Saving Shards: The National Library of Israel

Julee Ogawa, Congregation Shir Hadash

February 21, 2024, Jerusalem: With heavy hearts we bid farewell to the bereaved families and friends whose encampment in front of the Knesset has grown since the start of the war. Their pictures and stories brought to life the painful experiences of losing loved ones. It reminded me that their losses are our losses as well.

Our group wandered down Kaplan Street to the new home of the National Library of Israel. This spectacular structure houses the National Collections Archives, the National Sound Archives, and two world-class research collections. The grand opening scheduled for the week of October 22, 2023 was interrupted due to the war; the event was scaled-back to a limited opening on October 29th.

We entered an immense, circular space where portions of the collections and the people studying them could be viewed. In a designated area, a long, illuminated wall of individual victims’ names and their faces were displayed. It was a masterful use of space, perhaps planned for something else, preserving the images of these victims who lost their lives in a tragic moment in history. Our history. I wanted to honor and remember them by looking at each person but there were far too many. My head and my heart hurt and could not handle the scope of the collective loss. I wanted to close my eyes, but for their sakes, I had to keep them open because they no longer had the option to see.

Next, we were escorted through a spiraling and complicated maze to find our study space. Raquel Ukeles, Ph.D., presented on the topic, “Bearing Witness: Documenting October 7th and Its Aftermath in Israel and the Jewish World”. She and her colleagues “realized they needed to grab this moment” and started their work as soon as October 9th to guide the field to a common archive. Because of the open platform nature of this work, it would be extremely difficult to collect, organize, and archive “shards” (massive amounts of documentary material) of the variety of sources from which they come. Dr. Ukeles anticipated that this project would take approximately five years to complete. The website is available now: https://www.nli.org.il/en

What hit me later (as I tried to keep my attention level high for the next presentation by Tomer Persico of Shalom Hartman Institute) was the unprecedented amount of work that lay ahead for Dr. Ukeles’ team working on the archive. The shards from October 7th are everywhere. Documentary evidence comes in a variety of forms. It comes from first-hand or second-hand accounts. It may be the last image seen, the last word spoken, or the last text received. How will the team sort through this unfiltered material while taking care to manage their own secondary trauma?

I plan to follow their work and applaud their foresight and courage to jump on a project for an event that is ongoing with no end in sight. This is our story too.

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