Amid Ongoing War, Israel’s National Library Opens Its Doors
An inside view of the new National Library of Israel. (Photo by Gil Zohar)
JERUSALEM — Jews across Israel and the world marked sheloshim, the Hebrew word for “thirty,” on Monday. The solemn milestone of the first 30 days of mourning stems from the one-month anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre that killed some 1,400 Israelis.
Following this period, mourners can resume normal social and professional activities. It is amid the marking of this period — along with the ongoing war in Gaza — that Israelis craving a reprieve from all the bloodshed are venturing out to explore the newly-opened National Library of Israel.
Symbolically located in Jerusalem’s government precinct facing the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, and the Israel Museum, home to the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jewish people now have an iconic shrine worthy of their biblical and literary legacy, according to NLI Director Oren Weinberg, a man who can be considered the Jewish people’s chief librarian.
READ: How You Can Help Support Religion Unplugged
The visionary mega-project — built at a cost of NIS900 million ($225 million) — contains some six million rare volumes, manuscripts, books and miscellaneous printed material which were transferred from the previous library building on the grounds of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Givat Ram campus.
The new 46,000-square-meter (495,000-square-foot) building — featuring 11 floors — is incomparably more user-friendly that the previous location. Not to mention bigger. The state-of-the-art facility reference library extends over five basement levels, while six floors above ground serve the public.
The building is also high-tech. Books are retrieved from the underground stacks by robots. The oxygen level there is reduced to provide optimal storage conditions and protect the volumes from the threat of fire. Technicians entering the basement levels to carry out maintenance work must carry an oxygen cylinder and saturation monitor at all times.
Funded by the Rothschild family’s Yad Hanadiv foundation based in Jerusalem and the Gottesman Fund of New York, the NLI was designed by the Basel architect firm Herzog & de Meuron in conjunction with the Tel Aviv architectural firm Mann Shinar. The Swiss architects are renowned for their Bird Nest Stadium that graced Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics, as well as other mega-projects such as the Tate Modern in London and the Allianz Arena in Munich.
The library promises to be an equally recognizable instant landmark. Located on an irregular plot, the architects designed a modern interpretation of a triangular flatiron building surrounded by a lush garden. On the side of the building is the installation Letters of Light by environmental artist Micha Ullman. The sculpture references his The Empty Library in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, site of the Nazis’ notorious book burning that took place on May 10, 1933. While in the German capital one sees empty bookshelves sealed below the square’s surface, Ullman's Jerusalem “library” consists of a circle of 18 Hebrew letters arranged in a circle, leading to the building's entrance.
Like its predecessor, which opened in 1960 and was named after its patron Lady Davis of Montreal, the new NLI is primarily a closed stack facility. It too has a spiral staircase. The comparisons end there. With a glass oculus — it’s more than a skylight — and a swooping roof that would be a skateboarder’s delight, the distinctive library is incomparably more multi-purpose than the previous facility.
In addition to the greatly-expanded three-level reading room, the library features a 500-seat auditorium, display areas, lockers, commercial space, a restaurant, synagogue and underground parking. In 2026, it will be served by a light rail station on the Green Line currently under construction.
The multi-purpose research center and venue for cultural and educational activities is also a welcoming place to drink coffee and socialize. Illuminated at night, the NLI and its oculus is a light unto the nations beckoning with the collective knowledge of the Jewish people.
An exterior view of the new National Library of Israel. (Photo by Gil Zohar)
Home to priceless manuscripts
Founded in 1892, the NLI today is the repository of the world’s largest collection of Judaica and Hebraica. It collects everything related to the State of Israel and contextualizes that core with general books on the Humanities, Islam, the Middle East, religion and antisemitism.
Among its rare treasures are the Damascus Crown, a 13th-century Hebrew Bible smuggled out of Syria 30 years ago in a Mossad operation so hush-hush that the manuscript’s existence in Israel was kept secret for decades. Another priceless volume is a commentary on the Mishna handwritten by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides.
Sir Isaac Newton’s manuscripts about theology and the apocalypse, including his notations in cursive English and Hebrew, have a home at the NLI. Newton predicted the end of the world will come in 2060. That should leave readers 37 years to savor the new building.
More recent is Czech novelist Franz Kafka’s notebook wherein he recorded Hebrew words and their German meaning in advance of his unfulfilled dream of settling in Jerusalem.
The NLI continues with its mission of collecting, preserving and providing access to the cultural treasures of the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. For example, in a complex deal brokered in 2017, the library acquired 80 percent of the famed 10,000-volume Valmadonna Trust Library, the largest private collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts in the world.
Included were a rare 1491 chumash from Lisbon, and one of only two surviving copies of a 1556 Passover haggadah from Prague, a siddur (prayer book) from Venice dated 1459 written on parchment and a Hebrew Bible handwritten in England in 1189 — the only dated Hebrew text before the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 by King Edward I. In keeping with NLI policy, the price paid for the collection has not been made public.
Another treasure of manuscripts is the Afghan genizah, a Hebrew word meaning a storage place for damaged sacred writings. Traditionally worn-out Hebrew-language religious texts are placed in a temporary repository in a synagogue before being ritually buried. The priceless collection of 279 medieval manuscripts from communities along the Silk Road was acquired between 2013 and 2016 thanks to Jerusalem antiquities dealer Lenny Wolfe.
Yet another treasure is the NLI’s Gershom Scholem Reading Room – the world’s premier collection of rare books dealing with kabbalah, its sister studies of chasidism and Sabbatianism (the study of false messiah Sabbatai Zevi) and comparative mysticism in the gamut of the world’s religions.
Weinberg can’t find enough superlatives to describe the ever-growing collection of kabbalah esoterica, which today includes 35,000 volumes in Hebrew, English, German and other languages.
“It’s one of the jewels in the collections of the library,” he said.
And the Gershom Scholem Reading Room’s new space, more convenient relative to the general Judaica collection, is “a magnificent reading room to keep on nurturing it,” he added.
The Gershom Scholem Reading Room inside the National Library of Israel. (Photo by Gil Zohar)
Like books, space can also be a precious commodity. With desks for only 600 readers, the Givat Ram structure was obsolete. The new building more than doubles that number. Each reader enjoys a 1.25-meter-long (4-foot) desk instead of the small benches at the Lady David building. Each space is also equipped with its own reading lamp.
While computers are readily available both at desks and to borrow, most readers today bring their own notebooks. He adds that in the NLI’s forward-looking vision ever more materials will be digitized as the preservation of knowledge evolves.
A HISTORY OF GREAT BOOKS
Gish Amit’s 2014 book “Ex-Libris: Chronicles of Theft, Preservation and Appropriating at the Jewish National Library,” published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, tells the extraordinary story of how three collections came to the NLI. Following World War II, the “Diaspora Treasures” project brought to Jerusalem hundreds of thousands of books once owned by now-murdered Jews that had been looted by the Nazis.
Similarly during Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence, 30,000 Arabic-language books that were owned by Palestinian refugees were collected. They are cataloged “AP” — abandoned property — and await a peace treaty so that they may be turned over to the future National Library of Palestine.
Most problematic was the gathering of books and manuscripts from the 49,000 Yemenite Jews who were rescued and brought to the nascent state in 1949 and 1950 in “Operation On Wings of Eagles.”
Their property was systematically looted as part of Israel’s claim to ownership of the country’s Jewish past as well as its pre-Zionist past. Only a small number of those books were ever returned to their rightful owners.
Remembering Lady Davis
Noted Jewish Canadian philanthropist Henriette Marie Meyer was born in San Francisco in 1872.
She moved to Montreal in 1898 to marry businessman and tobacco tycoon Mortimer Davis, and became known as Lady Davis after her husband was knighted by King George V in 1917 for his philanthropy. It marked the first time a Canadian Jew was ever knighted.
The couple divorced in 1924. Lady Davis moved to Paris where she continued her philanthropic activities, including founding a resort for disabled children named the Colonie de Vacance. For her actions, she was made an officer of the Legion d’honneur.
With the outbreak of World War II, Davis fled to Montreal, where she donated a Spitfire plane to the Royal Air Force and provided lodging for RAF pilots. For her contributions, she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1945, she founded the Lady Davis Fund, which helped bring Holocaust survivors to Canada. She is best known in her adopted home for The Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.
In addition to the NLI in Jerusalem named in her honor, Meyer, who died in 1963, also donated funds to build the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Center at the Technion and the Lady Davis Carmel Medical Center, both located in the Israeli city of Haifa.
Running now through Dec. 31, NewsMatch will match your donations up to $1,000. Your generosity will help keep Religion Unplugged going in 2024 and beyond. You can donate here.
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto and moved to Jerusalem in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.