Manuscripts pertaining to Jewish life and lore in Eastern Europe, some of them at least 1000 years old, are being sold by the Soviet Union to the National Library in Ottawa as part of a new cultural exchange project between Canadian and Russian scholars, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned today. About 20,000 frames of microfilm representing 40,000 pages of manuscript, much of it hand written on parchment, have already arrived from Moscow.
They had been sealed away in the Soviet State Library since the Revolution in 1917. So far, $50,000 has been raised privately from Jewish and non-Jewish sources to finance the project, the total cost of which may reach $500,000. According to David Rome, former director of the Jewish Public Library in Montreal who initiated the exchange, the project represents “the rescue of the whole manuscript lore of Eastern European Jewish learning.”
All of the documents are of pre-18th century origin and some date as far back as the 10th century. Their value, according to scholars is religious and historical and allows comparisons to be made between original manuscripts and later known versions of the same document.
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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.
