AJA Awarded Grant to Digitize B’nai B’rith Film Archive

The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati has received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for the preservation initiative The Global Voice of the Jewish Community - Saving the Films of B'nai B'rith International. The Recordings at Risk grant will fund the digitization of 67 films produced by B'nai B'rith, B'nai B'rith Youth Organization, and Hillel International.

"Due to their fragility, these films have unfortunately been inaccessible to the public, but now this grant will not only make them available for the first time, but it will also ensure that future generations will be able to access them digitally through our online catalog in late 2025," said American Jewish Archives Managing Archivist Joe Weber, M.M., M.L.I.S. The digitization work will be completed by the audio/visual company Scene Savers in nearby Covington, Kentucky, and AJA will then add metadata and make it available to the public.

"At 345 linear feet, this collection is not only one of the largest at the AJA, but it is also one of the most frequently accessed by researchers," said Dana Herman, Ph.D., Associate Director of Research and Collections at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, describing the archive of B'nai B'rith - which was founded in 1843 and is one of the world's largest Jewish human rights, philanthropic, and community service organizations.

The film sub-series of the collection contains valuable sources of study across the humanities, including advertisements made for B'nai B'rith, youth recruitment films, conferences, videos filmed in Israel, and interviews with prominent figures such as David Ben-Gurion.

"The use of media to advance the causes of major Jewish organizations during the mid-to-late twentieth century is an understudied topic that will yield important findings regarding the rise of ethnic pluralism, interfaith relations, and public culture in the United States," Herman said.

This funding is the latest in a number of grants from CLIR over the years to support AJA projects that have made materials of all kinds more widely available.

Founded in 1947, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion's Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives is the largest free-standing repository dedicated solely to the study of the American Jewish experience. It contains more than 15 million pages of documents, audio-visual recordings, microfilm, and photographic images.