The first devastating days after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre left Jews across the world reeling. They turned to family, friends and community to express their grief and horror, attending public vigils, posting on social media and sending private emails and texts.
Now the National Library of Israel is asking people to help document those days as part of an effort to record how the attack affected people in Israel and across the globe. The archive will be available for future scholars to better understand the day when Hamas terrorists from Gaza flooded southern Israel, slaughtering 1,200 people and taking an estimated 240 hostages.
“It is already clear that even after the war’s end, the need to understand, study and research the events of Oct. 7th and the current war, and their social, cultural, military and political consequences, will remain relevant and important for decades to come,” Raquel Ukeles, the library’s head of collections, said in a press release.
Much of the project will focus on Israel, collecting texts, audio and video recordings from those who were killed, wounded and taken hostage, from Israel Defense Forces soldiers and even from Hamas terrorists.
The project will also include diaspora Jews. On the library’s website, there is a form that people living outside of Israel can use to submit written materials, videos, photos, artwork, personal testimony or share a website or social media account.
“The Oct. 7 massacre and its aftermath have made it evident that the ties between global Jewish communities and Israel are concrete, specific, intimate and personal,” according to the library’s website.
The library is working in collaboration with multiple partners, including Stanford’s Berman Archive, which has already been collecting official statements made by public figures, schools, synagogues, nonprofits and political groups as part of its own archival efforts.
“The goal is to create a large, authoritative database encompassing the entirety of evidence, documentation, media coverage and outreach activities, for the benefit of Jewish communal memory and historical research, and to make this evidence available and accessible for the long-term,” the library’s website states.
Founded in Jerusalem in 1892, the National Library of Israel aims to embody the memory and history of the Jewish people. J. partners with the library to host a searchable digital copy of our archives, which go back to 1895 and are available to the public through J.’s website and the library’s historical Jewish newspaper archive.