About 20 tons of unusable religious books and other materials were interred today at Shalom Memorial Park in Palestine in a city-wide Geniza ceremony sponsored by the Chicago Rabbinical Council and in which more than 50 synagogues in this area participated.
The custom of Geniza, in which worn-out religious books and other items are interred, dates back to antiquity and has been a great boon to archaeologists and Biblical scholars who have unearthed valuable parchments buried centuries ago. Two famous discoveries along these lines were the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and the parchments in the Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt at the turn of the century.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
