Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People Jerusalem (CAHJP)

• International
• Gemeinschaft

The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) were established in 1939. They hold the archives of hundreds of Jewish communities, as well as of local, national and international Jewish organizations and the private collections of many outstanding Jewish personalities.

The Board of Directors is composed of representatives of the Government of Israel, The Historical Society of Israel, The Jewish Agency for Israel, The Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University.

On January 30, 2013 The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People and the National Library of Israel (NLI) signed an agreement to implement a merger between the Archives and the Library.
By joining the Library the Archives will be able to avail themselves of the Library’s resources and facilities to gain access to more and more repositories of Jewish archival material and to make the contents of their vast holdings more available to a wider public.

The archive contains original and copies of documents and files from Jewish communities, organizations and individuals from 54 countries. There are over 60,000,000 pages; some of the material is in excellent condition. Some documents are in need of repair and restoration. The material reflects the history of the Jewish people for most of the past 1000 years. The languages represented include: Arabic, English, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Turkish and Yiddish.

Some of the material purchased by the archive is currently the only surviving source, as some of the original archives have been destroyed by various natural and human-caused disasters. The archive’s first priority is the acquisition of further material from endangered archives in the world. In particular, it is believed that there is an exceptional opportunity nowadays to purchase copies of material from archives and libraries in Eastern Europe and Asia in places that were not accessible in the past.

Entry prepared on November 2018.

http://cahjp.nli.org.il/
Jerusalem historical libraries and archives revisited, Revised report prepared for Open Jerusalem, October 2014, Merav Mack

Author : Open Jerusalem http://www.openjerusalem.org/