By JANICE ARNOLD
Staff Reporter
 The
Canadian Jewish Virtual Museum and Archives (CJVMA),
an ambitious project that aims to tell the history of
the Canadian Jewish community online, has been initiated
by Congregation Shaar Hashomayim with a major grant
from the federal government.
The
project includes both a Web site (www.cjvma.org),
aimed at the general public and in particular high school
students, and a larger database for the use of any Jewish
organization, synagogue or school in the country, which
wants to digitally preserve its records or artifacts.
Besides
the Shaar, the founding partners are Temple Emanu-El-Beth
Sholom, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, United
Talmud Torahs of Montreal, Centre Communautaire Juif,
Communauté Sépharade du Québec and the
Holocaust Literature Research Institute of the University
of Western Ontario, which holds one of the largest collections
of survivors' testimonies outside Israel.
CJVMA
curator Naomi Kramer said the intention is to make the
project as national as possible, and interest has been
especially strong in smaller communities that do not
have the resources to digitize their holdings.
"We
hope it will raise awareness of the need to document
materials that are often left to gather dust in basements,
or worse, thrown out," she said.
"[The
Shaar] encourages all organizations and individuals
across Canada to participate in the creation of this
communal archive," says synagogue president Mel Hershenfield
in the CJVMA's brochure.
"Databases
that speak the same computer language and that have
the option to be published on the Internet will enable
us to preserve and record our history while building
the future."
Currently,
about 1,000 archives are online. They have been scanned
page by page or, in the case of objects, accompanied
with known information. Under another major heading,
Vignettes, is an eclectic mix of stories related to
the Canadian Jewish experience. The content of these
two major headings are linked so that if a user wants
to understand a record or artifact from a historical
or personal perspective, they can do so with a click
of the mouse.
The
long list of searchable categories includes expected
headings, such as anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, religion,
education, immigration, philanthropy and volunteerism,
as well as topics such as entertainment, sports, military
and politics. The site is fully bilingual.
A
third heading, Albums, which is still being developed,
will provide in-depth background information, through
bibliographies, online texts and pedagogical resources.
It
will also be a video-conferencing site for the twinning
of Canadian and Austrian high school students who want
to talk to each other about such common issues as human
rights, immigration and prejudice. A fourth heading,
Links, has connections to other Jewish virtual museums
in the world.
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The
CJVMA, which will be officially launched at the Shaar
Oct. 15, is not a conventional history; information is
not presented in chronological order nor is it, by any
means, comprehensive.
Kramer
said it has avoided "the great man, great events approach"
to history, and instead aims to "relate economic, social
and cultural factors surrounding historical events."
The
site does not have the kind of information sought by genealogists:
birth, marriage and death records.
As
it is for the use of everyone, basic traditions and customs
of Judaism are explained.
The
project began modestly last year when the Shaar decided
to move its museum upstairs to the lobby. Kramer, who
previously worked at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre
(MHMC), was hired to go through the congregation's huge
collection of items, many of them valuable, and display
a selection of them.
Kramer
was also asked to establish a database of the synagogue's
vast records accumulated over its 156-year history.
Coincidentally,
Heritage Minister Sheila Copps announced an over $500-million
grant program for Canadian culture, which included digitization
projects, Kramer said.
Last
February, the CJVMA received a $181,000 grant towards
the project's $330,000 start-up costs. A second application
has been made to see the project through to April 2004,
she said.
The
stories told through the virtual museum were built around
what papers and artifacts the founding organizations provided,
plus other supplementary materials from, for example,
the Canadian Jewish Congress and Jewish Public Library
archives, as well as outside sources such as the National
Archives of Canada and the CBC.
The
latter turned up a 1945 recording of Georges Vanier, then
Canadian ambassador to Paris, talking about his visit
to the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.
With
news of the CJVMA spreading, individuals are starting
to come forward with personal memorabilia they would like
recorded. One example is a 100-year-old shochet's knife
brought in by a woman. David Mendelson contributed a musical
tape of his late father Nathan who was cantor at the Shaar.
The tape has been incorporated on the site with a series
of photos of him.
Working
with Kramer on the technical aspects are three young Austrian
men, Benedikt Breinbauer, Simon Niederkircher and Fabian
Schroeder, who have volunteered to come here under a program
called Gedenkdienst. This allows young Austrians to work
in Jewish communities abroad for a 14-month period in
lieu of performing military service.
The
database was created by Lothar Bodingbauer, a former Gedenkdienst
intern at the MHMC.
The
CJVMA has a historical, literary and advisory review board
chaired by Carole Rocklin, among whose members are academics
and community leaders.
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