New Programs at the Library of Congress

Upcoming Exhibition October 25, 2012 through March 16, 2013 The exhibition will be on view 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, from Oct. 25, 2012, through March 16, 2013, in the South Gallery of the Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. To help us celebrate the opening we are planning a number of events, starting with a talk by Dr. Emile Schrijver, Curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, University of Amsterdam, on Thursday, October 25th, at 12 noon in our Reading Room: The Jewish Book since the Invention of Printing We are also pleased to announce the publication of our latest book: Perspectives on the Hebraic Book The Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lectures at the Library of Congress The book will be launched with a panel discussion at noon on Monday, October 29, by some of the outstanding scholars who contributed to it. The discussion, which will take place in LJ119 (rather than the usual LJ220, our Reading Room), will be followed by a book sale and signing. For more information on these and many other upcoming events, please click on: http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/Upcomingevents/UpcomingEvents.html

Kiev Fellowships Announced

from the George Washington University website: "Kiev Judaica Research Fellowship Winners Announced The I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection of the George Washington University Libraries is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012-2013 Kiev Judaica Collection Research Fellowships. Awarded every two years, the Fellowships provide stipends of $750 for a GW undergraduate and $2,500 for a graduate, post-graduate, or independent scholar to conduct research using the Kiev Judaica Collection. The Senior Fellowship has been awarded this year to Professor Barry Trachtenberg , director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Prof. Trachtenberg will make use of the bibliographic and other resources of the Kiev Collection in the completion of his book-length study on the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, the first comprehensive encyclopedia in Yiddish, launched in Berlin in 1932 on the eve of the Nazi period. Prof. Trachtenberg, who received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, has lectured and published widely on the history of Yiddish scholarship. "I'm thrilled to have been awarded the Kiev Fellowship. The staff and diverse Yiddish and Hebrew-language resources of the Kiev Judaica Collection will be of tremendous help with my research project on the Yiddish encyclopedia," said Dr. Trachtenberg. The recipient of this year’s Kiev Junior Fellowship is Ms. Aviv Becher, a Judaic Studies and English major at GW. Her planned Honors thesis in Judaic Studies and English will examine the relevance of modern Hebrew poetry to Jewish religious life in Israel and the Diaspora. In the course of her interdisciplinary research, Ms. Becher will be able to make use of a variety of Hebrew, literary and liturgical materials in the Kiev Collection. Ms. Becher stated: “I am grateful for the opportunity to deepen my studies of Modern Hebrew poetry by tracing historically the theological roots of the discipline in the Kiev Collection. The Collection is such an asset to the university and I feel fortunate to have such free access to its holdings.” These awards mark the second iteration of the Kiev Fellowships. The first Senior Fellow was Dr. Jonathan Skolnik, Assistant Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who worked on German, Hebrew, and Yiddish Writers in 1920s Berlin, focusing in particular on German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler. The first Junior Fellow was Ms. Robin Janofsky, a GW History major and pre-Law student, who wrote about the American Jewish community’s relationship to Abraham Lincoln; her Honors thesis is now held in the Lincoln Presidential Library. Established by Dr. Ari and Phyllis Kiev in 1996, the Kiev Judaica Collection is based on the private library of Dr. Kiev’s father, Rabbi Dr. I. Edward Kiev (1905-1975), one of the preeminent Judaica librarians of the 20th century. Housed since 1998 in the Kiev Room of the Gelman Library, the collection contains more than 28,000 volumes, along with Jewish graphic art, archives, recorded music, ephemera, artifacts and ritual objects. For more information visit http://library.gwu.edu/collections/kiev"

Updates from the Kiev Collection

FYI - several new web and social media pages devoted to the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection at George Washington University, Washington, DC : KIEV JUDAICA COLLECTION WEBSITE: http://library.gwu.edu/collections/kiev FACEBOOK PAGE FOR THE KIEV COLLECTION: http://www.facebook.com/IEdwardKievJudaicaCollection PINTEREST BOARD FOR THE KIEV COLLECTION: http://pinterest.com/gelmanlibrary/i-edward-kiev-judaica-collection/ PINTEREST BOARD FOR BOOKS BY DR. ARI KIEV: http://pinterest.com/gelmanlibrary/books-by-dr-ari-kiev/ with collegial greetings from the cloud. :) -- Brad Sabin Hill Curator The I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection Gelman Library The George Washington University 2130 H Street NW, suite 709C Washington, DC 20052 USA

September 12 in New York: Lecture and Exhibition Opening at Columbia

From Michelle Chesner:

August 21: Lecture on 16th-century Hebrew Books at the Library of Congress

September 27-28: Conference on Manuscripts in Multiple Languages and Scripts

MANUSCRITOS PLURILINGÜES Y PLURIGRÁFICOS DE ORIENTE Y OCCIDENTE Comité: Giuseppe Mandalà, Alex Metcalfe, Inmaculada Pérez Martín 27-28 Septiembre 2012 Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas C/ Albasanz 26-28, 28037 Madrid The conference deals with the evidence of manuscripts and handwritten documents with multilingual and/or multigraphic structures in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and/or Greek. The congress aims to connect research frameworks forging new, cross-cultural debates between disciplines, including palaeography, codicology, history, art history, linguistics, and sociology. Particular attention will be given to three regions: 1. Sicily and the Italian mainland 2. The Iberian Peninsula 3. Syria–Palestine The chronological range is broadly medieval, from the sixth to fifteenth centuries. Papers will be based around research aspects of the following two themes: 1. manuscripts: including holy books, scientific and legal texts, literature and theology, glossaries, lexicons, grammars, and other texts for learning a foreign language 2. documents (public, semi-public and private) with particular reference to multilingual chanceries and/or inter-state relationships in the medieval Mediterranean. Línea “Oriente en Occidente. Desafiando fronteras”, CCHS, CSIC Directora: Mercedes García-Arenal Coordinación científica: Giuseppe Mandalà Apoyo técnico: Regina Chatruch del Rio, Amina Naciri Azzouz contacto: giuseppe.mandala@cchs.csic.es tel. +34 916022698 www.cchs.csic.es

Updates to Catalog of Hebrew Manuscripts at NLI

FROM H-JUDAIC: From: Yael Okun [mailto:Yael.Okun@nli.org.il] Sent: Tue 7/31/2012 9:13 AM Subject: Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts Catalogue We are delighted to announce that The National Library of Israel's online catalogue now includes more than 4000 linked records to freely available digitized Hebrew manuscripts online (post-dating the Dead Sea Scrolls) from institutions around the world, including 1000 on the NLI website itself. These represent many more Judaica records than are currently available through either the Digital Scriptorium or the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts or similar digitized manuscript aggregators. As we continue to add links, we aim to serve as the global access portal for Hebrew digitized manuscripts. Most of the scans are full color; only a minority are in black and white - namely, digitizations of microfilms rather than scans from the original manuscript. Usually, these represent full codices, but sometimes single pages serve as samples of a larger work, or alternatively represent the complete extant fragment. We do not link items accessed for a fee or via subscription (thus, Cairo Genizah items available via the Friedberg Genizah Project or similar projects are not included). Also, as we don't catalog individual Genizah fragments, digitized items available at the Princeton University Genizah Project (The Princeton Geniza Project ) are not included in our database. We are aware of, and are working to include, the digitized microfilms of JTS and HUC mss and the Chaim Reich collection facsimiles, now being uploaded at Hebrew Books.org and its affiliate Hebrew Manuscripts.org . Finally, we realize that many online items are not yet included in our collection of microfilmed manuscripts and thus do not appear in our catalogue. Please be patient as we work to rectify the situation. For items that may be in error, or incomplete, or refer to unstable links, or were completely missed, we encourage you to inform us so we may correct and add to our growing collection. Institutions that upload Judaica manuscripts are urged to let us know so we may add links from/to our catalog records as soon as possible. 1. Search for Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts The National Library of Israel's home page is The National Library of Israel ; from there, click on the Library's "Online Catalogue," and then to "Manuscripts" in the drop down menu of "libraries." (Or go directly to IMHM Online Catalogue ) To locate all records with links to digitized manuscripts online, search in our online catalogue "Basic search [????? ?????]:" under "subject[??????] " field, type "digitized manuscripts[??? ??. ?????] ". To limit the search to a specific subject, search under "Advanced search [????? ?????] " with items "digitized [?????]" and the relevant subject (e.g. ???? for all biblical related mss). To sort the results by location, click on "source/title [???? ]" in the upper section of the screen. Results may appear in either "table" or "brief" formats. 2. Browse Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts To simply browse through all digitized manuscripts on the NLI digital website itself (at this point, about 1000 items, including but not limited to 250 from the Rosenthaliana collection in Amsterdam; 100 from Columbia University in NY; 50 from the Braginsky collection in Zurich; as well as nearly 400 of NLI's own collection), click Digital Collections at The National Library of Israel . 3. Rabbinics Mss Online The old Talmud Mss Online website is in the process of being dismantled. In its place, we are happy to refer readers to the new and more comprehensive Rabbinics Manuscripts Online (still in beta mode but to be updated significantly on a consistent basis). We must clarify a legal point: just because we link to, or feature on our website, fully digitized manuscripts, either owned by The National Library or other institutions, this does not represent permission for use from either The National Library or those other institutions, for any use exceeding the Fair Use provisions defined by law, which include private research. Only explicit permission in writing from the institutional owners of the manuscripts themselves and the copyright holders may grant authorization for additional use. Department of Manuscripts & The Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts The National Library of Israel Jerusalem, Israel