JPress: The Historical Jewish Press Project
The Jewish press, in its many languages, is an invaluable source of information on the history and culture of world Jewry and on the countries and regions of Jews' residence in the modern era. NLI’s flagship Historical Jewish Press (JPress) project allows researchers to search the entire archive of all the published text of a given newspaper. JPress hopes to make available online the majority of Jewish newspapers and journals published throughout history, including extremely rare newspapers to which access had been previously impossible. The site includes hundreds of newspapers in 25 languages, published in numerous periods and places over the course of 240 years.
This website's initiators, Tel Aviv University and the National Library of Israel, invite additional partners and contributors to join in this project.
Preserving Ethiopian heritage at the Library
NLI, in partnership with the Ethiopian Jewry Heritage Center and the Orit Guardians program at Tel Aviv University, in October 2024 proudly announced a new digitization project to scan and make available the rare holy books and manuscripts of the Beta Israel community. Until now, most of these items were held by the community’s Kesim (clergy) in private homes or Beta Israel synagogues and remained inaccessible to the public.
The manuscripts are written in the sacred language of Ge'ez and include the Octateuch known as the Orit (the Torah of Beta Israel comprising the five books of the Torah and the books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth), the Jewish apocryphal texts of Jubilees and Enoch, prayerbooks such as the Book of Psalms, holy books held by descendants of Kesim, and more.
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