Authority Work as Memorial to the Victims of October 7th and the Iron Swords war at the National Library of Israel

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14263/23/2024/1423

Keywords:

October 7th, authority records, emotional labor, Israel-Hamas war

Abstract

On the 7th of October 2023, Hamas terrorists staged the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Within days, the National Library of Israel (NLI), acting as an international memory institution of the Jewish people, began collecting materials associated with the attack and the ensuing war for a memorial project named Bearing Witness. This essay describes the work done by a small group of catalogers to create authority files for the fallen, working under pressure of deadlines, public scrutiny, and life in a war zone.

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Author Biographies

Dr. Ahava Cohen, Cataloging Section, National Library of Israel

Ahava Cohen serves as head of the cataloguing section at the National Library of Israel and is a member of the Israeli Inter-University Cataloguing Committee. She holds a doctorate in RDA from Bar Ilan University, Israel. Cohen teaches cataloguing, classification and indexing in the David Yellin College MLIS program in Jerusalem, Israel, and heads the national continuing professional development program in cataloguing.

On the international front, Cohen is the European representative to the RDA Steering Committee.

Ester Taga, Foreign cataloging department, National Library of Israel

Team Leader, Foreign cataloging department at National Library of Israel
M.A. in Librarianship, David Yellin College of Education

A book label of the Kedem bookstore in Tel Aviv, established there after partner Lipa Bronstein of the Berlin store (opened 1921) escaped the Nazis in 1938. The store address, at the corner of Yonah ha-Navi and Allenby streets, displays an abbreviation (str.) for the word Strasse (street, in German), creating Hebrew-German portmanteau words. See Zvi Barsky's article in this issue, "Jewish immigrant booksellers from Germany and Central Europe in Palestine, 1933–1939."

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Published

2024-12-29

How to Cite

Cohen, Ahava, and Ester Taga. 2024. “Authority Work As Memorial to the Victims of October 7th and the Iron Swords War at the National Library of Israel”. Judaica Librarianship 23 (December):84-91. https://doi.org/10.14263/23/2024/1423.

Issue

Vol. 23 (2024)

Section

Essays and Research

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Copyright (c) 2024 Dr. Ahava Cohen, Ester Taga

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.