National Library of Israel collecting all documentation of Hamas massacre and war
Institution for collective cultural memory of the State of Israel and the Jewish people meets the challenge of amassing material in real time while the events are being denied
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
The National Library of Israel has added to its mission of archiving Jewish and Israeli works with the creation of a central repository for all documentation of the brutal attack by Hamas on southern Israel on October 7. The scope of the collection would also include the ongoing Israel-Hamas war sparked by the attack and related events and responses around the world.
“By law, we are the institution for collective cultural memory of the State of Israel, the Land of Israel and the Jewish People,” said head of collections Dr. Raquel Ukeles in explaining why the task should reside with the National Library of Israel.
It is a huge undertaking expected to take five years and be funded jointly by the Heritage Ministry and private philanthropic partners. Around 10 library staff members have begun to work on the collection, and more dedicated staff will be hired.
With the savage events of October 7 that resulted in the murder of more than 1,200 individuals, mostly civilians, and the taking of some 240 hostages to Gaza and its aftermath having been recorded in real time almost exclusively by digital means, the library had to approach the project differently than when collecting material on past events in Israeli history.
“Everybody recognizes both the importance of this work and also how different this work is from traditional collecting. We had to ask whether the role of the library is to document in real time, or to collect after the fact,” Ukeles said.
Ukeles shared that library leadership had been having internal debates on this question for some time and that October 7 brought those discussions to the fore.
“I’m more on the documenting side. I think that the digital world we live in does not allow us to sit back and wait for culture to develop,” Ukeles said.
“I feel that we don’t have that luxury anymore to sit and wait. We need to collect now and then wait and see whose and what material has an impact and importance going forward,” she said.
To move quickly and act in real time, the library is using cutting-edge technology to capture everything online related to the massive, brutal terrorist attack and the war.
“The first step we took was to immediately start archiving the internet and social media because that’s very ephemeral. It was important to move swiftly. Websites and social media go up and are taken down. Hamas posted videos [of their committing atrocities] and then took them down,” Ukeles said.
The first step we took was to immediately start archiving the internet and social media because that’s very ephemeral
The National Library is doing its own collecting, and it also serves as the repository for the documentation collected by dozens of projects in Israel and around the world. The material being amassed includes testimonies, audio and video recordings, online messages, press clips and ephemera from social media, civil institutions, the military, governments and more.
While most of the material is digital, Ukeles said that it is also ready to digitize any relevant printed material, such as posters, flyers, or cards written to soldiers by school children.
Among the library’s many partners in this endeavor are the Israel Oral History Association, the Oral History Division at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Association of Israeli Archivists, the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), and the Berman Archive at Stanford University.
The library is closely coordinating efforts with hundreds of scholars and practitioners of oral history, and oral testimony collection from these and other partners. Hundreds of experts joined together to create what has been named The Collaborative Forum for Leaders of Collection Efforts.
Both professionals and volunteers are producing and collecting the material for the central repository. According to Ukeles, among the quickest to pivot toward documentation were highly organized civic groups that had formed to protest against the government’s judicial overhaul earlier this year.
Among the grassroots projects that quickly popped up is the Civic Headquarters, a group of artificial intelligence and cyber experts who mined videos to capture 200,000 segments identifying as much information as possible about missing, kidnapped, and murdered people.
Another called Edut (Testimony) 710 brought together Israeli documentary filmmakers to film and archive testimonies from what has become known in Israel as Black Shabbat.
A third project, called “Waiting for You at Home” appears on the website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. For each hostage, information about the name and origin of their first name is given.
“At the same time that we are focused on collecting, we have an intellectual property legal team working on protocols and forms dealing with rights and access to the material,” Ukeles said.
There is much to consider as the library determines its policies for this unique collection in terms of who should have access and to how much. There are issues of privacy for those seen in videos and who share their testimonies, as well as concerns about preventing underage individuals from being exposed to graphic content.
“Our general principle is to open as much as possible. Unlike government archives with much stricter rules, we can be very agile about opening as much as possible, keeping in mind people’s privacy issues, which we will be sensitive to,” Ukeles said.
Like all collections at the library, this one is also for the historical record. But it differs in that is being created in a time when we see denial happening simultaneously to the events themselves.
“I think everyone in this country understands the importance of collecting this material and of preserving it in a stable and trustworthy repository, and to enable access so people can use it to tell the story — or the infinite stories — from this material,” Ukeles said
The National Library has a page on its Hebrew-language website dedicated to the documentation and collection project. There you can find more details about it and how you can get involved.
