Summer 2023
We have a lot to report on since last summer!
New collection highlights:
- In January of 2023 Dr. Yolande Cohen donated
an important collection about Moroccan Jewish immigrants to Montreal
consisting of audio and video interviews done between 1980 and
2014. The material includes interview transcripts and background
information on Moroccan Jewish culture.
- We received the Nathan Dlusy and Family collection which
vividly documents the life of a fallen WWII soldier and his legacy.
- We are in the process of inventorying a recent acquisition of
pre and postwar documents from Helen Kern
Scharf. As some of the material is also relevant to the
mandate of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, we will be sharing scans
of these documents with the Museum for their use in education and
displays.
- Ten lifecycle register books have been
acquired from the now-defunct Chevra Thilim Linas Hazedek /
Pinsker Kinyan Torah synagogue. The registers had been in
the possession of the congregation's last rabbi since it closed in
1993.
- At the end of last summer we received additional boxes of
photographs and documents from the Na'amat Pioneer
Women national office and Montreal Daroma Chapter office.
- We also added to the James Torczyner collection 6 boxes of
sociologically relevant papers about Project
Genesis, an ongoing initiative of which he was a
founder.
- Recently-received small collections of note include documents
from/ about the Rawas and Schouela families, Izydore Mesner and Mila Sandberg Mesner,
filmmaker Burton Rubenstein, activist and scholar
Gabrielle Tyrnauer, and audio materials featuring
Montreal labour leader Albert Eaton.
- In total between July 1 2022 and the end of June 2023, the
Archives received the equivalent of 75 bankers' size boxes of
donated materials from various sources, including over 2000
photographs and upwards of 200 hours of audio / audiovisual
recordings.
Collections processing and collaborative projects:
- Last fall we helped the Shaare Zedek synagogue of
western NDG get project funding from the Québec Anglophone
Heritage Network, and from January to March we supervised a
student from McGill's School of Information Sciences in cataloguing
the historical documents kept at the synagogue. The project
culminated in a public presentation by congregation member Norman
Spatz drawing on the archival discoveries made in the course of the
project.
- In November, as part of the three-part "Archives
Roadshow" series of virtual panels organized by the Jewish Public
Library Archives, Archives director Janice Rosen spoke on
"An Object Lesson: Opening the Door to the Joseph and Wolff Family
Collection."
- In the 2022 fall semester we partnered with the
Concordia institute for Canadian Jewish studies by
offering support to the new initiative,
Performing the Canadian Jewish Archive (PCJA), during
which one student focused on Refusenik voices and another on
Creative Women's voices.
- The Canadian Jewish Archives contributed pertinent collection
descriptions to the EHRI portal on Holocaust related
resources. See: https://portal.ehri-project.eu/institutions/ca-005596.
- Continuing in our initiative with the Ontario Jewish Archives
to have the Canadian Jewish Congress archival
fonds recognized in the UNESCO Memory of the
World Register, we arranged for the inclusion of two other
Canadian Jewish repositories in the proposal, the JHCWC in Winnipeg
and the JHSBC in Vancouver. We have been informed that the now
cross-country scope of our project makes approval for inclusion in
this prestigious registry more likely.
- Having completed the indexing of the hundreds of hours
of audiovisual materials digitized for us by the Société
d'histoire et de généalogie Maria-Chapdelaine under a
federally-funded group project, Archives Assistant Helene Vallee
attended the launch of the Virtual Exhibit website LaVoute.tv, where more than two
dozen examples of films from the Canadian Jewish Archives are now
exhibited.
- Archives Assistant Helene Vallee progressed in eliminating
redundancies in the massive Canadian Jewish
Congress archival records group with the help of a student
paid by a McGill University internship in Quebec Studies program in
Spring 2023. Earlier in the year, with the help of interns from two
archival studies programs, she supervised the weeding of
duplications and surplus documents from the large James
Torczyner Canadian census analysis collection. These
labour-intensive projects have resulted in an increase in available
shelf space for future collecting.
- Archives technician Melissa Castron reviewed and catalogued the
extensive Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation
collection received in July 2022.
- Archives staff worked on arranging the Yolande Cohen
Moroccan Jewish interviews collection and the
Na'amat Pioneer Women photograph collection with
the help of student interns from the John Abbott College archival
studies program and the Concordia Canadian Jewish Studies
Internship program.
Presentations and publications:
- The 2022
edition of Canadian Jewish Studies, the journal of the
Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, contained a "The Archives
Matter" section edited by Janice Rosen. In addition to herself,
archivists from the VHEC in Vancouver, the JHHSA in Calgary, and
the Ottawa Jewish Archives contributed to the section, writing on
the theme of poetry holdings in archives.
- In July and August 2022 Janice Rosen presented two virtual
overviews of the Canadian Jewish Archives, the first to a group of
religious collection archivists within the Society of American
Archivists and the second to a similar group in the Association of
Canadian Archivists.
- In September 2022 and in January 2023 Janice Rosen spoke to
virtual groups about using the resources of the Canadian
Jewish Archives, with presentations tailored to a
university class in the History department of York University and
the Quebec Studies department of McGill University.
- On May 29 Janice Rosen organized and chaired a panel on
digitization which was presented at the Association for
Canadian Jewish Studies annual conference in Toronto, in the
context of the Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities
conference at York University. The panel, made up of archivists
from Jewish repositories in Quebec and Ontario, consisted of
Archives Technician Melissa Castron and representatives from the
Jewish Public Library Archives and the Ontario Jewish
Archives.
- In March the Archives hosted an onsite class of Public History
students from Concordia University which included the students
doing a hands-on study of WWII refugee youth
documents. This format became the model for a similarly
hands-on group workshop for Museum of Jewish Montreal Research
Fellows which we presented on our premises in May.
- On June 19 2023 the staff of the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish
Archives presented a three-hour workshop on what goes into
setting up an archives. The 10 participants were
representatives from five community groups in the Montreal area;
the Quebec Board of Black Educators, the Park Extension Historical
Society, the Union United Church, the Black Community Resource
Centre, and the Greenwood Centre of Hudson, Quebec. This workshop
was commissioned by the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network in the
context of a program called "Mentorat, aide et formation en
patrimoine Communautaire 2023-2026"; in English "Mentorship Assistance and Training for Community
Heritage (MATCH)", funded by the Government of Quebec's
Secrétariat aux relations avec les Québécois d'expression anglaise
(SRQEA).
Onsite and remote research:
- Usage of the Canadian Jewish Archives continues high, with 280
onsite researchers recorded in 2022, and over 700 instances of
remote assistance.
Grants and donations:
- At the beginning of this report period we received a three year
bonus allocation from the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales
du Québec (BAnQ), which has allowed us to add a now indispensable
third person, Melissa Castron, to our full-time
staff.
- In March we received a $5000 donation from the Labour
Zionist Trust, which is being used for expenses related to
our physical space; a much appreciated supplement due to the 2023
increase to our rent.
- At the beginning of summer 2023 we received a $10,250
one-time grant from the BAnQ designated for the purchase of
digitization equipment. This has been used to purchase a
new high resolution flatbed scanner and its associated computer
station.
- At the end of the summer we received a generous personal
donation from Peter Usher, which is being used to enhance
the way we present our collections online.