In February 2022, J. proudly unveiled its newly digitized archives — 125 years of Bay Area Jewish history, more than 167,000 pages of the newspaper scanned, searchable and available to the public for free.
Many readers have written to J. since then, saying how wonderful it was to find their parents’ wedding photos, articles about their grandfather’s deli or their synagogue’s groundbreaking, and announcements of their bar or bat mitzvah — including one 84-year-old who was surprised to find her own bat mitzvah notice from 1949.
Today the site that hosts those archives is in danger of shutting down.
UC Riverside’s Center for Digital Newspaper Collection, which hosts hundreds of historical California news outlets, and where J. readers can access issues all the way back to 1895, has belatedly learned that its 2024-2025 budget was slashed to nothing by the state, its major funder. CDNC director Brian Geiger was informed of the decision in January, halfway through the fiscal year.
If he can’t find $300,000 in the next few weeks, he will be ordered to “wrap things up,” he told J.
“The annual appropriation from the state is $430,000,” funds administered by the California State Library, Geiger said. “We didn’t receive any of it this fiscal year, which runs from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. UCR has continued to pay expenses, mainly salaries, this entire year,” expecting to be reimbursed by the state.
Geiger has some funds in reserve that can cover part of the gap, he said, but to cover the whole deficit he needs to raise at least $300,000 — unless UC Riverside agrees to absorb the costs. He is meeting with his associate dean later this week, and the dean next Thursday.
If the university does not agree to absorb the cost of running the collection for this past year, or if a benefactor does not step forward to cover the shortfall, Geiger will have 60 days to shut down the collection.
“I don’t know yet whether the university is going to want to support us,” he said. “So we will have, technically, a 60-day notice. They have not made that announcement yet, but if they do, then I have 60 days to wrap things up.”
“I don’t think I could close it down in 60 days, not in a way that would leave it in any decent shape,” he said.
At that point, the CDNC will simply go offline. The data will be protected, but the public will no longer have access to it.
Meanwhile, J. CEO Jo Ellen Green Kaiser is talking to other host sites, including archive.org, which hosts newspapers for free in a fashion similar to the CDNC, and is also considering a plan for J. to host its own archives — although that would cost a lot of money.
“I want to reassure our readers that J.’s archives are not in danger. We have copies of the data,” she said. “J. is actively searching for an alternative, but UC Riverside should step up, do the right thing and preserve the CDNC.”
J.’s archives and other archives are essential historical records that help us understand our shared histories. Prof. Rachel B. Gross, S.F. State University
The project’s immediate fate is in the university’s hands, but the state might also have a role to play. Next year’s budget cuts have not yet been finalized.
“While the full picture won’t come into focus until the May revision, I understand the urgency of this situation,” said state Sen. John Laird in a statement emailed to J. “As Chair of the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Education, I am committed to engaging with the [university] administration on the future [of the CDNC] and I plan to raise these issues during the committee’s May budget hearing.”
The potential damage goes much further than J. The CDNC, which is the largest project of UC Riverside’s Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, is a huge repository of historical California newspapers. It hosts more than 1.5 million issues of some 425 newspapers published from 1846 to the present, including The Californian, the very first paper published in the state. The majority of the site’s content is also available elsewhere, Geiger said, but as much as 25% is not.
Along with J., the CDNC preserves and provides public access to three other historic Jewish publications: The Hebrew, published in San Francisco from 1864 to 1906; Hillel Call out of UC Berkeley from 1927 to 1957; and Jewish Radical, published in Berkeley from 1969 to 1978. All of this will be out of reach for students, researchers and the general public.
The tremendous value of such projects cannot be overstated. Individuals and institutions use it to discover their own history.
Pearl Cohen, 84 and living in Roseville, was shocked to come across coverage of her bat mitzvah in 1949 at San Francisco’s Temple Beth Israel, now part of Am Tikvah. She saw it thanks to “From the Archives,” a biweekly column penned by culture editor Maya Mirsky and featuring thematic stories and ads from J.’s archives.
Rabbi Doug Kahn, former executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, turned to J.’s archives to learn more about his great-grandfather, the first rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Jose and, in 1880, of Oakland’s Temple Sinai.
“Reading these articles gave me a much fuller picture of the rabbi and the man who was my great-grandfather,” Kahn wrote in an opinion piece in J. “They also filled me with an enormous sense of pride and profound gratitude that J. undertook the massive project of digitizing the archives.”
In May 2022, San Francisco Congregation Beth Sholom used J.’s archives in its 100th anniversary gala celebration.
“Part of the decor for our event was printouts of old articles from J. that helped people connect to their history,” said Ruth Katz, gala co-chair. “As people started to find their bar and bat mitzvah announcements and their parents’ wedding announcements, they saw their connection to this history in a new way. It was a powerful tool for us in telling our story.”
For scholars and researchers, J.’s archives are a godsend.
“J.’s digitized archives have been an incredible tool in my classroom,” San Francisco State Jewish studies associate professor Rachel B. Gross told J. by email. “They allow students to do first-hand research on topics we’re studying about U.S. and San Francisco Jewish histories.”
In her “Introduction to Judaism” class, for example, her students used J.’s archives to research debates around creating a Holocaust memorial in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s, which eventually led to George Segal’s memorial at the Legion of Honor.
“Exploring the mixed reactions to the city’s plan to create a Holocaust memorial — including a letter from Holocaust survivors insisting that the city would be better served by spending municipal funds on social services — allows students to understand the place of the Holocaust in American public life,” Gross wrote.
“J.’s archives and other archives are essential historical records [that] help us understand our shared histories, not only to help us understand the past but how the world around us came to be the way it is.”