International Judaica Curators Conference 2024
In May 2024, 70 professional curators of Judaica collections from throughout the world convened at the Library for a three-day intensive learning experience on topics ranging from the challenges posed by AI to saving endangered archives to a session on the Library’s Bearing Witness project and the benefits and obstacles in collecting digital materials in real time. The conference culminated with the presentation of a White Paper on Judaica Provenance, a joint project of NLI and the Association of Jewish Libraries, outlining best practices for a field with unique complexities. The conference’s big success was in creating a sense of community, hope, and solidarity among colleagues, particularly during this difficult year. The Well educators’ seminar A group of 16 Jewish educators from across the globe arrived in Jerusalem in August 2024 to take part in The Well, an educational seminar at the Library under the auspices of Gesher L'Europa. The Well presented Library collections and projects as primary sources for the classroom and pedagogic tools for Jewish and Israel studies. Along with hands-on activities, lectures, discussions, and workshops, the seminar included immersive experiences and opportunities to share ideas, challenges, and questions with international colleagues. Hatikva: A National Anthem Comes Home Most national anthems are not originally composed as such. This is also true of the Israeli national anthem written by Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909), which received its status by virtue of the tremendous love and appreciation accorded to it by the Jewish people. “Tikvatenu” (“Our
Hope”) was first published in the Land of Israel in 1886 as a nine-stanza poem written in the genre of songs expressing yearning for Jerusalem. When Imber moved to the United States, he found that his (abridged) song had become the unofficial anthem of the Zionist Congress. In 1908, Imber was hospitalized in a Jewish hospital in New York. There he met Jeannette Robinson- Murphy, an American ethnomusicologist, who asked him to write down the lyrics of the only Hebrew song she knew how to sing. He took a piece of hospital stationery and jotted
down the original first two stanzas. In 1933, the eighteenth Zionist Congress declared “Hatikva” the Jewish national anthem. Three years later, Robinson-Murphy decided that the page she had received from Imber belonged in “the land of Zion, Jerusalem” and entrusted it to the National Library of Israel. This is the sole known autographed copy of “Hatikva” in the world.
(Excerpted from 101 Treasures from the National Library of Israel )
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