Highlights of 2012 at the CJCCC National
Archives
by Janice Rosen, Archives Director
2012 brought in a bumper crop of
acquisitions: The CJCCCNA holdings expanded by more than
100 boxes over the past year. While much of this quantity was due
to the ceasing of Canadian Jewish Congress' operations across
Canada, many of the smaller additions can be attributed to our
increased visibility via the CJHN website. Factoring into this
total are donations from two synagogues; over a century's worth of
minutes, newsletters and cemetery records from the venerable
Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, and administrative and
life cycle records from the historically complex Chevra Shaas Adath Jushurun Shevet Achim
Chaverim Kol Israel. Of particular interest among the
collections about individuals received in 2012 are the Philip
Schachter collection and the Joe Jacobson
series of the Percy and Joe Jacobson collection, both containing
original diaries and letters written by World War II Jewish
servicemen. Additions to our audiovisual holdings include a series
of video interviews by Sharon Gubbay Helfer on Jewish-Christian
dialogue-related themes.
This was also a record year for student internships: In
2012 McGill student Ilana Donahue became the first Jewish Studies
intern to work at the Archives, helping with diverse research and
scanning jobs on a part time basis over several months. John Abbott
College Library student Trista Nerenberg worked from January to
March on a variety of assignments, including the digitization of
many Lou Seligson profiles and sketches. McGill
Library School student 
Shannon May spent an 80 hour summer term internship
cataloguing the newly-received Chevra Shaas Adath Jushurun Shevet
Achim collection, and University of Montreal Library School student
Patrick Boivin 
helped project worker Shirley Brodt complete
the cataloguing of the Spanish and
Portuguese Synagogue archives and digitized the portions
selected for online display, during a 10 week combined
internship and Young Canada Works grant-funded position.
Meanwhile, Shirley Sibalis, Willie Glaser and Eunice Seligson, the
Archives' loyal trio of volunteers, have continued
to work along with Assistant Archivist Hélène Vallée on the
cataloguing of CJC records and small collections.
We helped the CJHN expand and diversify:
The Canadian Jewish
Heritage Network website has seen impressive growth over the
past 12 months. In the first part of the year a Mobile Interface
and cross-database "One-Search" features were added to the site.
Following this, with the help of a Partnership Project special
allocation from the Alexander Dworkin Foundation for Jewish
Archives, we were able to help bring two new partners into the archival database of the site: the Montreal
Holocaust Memorial Centre and the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue
archives. Much of the database work involved in adding the
Synagogue and the Holocaust Centre collections to the CJHN was
carried out by project worker Shirley Brodt, drawing on
her experience in doing this for the holdings of the Congregation
Shaar Hashomayim last year. In summer 2012 the Holocaust Centre
joined the CJHN as a full partner, and their staff are now
modifying and uploading data directly to the site. A third new
contributor, the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum of New
Brunswick, under our direction very recently added over 6600 names
and associated information to the Genealogy database of the CJHN, with plans to
contribute to the archival listings, with the assistance of the JPL
archivist, by the end of the year or early in 2013. This new
contribution comprises the first addition of records from outside
the province of Quebec, and marks the beginning of a new phase in
the growth of what has become a much-praised and increasingly
utilized public resource.