February 3, 2010: Shimon Iakerson Lecture at Library of Congress

News from the Library of Congress
Press contact: Audrey Fischer (202) 707-0022
January 8, 2010
Judaica Collections in Russia Subject of Feb. 3 Lecture At the Library of Congress

Shimon Iakerson, curator of Judaica at the Russian Museum of Ethnography, will deliver a presentation on "Unique Hebrew Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, Russia" at the Library of Congress at noon on Wednesday, Feb. 3, in the African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room, located in Room LJ220 of the Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public; tickets are not required.

Iakerson is the preeminent scholar in the field of Hebrew incunabula (books printed before the year 1501), and the author of several books on the subject. In addition to his curatorial duties at the Russian Museum of Ethnography, he is the 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."

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a personalized website at myLOC.gov.

The Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division (www.loc.gov/rr/amed/) 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.

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PR 10-004
01/08/10
ISSN 0731-3527

New on-line resources of interest

Highlights from the Braginsky collection are now on-line here.

Shnayer (Sid) Leiman has put much of his scholarship on-line here.

Dan Wyman Booksellers has a new on-line catalog of Jewish liturgical history here.

And the Andy Holt Virtual Library at the University of Tennessee has compiled this page with references to key medieval textual studies web resources.