The Jewish Public Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to present JPL Curates as a platform for digital storytelling. Building on the photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, and artifacts in over 400 fonds in our Archives, and the antiquarian and rare materials of the Special Collections (including books, postcards, chapbooks, and pamphlets), we seek to invite visitors through our front doors and into several centuries of history and culture.

The materials we are exploring are unique and one of a kind; however, to the people who read them, studied them, and shared them with one another at the time of their creation, they were a quotidien part of life. Jewish archives in particular emerged as an idea as far back as the 6th century with the Cairo Geniza and through the medieval and early modern periods in which collections of recorded documents were subject to frequent dispersions and destruction in parallel to the communities which kept them. Jewish archives as an idea assumed a unique status in the historiographical discourse after 1945: the efforts of people like Abraham Sutzkever and others who squirrelled away the YIVO collections from Vilna to New York, and elevated the importance and necessity of the written record in the face of a long oral tradition in which many of the storytellers had perished.

Back in 2014 when the JPL turned 100, its first exhibition of rare books was entitled “A Roomful of Dwellings.” The idea was that each book in the collection could be imagined as a dwelling place. All stories – but especially Jewish ones – are rooms inside rooms.

JPL-Curates is a virtual roomful of dwellings that gathers stories from these collections. Our guiding principle is that learning and teaching are reciprocal acts of kindness, compassion, and convergence – convergence between our most remarkable collections and our diverse publics. While the Jewish Public Library has curated collections that are rich in Jewish content, the stories we tell through these collections are universal and inclusive.