Zvi Yekutiel, director of the Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, located in Jerusalem, has announced the creation of a new Archive of Slides on the History of the Jewish people. It is hoped that the collection of close to 5000 slides will be utilized by high school instructors, university professors and public lecturers as an audio-visual tool for teaching Jewish history.
The Archive of Slides, which Yekutiel said, has been assembled with the assistance of a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, is coordinated by Yaokov Schiby, librarian of the Center. Schiby, who was born in Salonika, Greece and graduated from the Hebrew University, is an expert in Judeo-Greek of the Middle Ages and recently received a grant to publish a dictionary of this language. He has compiled 45 different series of slides, which are described in the Archive’s catalogue, to be issued in September. Dr. David Geffen, Educational Director of the Center, is preparing an English version of the catalogue.
Among the categories of slides included in the collection are: economic life during the Biblical period; Mosada; the role of the Yishuv during World War II; Jewish homelife in America; illuminated Ketubot; nineteenth century synagogues in America; synagogues in Eastern Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries; Jerusalem architecture; Jews of Morocco; and Jews of Tunisia.
The Zalman Shazar Center was established in 1973 by the Historical Society of Israel, with the assistance of the Israeli government, to perpetuate the memory of Shneur Zalman Shazar, the third president of Israel and honorary president of the Israeli Historical Society.
The Center seeks to faster a Jewish historical consciousness among Israelis and to make the fruits of Jewish scholarship available to Jews in Israel and throughout the world. Among the services provided by the Center, in addition to the Slide Archive, are public historical lectures and conferences, seminars for high school history teachers, the publication of studies and texts in Jewish history and a central, 7000 volume library, which includes the library of the late President Shazar. In addition to the slides, the Center has also published 26 books during the first four years of its existence.
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