Barack and Michelle Obama announced the design for the Obama Presidential Library. The structure will be designed by the husband and wife architectural team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Williams and Tsien have previously designed for organizations like The Jewish Theological Seminary, and The University of Chicago, which will host the library. The design…
Given that it’s is one if not the most essential Jewish texts, the Talmud can be surprisingly hard to come by. But not anymore: The Jewish start-up Sefaria just released a free digital version into the public domain. The William Davidson Talmud is an edition of the Babylonian Talmud with parallel translations into English and…
The greatest collection of rare Jewish historical documents in the United States will be boxed up later this year and put into storage until at least 2018, the Forward has learned. The library at Manhattan’s Jewish Theological Seminary — Conservative Judaism’s largest rabbinic seminary — holds the most impressive compilation of Jewish historical materials outside…
The art at the Brooklyn Public Library branch on Grand Army Plaza just got a little more frum and a little more Japanese. Through February, the library is featuring a black and white photo exhibit depicting the life and rituals of Crown Heights’ Chabad Lubavitch hasidim. The exhibit, entitled “The Hasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn;…
It’s a scenario that the Yiddish writers of yore could never have predicted, and yet by which they likely would have been tickled: Today, their work is being digitized with the help of a home-made scanner built by a former Baptist from Indiana who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As of mid…
A Russian court demanded on Thursday that the U.S. Library of Congress hand back seven precious Jewish texts to Moscow – and, in a tit-for-tat ruling, said it should pay a massive fine for every day it delays. The so-called Schneerson collection, claimed by both Russia and the New York-based Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group, has become…
Tokyo Metropolitan Police reportedly have arrested a man in connection with the vandalism of hundreds of copies of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in city libraries. The Tokyo resident, identified in the March 12 announcement of his arrest as an “unemployed man in his 30s,” made a statement admitting to some involvement in the vandalism…
Israel’s embassy in Japan is donating 300 copies of Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” to Tokyo libraries following a vandalism spree. More than 300 copies of the diary and other books about Anne Frank have been found damaged in libraries throughout the country’s capital. Police have established a task force to investigate the…
100% of profits support our journalism
