NEH Grant Makes Possible the Reuniting of Science of Judaism Texts Lost During the Holocaust
NEW YORK, Aug. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- During World War II with the Nazi rise to power, more than 2,000 titles from the Wissenschaft des Judentums or Science of Judaism texts housed at the Frankfurt Library in Germany were either destroyed or dispersed. More than half of the lost titles, cataloged at Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) located at the Center for Jewish History in New York, will now be digitized to reconstruct the collection, thanks to a digital humanities grant awarded to the Center from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"The Wissenschaft des Judentums volumes housed at LBI will fill in the missing gaps of Frankfurt's collection, thereby virtually recreating a pre-Holocaust Jewish library," says Carol Kahn Strauss, Executive Director of Leo Baeck Institute.
"This collection is considered the library of Jewish scholarship and through digitization will be reconstructed and accessible for future generations," says Michael S. Glickman, COO of the Center for Jewish History.
According to Jim Leach, Chairman of the NEH, "The NEH grants awarded will promote new areas of research and make the breadth of human experience more understandable and knowledge more accessible."
This initiative is jointly funded by the NEH and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation or DFG), the German government's funding mechanism for the humanities. The project will digitize 1,000 books from the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement that are housed in the LBI collection at the Center and combine them with related volumes at Frankfurt University, whose extensive holdings amounted to the largest Judaica library in Europe before the Holocaust. This $300,000 project will begin in September and will take approximately 2 years to complete.
Leo Baeck Institute is an organization dedicated to preserving German Jewish history and culture. The Center for Jewish History is the nation's leading repository for books, documents, photos, ritual objects, art, and other materials that detail Jewish life around the world and across the centuries. It is home to five major institutions: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. For more information regarding the Center, visit www.cjh.org. For more information regarding the Wissenschaft des Judentums collection, visit www.lbi.org.
SOURCE The Center for Jewish History / Cathy Callegari PR
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