Jewish Historical Society Downsizes To Digitize

The People of the Book are getting rid of a few — and for one day you could get them wholesale, as many as you could stuff into a bag.

Those books on the market were the centerpiece of a fundraiser for the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven (JHS), billed as a Festival of Second-hand Jewish Books.

It unfolded Sunday afternoon at the Ethnic Heritage Center building at 270 Fitch St. The goal was to free up space and get the JHS inventory a little more aligned with their mission.

Amid display cases of artifacts from a hundred years of New Haven synagogues, schools, and beloved delis, the society’s president, Michael Dimenstein, and volunteersa laid out on about a thousand Jewish books on a half-dozen tables. 

Books ranged from encyclopedias to kid fare to popular trade books of general Jewish interest, like Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, to the traditional Jewish texts and commentaries.

They were there for purchase, both for possible Hanukah gifts and also to help New Haveners in the larger community learn more about the society, which in a couple of years will itself turn a half century.

“We hope to find loving homes for them,” said the society’s archive manager, Nicole Zador, of the books for sale.

Case in point was Ian Wollman, who teaches Chinese at the Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Wallingford and has been in the Elm City for only two years. Wollman used to visit New Haven when his grandmother lived here, and he’s friendly with one of the society’s board members, Jordan Levin. 

So there’s some history there. 

After an hour’s prospecting among the table-top treasures, Wollman selected two books on the not-unrelated arts of Jewish cooking and noshing, one on the history of the Jews in America, and his prize find: A 1996 Jewish Guide to the Internet.

“I was 5 years old when this came out,” Wollman said. He found it intriguing that the volume — basically an internet browser in the form of an old fashioned printed book — emerged as such before there was anything like browsers such as Mozilla/Firefox or Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.

The main reason for the de-accessioning sale, according to Dimenstein and Zador, is space. Or lack thereof.

The thousand books on the tables had been gathered over the decades, gifts that were accepted by the JHS in the absence of rigorous, professional library/archive guidelines and acquisition policy, and all that is now changing.

“These,” Zador said of the books for sale, ​“don’t bear specific relevance to JHS’s mission, which is to collect, preserve, and share documents and publications and artifacts that specifically chronicle the Jewish history of New Haven,” not just anywhere.

The books’ departure will free up precious room to make more available for the collection does have. That is about a thousand linear feet of documents; 400 audio interviews, which include about 300 oral histories of New Haven-residing Holocaust survivors; and 800 objects or artifacts.

The latter include like Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s purse, which she mistakenly left in town when she was visiting her son in the mid-1970s while he was on the Yale University faculty.

The artifacts include coffee mugs with a bagel-esque hole in them that were created by Lender’s Bagel company, and hangers from a wide range of Jewish clothing stores over the decades, such as Enson’s, which this year marks its centennial.

There is also the milkshake machine from Chucky’s Luncheonette on Whalley Avenue, the corner stone of an Orthodox synagogue that broke from Mishkan Israel after it decided to join the Reform movement, and an original ​“Oak Street” street sign — a survivor of the 1960s urban redevelopment era that once looked out over the long-gone immigrant business corridor that is now Route 34.

Objects like these, along with extensive institutional records (synagogue meetings, documents of Jewish schools, founding and other documents of Bna’i Brith and other early and historic New Haven Jewish social service organizations), tell the Jewish story in New Haven and now will have more room to breathe, and for the collections to grow.

In the coming year, Dimenstein, Zador, and the largely volunteer organization hope to make more of the society’s records available online and develop better cataloging protocols and finding aids, said Zador.

That would serve the dozens of researchers who are in touch with the JHS, both local and from around the country and the world. These include students (both undergraduate and graduate), genealogical researchers, and family members exploring and researching their New Haven connections.

It’s important, said Zador, to migrate the 300 Holocaust survivor interview tapes from a current, fragile VHS format to MP3 or other longer-lasting files. And to make all the audiovisual material more available to the public.

Dimenstein said the clock is also very much ticking in finding and professionally recording the oral histories of the some 45 Holocaust survivors still living, mostly in New Haven, whose testimonies have not yet been recorded. 

Click here for a previous story about the JHS’s oral history initiative. Zador, whose professional library training focused on oral histories, would lead such efforts and the call is already out for volunteers to come in for training.

“We have strong holdings in institutional Jewish life, and we’re looking to augment personal chronicles, especially of Jewish women,” Zador added.

This is the second year in which Dimenstein has been leading the JHS, working to clarify the mission while the group is confronting limited space at the Ethnic Heritage Center building that JHS shares with its sister organizations, the African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, and Ukrainian-American historical societies.

No further dates have been set for dispositions of the books not sold, but the books are there. And there are always more Jewish holiday gift occasions. 

For contributions, notices about upcoming educational programming, and more information, contact info@jewishhistorynh.org