New developments on the ground and on the web
Since our last newsletter a major community reorganization
resulted in the merging of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the
Canadian Israel Committee, the University Outreach Committee and
the Quebec-Israel Committee into a new entity; the Centre for
Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). While other activities of the CJC
Charities Committee have been scaled back as a result, the CJCCC
National Archives continues to thrive, thanks to generous
newly-initiated support from the Alex Dworkin Foundation for Jewish
Archives.
Over the past months we have been busy with several new
and ongoing projects:
As a
result of a Young Canada Works grant received from Canadian
Heritage this summer, the CJCCC National
Archives has been able to transfer onto the Canadian Jewish
Heritage Network most of the Congregation
Shaar Hashomayim Museum and Archives items previously
displayed on the now defunct Canadian Jewish Virtual Museum and
Archives (CJVMA) website, which was taken over by CJCCCNA in
2004. Visitors can zero in on the Shaar Hashomayim
Museum's digitized materials and their descriptions by going
to the Advanced Search
page and ticking off the "ShaarHashomayim"
repository check box. 455 items are online at
present, all of them illustrated with either a photograph, a
multi-page PDF document, or a video clip.
Thanks to funding from Penny Rubinoff and from the Jewish
Genealogical Society of Montreal we have continued to add
genealogical information to the CJHN's Family History search engine, to the
delight of many researchers, some of whom have shared their success
stories with us. We were especially gratified to learn that our
Jewish Colonization Association colonist reports had helped
researchers at JAHSENA (the Jewish Archives and Historical Society
of Edmonton and Northern Alberta) discover the fate of one of the
families who founded the "lost" colony of Pine Lake,
Saskatchewan.
We are also in the process of finishing the cataloguing of
audiovisual materials donated to us many years ago by filmmaker
Jacques Bensimon, related to the making of his
historic film "20 ans après" which documents the mood of Montreal's
Moroccan Jewish community in the turbulent years of 1970s Quebec.
This project was funded by a grant from the Bibliotheque et
Archives nationales du Québec.
Notable among the new collections we have acquired
over the past year is a treasure trove of original caricature
drawings by artist Lou Seligson, all accompanied
by his trademark biographical profiles. We expect to display
samples of these works on the Canadian Jewish Heritage Network once
the collection has been arranged by our long-time volunteer Shirley
Sibalis, assisted by Seligson's widow Eunice, who donated the
material.
We are looking forward to another busy year, as 2011 winds down
and 2012 beckons.