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Jewish Exponent Archives
Find New Life At Gratz College
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
“G” is for Green Party, Grenada,
Graterford Prison, Gratz.

“H” is for Habitat for Humanity, hala-
cha, Halley’s Comet, hate crimes.

Th e mishmash of categories fi nds
order in a drawer marked “GRA-HEB,”
the bottom of three drawers in a fi ling
cabinet among 33 others of its kind,
each with stacked drawers fl ush with
fi les labeled with subjects and names.

Since the 1950s, the Jewish Exponent
has kept its archives of clippings and
photos in these fi ling cabinets in its
2100 Arch St. offi ce in a room known
lovingly as “the morgue.” Packed like
sardines and lining all four walls of
the room, the fi les — the epitome of
organized chaos — were not only a
resource to the paper’s reporters but
were also representative of decades of
Philadelphia Jewish history. On the
opposite side of the wall in the hall-
ways, one could fi nd bound volumes of
the Exponent storing issues from the
publication’s 135-year history.

Th ese archives will no longer just
be accessible to the Exponent staff ,
housed in a room with a name connot-
ing lifelessness. In mid-July, the Jewish
Exponent archives found a new home
and renewed purpose at Gratz College’s
Melrose Park campus, where the library
staff will organize, digitize and put
online the publication’s archives over
the next 12-plus months.

Th e move of the archives comes in
tandem with the move of the Exponent
staff offi ce to Gratz.

“Th ere’s a fi le on everything from
radical reform synagogues in the 20th
century to the Philadelphia Yeshiva,
from Holocaust aid and rescue eff orts
to burgeoning restaurants and music
festivals, the free Soviet Jewry move-
ment. It’s a phenomenal repository
of the impact and eff orts of Jewish
Philadelphia,” Gratz President Zev
Eleff said of the archives.

Aft er the organization and digitiza-
tion eff orts, the archives will be avail-
able on a website free to the public.

It will be part of Gratz’s expanding
digital archival footprint, which also
includes online Holocaust oral history
transcripts and audio fi les and a com-
pilation of 800 Rebecca Gratz letters
detailing the Philadelphia Jewish com-
munity aft er the Revolutionary War and
the establishment of Gratz College.

Th e Exponent archives take up about
320 linear feet, the de facto measure-
ment of archive size, making it one of
the college’s largest archives, according
to Donna Guerin, Gratz’s director of
library services.

Gratz’s long-established focus on
A Passover seder at the Rebecca Gratz Club, which provided support for
“troubled” young women
Jewish Exponent archives
10 AUGUST 4, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
online learning means it already has the
infrastructure to take on another exten-
sive archival project. Holding its fi rst
online class in 2001, Gratz’s strong online
presence was built to accommodate its
non-traditional student body. Th e college
boasts 5,000 students spanning across
36 states and six countries. Seventy-fi ve
percent of its Holocaust and genocide
studies program students live out-of-
state; most students in its other graduate
programs are public school teachers in
the commonwealth.

While Eleff was interviewing as a
job candidate for president at Gratz, he
identifi ed the school’s online presence
as a strength.

“It became very clear that, as a col-
lege that has a very wide online foot-
print, we needed to point our library
services directly at our degree pro-
grams and also to support broader
learning opportunities, resources for
the extended Gratz and Philadelphia
Jewish community,” he said.

Before Eleff ’s tenure, the Claims
Conference awarded Gratz with a grant
to digitize their Holocaust survivor
oral histories, the nation’s second-old-
est Holocaust testimonial archive. It
received a naming gift from the Barbara
and Fred Kort Foundation. Concurrent
with creating the Holocaust Genizah
Project with the digitized oral histo-
ries, Gratz will digitize the Exponent
archives as part of a Judaica Americana
collection. Once a website is built to house the
collections, it will primarily be used by
Gratz students, who are also teachers,
to help build curricula and identify
primary sources for research.

With the initial grant money, the
college bought technologies to digitize
and store its materials, creating a prec-
edent of how to continue its long-term
archival work. Th e process of main-
taining and digitizing the archives,
however, endures.

Gratz’s Holocaust oral history proj-
ect began in 1979, and though it has
accumulated 900 interviews, about 300
have complete transcripts, according to
Josey Fisher, director of the Holocaust
oral history archive. One hundred and
twenty-four are available on the U.S.

The Jewish Exponent front page
from Sept. 8, 1995, celebrating
the 100th anniversary of Gratz
College Holocaust Memorial Museum website.

Originally, the oral histories were
recorded on cassette tapes and sent to
USHMM to be converted into digital
fi les. Using funds from Yad Vashem
and USHMM, Gratz hired transcrib-
ers; now, they mostly rely on volun-
teers, but the transcription process is
challenging, particularly because the
survivors sharing their stories are not
native English speakers and oft en have
thick accents.

“It’s very, very time-consuming and
very meticulous, which is why we have
not gotten through the whole collec-
tion, and that won’t happen,” Fisher
said. “We’re not going to be able to get
through all of that, not at this point.”
While the Holocaust oral history
digitization is ongoing, digitizing the
Exponent archives presents its own chal-
lenges. Attempting to digitize all of the
fi les chronologically or cabinet by cabinet
is a tall order, Guerin said. Likely, she
will put together a collection that will be
relevant to Gratz and includes fi les on
its history and programming and also
relates to current events.

Guerin, like Fisher, is not put off by
the mountain of work before them.

“Th is is common with any digital
collections that college libraries are
doing,” Guerin said. “Th ere’s the caveat
that’s on the website that says, ‘Th is is
an ongoing project’. Th is isn’t every-