the communities that created them, provided they are maintained and made available to the public in accordance with accepted archival practice.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 309-326 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Archival Science |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Sep 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
Funding
However, in the case of Jewish archives, a network covering all Jewish communities does not yet exist. There are individual Web sites which enable various levels of information retrieval. In addition, there are several initial efforts to create joint projects that include various Jewish cultural institutions, libraries, and museums. The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem is creating a network of Israeli archives. Judaica Europeana is a network that brings together Web sites of European Jewish cultural institutions and also includes materials relating to European Jewry that are found elsewhere, such as in Israel and the USA. A Web site still under construction, funded by the Rothschild Foundation, is Yerusha Jewish Archives Europe Portal. Since for the present it is focusing more on Jewish materials found in general cultural institutions in various European countries rather than on Jewish archives per se, it falls outside the scope of this article. As for the specific subject of the Holocaust, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) is a research network that also deals with archival collections. The first archives that are considered in this section is the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish people (CAHJP). CAHJP was established in 1939 in Jerusalem (then still under the British Mandate) upon the initiative of historians teaching at the Hebrew University who held Zionist ideals and wished to establish a ‘national archives’ for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. This desire received additional impetus from events in Europe; it was now imperative to preserve not only the past but also the present. From 1944, the CAHJP was supported by the Historical and Ethnographic Society of the Land of Israel and the Hebrew University. This institution played an important role in the fate of Jewish archival documentation that survived the Holocaust (Arroyo ).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Historical and Ethnographic Society of the Land of Israel | |
| Rothschild Foundation | |
| Yerusha Jewish Archives Europe Portal | |
| Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
Keywords
- Archives migration
- Archives plunder
- Archives restitution
- Israel–Diaspora
- Jewish archives
- World War II