UCBerkeley: Magnes Museum Jewish collection acquired

The Magnes Museum's 10,000-piece collection of music, art, rare books and historical archives will be moved to several University of California-Berkeley locations, as the university has acquired the collection.

[Photo left: Judah Magnes]

According to the press release (with accompanying photos of collection items):

The UCalifornia Berkeley announced a five-year, $2.5 million gift from Warren Hellman, Tad Taube and the Koret Foundation to acquire the Magnes Museum's Western Jewish History Archives, a 10,000-piece collection of music, art, rare books, and historical archives.

During the summer, all letters, diaries, photographs and other archival documents will be relocated to the Bancroft Library, and will be known as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library. Musical manuscripts and sheet music will be moved to the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library.

Supported by the gift, a building renovation in Berkeley's arts and commerce district will provide lecture and seminar rooms, exhibit space for prints, paintings, photographs, costumes, and Judaica objects such as 15th-century Hanukkiah lamps and Torah ornaments.

See the press release link above for more information, photos and details.

New York: Sephardic Book Fair, July 25

The first New York Sephardic Jewish Book Fair - with book readings, author signings, book sales and tours - is set for Sunday, July 25.

Hosted by the American Sephardi Federation (ASF), will be held from noon-5pm, at the Steinberg Great Hall at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th Street.

The free event, open to the public, will include authors and book lovers, those who write about and read about the culture, history, philosophy, religion, languages and experiences of the Sephardic Jews, past and present.

Hundreds of titles of Sephardic-oriented books, including many rare titles, will be available for sale by the Sephardic House bookstore, as well as by unique vendors that specialize in Sephardic Judaica.

Several visiting authors will discuss a wide range of topics including personal histories, Sephardic history, philosophy, culture and religion. The day's key author and speaker will be Dr. Marc D. Angel, founder of The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals and Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Shearith Israel, North America's oldest Jewish congregation.

The fair will also feature a display of rare Sephardic books from the ASF Library and Archives, while Yeshiva University Museum will hold tours of their current exhibit: "A Journey Through Jewish Worlds: Highlights from the Braginsky Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts and Printed Books."

The Braginsky Collection includes handwritten manuscripts and printed books from Holland, Italy, Spain, Greece and India.

There will also be hourly free door prizes for attendees.

The ASF promotes and preserves the spiritual, historical, cultural and social traditions of all Sephardic communities as an integral part of Jewish heritage.

New York City: Hebrew manuscripts, books, July 1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will offer three lectures on the art of Hebrew manuscripts and books on Thursday, July 1.

Lectures will be held from 2-5pm, in the Sacerdote Lecture hall of the Uris Center for Education. They are free with Museum admission.

The exhibit - "A Journey Through Jewish Worlds: Highlights from the Braginsky Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts and Printed Books" - offers recent research in the field and is currently on view at Yeshiva University Museum.

-- "Hidden Treasure: The Intellectual Life of Medieval Ashkenazi Jews," by
Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry Professor of Jewish History, Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University

-- "Making Hebrew Manuscripts in a Gentile World," by Evelyn M. Cohen, independent scholar, New York

-- "Hebrew Manuscripts after Gutenberg," by Emile G. L. Schrijver, Curator, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Special Collections, University of Amsterdam

For more information, see the museum website.

Cairo Geniza: Digitizing project underway

The Cairo Geniza, with some 200,000 documents and fragments, was discovered in the late 19th-century, in Old Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue annex in Fustat.

It is a rich source of genealogical information as well as documents - from the 9th-14th centuries - which include rabbinical court records, leases, deeds, endowment contracts, debt acknowledgments, marriage contracts and private letters.

The collection demonstrates the history of Jews in the region during the Middle Ages as well as information on religious beliefs and practices, economic and cultural life.

Today, technology is making it possible for everyone to access these treasures as the collection is being digitized.

Autograph draft of Mishneh Torah, the legal code compiled by

the rabbinic authority, philosopher and royal physician

Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1137/8-1204)

MS.Heb.d.32, fols.50b-51a

Learn more here.

The project is important because pieces of the Geniza are today in many institutions; even manuscripts were separated by single leaves and located in different places, making it difficult to understand the importance or significance of the whole item.

One major collection of 25,000 items, is at Oxford University's Bodleian Library, which possesses liturgical manuscripts and rare Talmud fragments among its holdings. These are unusual because 16th-century Europe experienced mass burnings of Talmud manuscripts.

Technology contributes to the study of these fragments and major libraries are, or have completed, digitizing their collections. The goal is to generate a worldwide database of digitized images, thereby enhancing the accessibility of the various collections and bringing them together. Other institutions involved are Cambridge University, Jewish Theological Seminary, John Ryland Library and the University of Pennsylvania.

Digital communications pioneer and philanthropist George Blumenthal of New York ( president, Center for Online Jewish Studies) and donated his organization's professional services to this project.

The ability to compare fragments in Oxford with those in Philadelphia, New York, Cambridge and Manchester will enable global scholars to access these collections and to identify matching fragments in different collections.

UK: 'Crossing Borders' manuscript exhibit opens

"Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures," is a major exhibition at Oxford University's Bodleian Library. It opened in December and will run through May 3..

It is based on the library's own Hebrew holdings - one of the largest and best Hebrew manuscript collections in the world.

The Bodleian’s Hebraica curator Dr Piet van Boxel is also librarian of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies Centre.


The exhibit describes how Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together during the Middle Ages, and illuminates the Jewish experience across Europe and the Middle East in the 300 years between the 13th-15th centuries.


On display are manuscripts written in Hebrew, Latin and Arabic which illustrate how Jews and non-Jews interacted socially and culturally in both the Muslim and Christian worlds.

Similar decorative patterns, writing styles, script types and text genres appear in manuscripts in different languages from the same region, showing how communities in the same localities shared taste and technology. While Hebrew manuscripts from Spain, Italy or Northern Europe look different, they resemble non-Hebrew books from the same places.


Hebrew scribes adopted elements of the surrounding culture, sharing co-existence, cultural affinity and cooperation between Jews and their neighbors.


The illustration above left is a carpet page from the Kennicott Bible, an illustrated Spanish Hebrew manuscript of the 14th and 15th centuries.

According to the exhibit site, interactive digital technology allows visitors to "turn the pages" of the manuscript virtually.

One prayer book - the Michael Mahzor - produced in Germany in 1258, was illuminated by a Christian who didn't know Hebrew; the first illustration is painted upside down.

The exhibit runs through May 3 in the Bodleian's exhibition hall. It is open Monday-Friday 9am-5pm, Saturday 9am-4.30pm and Sunday 11am-5pm. No admission fee.

For more information, click here.

Washington DC: Russian Judaica Collections, Feb. 3

St. Petersburg, Russia, is the home of unique Hebrew manuscripts, which are the focus of a Library of Congress lecture at noon, Wednesday, February 3.

The city's libraries, archives, institutes and museums hold many unique artifacts of Jewish culture, such as more than 15,000 items in The National Library of Russia, which holds the Abraham Firkovich collection. The Leib Friedland collection of manuscripts and rare books is at the Library of the Academy of Sciences, while the Museum of Ethnography houses S. An-sky's Pale of Settlement ethnographic expeditions material.

The Russian Museum of Ethnography's Judaica curator Shimon Iakerson PhD, will present this program at noon in the African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room, Room LJ220 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public; tickets not required.

The leading scholar in the field of Hebrew incunabula (books printed before the year 1501), and the author of several books on the subject, Iakerson is also senior researcher at the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 2005, he received the first Honorable Medal presented at the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress in Jerusalem for his two-volume work, "Catalogue of Hebrew Incunabula from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America" (New York and Jerusalem, 2004-2005).

In 2009, he won the Antsiferov Award, an international prize in honor of the historian N.P. Antsiferov, for his overall contributions to the field of St. Petersburg studies for his most recent work, "Jewish Treasures of Petersburg: Scrolls, Codices, Documents" (Evreiskie sokrovisha Peterburga), St. Petersburg 2008.

Iakerson's book presents a selection of examples of 16th-17th century medieval manuscripts, incunabula and unique works such as richly illuminated manuscripts, individual pages of "lost" works, classic works and more. Unfortunately, the text of the 240-page text - with more than 140 color illustrations - is only in Russian. The cost is $299, through The Hermitage Museum online store.

See a newspaper article - Jewish Treasures Survive The Czars - about some of these treasures from the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, from April 15, 1995. The Jewish Heritage Society here offers more information, as does the Petersburg Judaica Center. Here are details on a book, "Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expeditions," by Eugene M. Avrutin, ed, which includes 170 photos from the Pale of Settlement.

Sephardic researchers should know that St. Petersburg was home to Sephardim from the Netherlands (who were invited by the Czar), that the Russian court physician was the Sephardic Ribeira Sanchez, and that Russian collections hold Sephardic manuscripts.

The Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division is the center for the study of some 78 countries and regions from Southern Africa to the Maghreb and from the Middle East to Central Asia. The division’s Hebraic Section is one of the world’s foremost centers for the study of Hebrew and Yiddish materials.

Tracing the Tribe has often found materials of interest for our family history among the many resources in the Hebraic Section.

New Blog: Jewish food - and genealogy!

Tori calls herself a shiksa (a Yiddish term, generally negative, for a non-Jewish female) married to an Israeli-born Jewish husband.

Her blog is all about Jewish food. Her most recent post is Part I of "Uncle Dov’s Memoir: Polish Ashkenazi Food and Traditions."

My friend Etti Hadar descends from a Polish family. Her maternal ancestors, the Levin family, lived in the Pinsk region of Poland (now considered Belarus) in a small town called Luninets. While researching her ancestry, Etti found a 280 page memoir written by her late uncle, Dov Shimon “Beraleh” Levin. Dov grew up in Poland in a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish family. He later served in Italy in the Jewish Infantry Brigade, and fought the Nazis during World War II. His memoir describes in great detail what Jewish life was like in Poland during the 1920’s and 30’s.

The post provides many glimpses of Eastern European Jewish life that should be very interesting for Jewish and other genealogists. Part II will cover some recipes and dishes prepared by the Levin family. Tori and her friend Etti selected a few of them and recreated a Polish Shabbat dinner. With Etti's mother, they spent a day preparing a feast.

Since meeting her husband, Tori has traveled the world learning about Jewish cuisine, and friends and family have shared their culinary knowledge, keeping traditions alive.

She's now working on a first cookbook, "The Shiksa in the Kitchen," which will include recipes gathered from international Jewish family kitchens.

I am fascinated by the traditions and history associated with Jewish cuisine. Food is a way of communicating; the energy we pass on through our cooking feeds the body as well as the soul. By recording the stories and recipes of Jewish family cooks, I hope to help preserve and cherish the past, present, and future of the Jewish people.

Visit Tori's blog and read Parts I and II about Uncle Dov's 280-page manuscript.

Everything has a Jewish genealogy hook to it, including cuisine!