From May 12 to 14, scholars, librarians, journalists, and cultural leaders from around the world gathered in Jerusalem for the JPRESS Conference to celebrate 20 years of the Historical Jewish Press (HJP) project, one of the most ambitious digital preservation efforts in the field of Jewish studies.
Launched jointly by the National Library of Israel (NLI) and Tel Aviv University (TAU), the project has grown from a small initiative into the largest online archive of Jewish newspapers and periodicals. Its mission has remained simple but powerful: to digitize Jewish newspapers from across the globe and make them freely accessible and searchable to all.
In 26 languages—including Hebrew, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino to French, English, Persian, and Hungarian—the platform now includes more than six million pages, with more than 500 periodicals spanning continents and centuries.
With titles originating in Israel, North Africa, the Americas, Europe, and beyond, the project offers a rich lens into Jewish political, cultural, and religious life. Marxist and Zionist newspapers sit alongside Orthodox journals, women’s columns, underground bulletins, and anarchist pamphlets. The platform has logged over 70 million page views from 200 countries, with more than 15 million visits by 7.5 million unique users.
At the opening conference session on Monday evening in the NLI auditorium, acclaimed author Haim Be’er delivered a keynote address. He was followed by a panel titled “Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Evolution of the Historical Jewish Press Project,” moderated by HJP manager Eyal Miller, featuring co-founders Yaron Tsur and Orly Simon.
The event also marked the launch of newly digitized 19th-century Hebrew periodicals. Miller said he constantly strives to expand the collection, calling on researchers and institutions to contribute additional titles.
Sessions over the three-day conference examined the digital corpus from multiple angles: as a tool for historical research, education and international collaboration. Highlights included panels on AI analysis of historical texts, the portrayal of women in the Orthodox press and newspapers’ role in shaping modern Jewish identity.
The only English-language session, “Connecting Collections: The Historical Jewish Press as a Hub for International Collaboration,” was chaired by Caron Sethill, program manager for Europe at the NLI. It brought together voices from Columbia University, Goethe University Frankfurt and national libraries from Lithuania, Serbia and the U.S.
Speakers shared how institutional partnerships had broadened access to Jewish newspapers worldwide, often leading to unexpected discoveries and innovative approaches.
Michelle Margolis, the Norman E. Alexander librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University, reflected on the value of preserving Jewish periodicals, mentioning initiatives such as the Manhattan Research Library Initiative (MaRLI), in which Columbia and NYU pay for digitization of American Jewish newspapers on microfilm from NYPL’s collection to be included in the Historical Jewish Press.
A broad range of views from the history of American Jewry are included in the digitized material. Criteria for newspaper selection include language, location, thematic relevance and historical value.
The costs of digitization and copyright clearance issues are significant factors in the work. Collaboration is important, and she looks forward to more coming from this conference. The archive includes everything from Civil War-era publications to Forverts front pages in Yiddish and forgotten women’s newspapers such as Deborah, published until 1902.
Kerstin von der Krone, head of the Judaica Division at the University Library Frankfurt am Main at Goethe University, shared Germany’s “Compact Memory” project, which digitized even fragile pages of publications and highlighted rare finds. Early Jewish newspapers often copied content, ads and articles alike from one another, forming a dynamic pre-digital information network.
Another presentation revealed remarkable stories of rediscovery. Lara Lempert, head of Judaica at the National Library of Lithuania, spoke about archival efforts post-Communism and described the beginnings of the recovery of Jewish periodicals in Lithuanian repositories.
These included materials from the late 19th century through the 1930s and 40s, offering new insights into Jewish intellectual life before the Holocaust. Through metadata and international partnerships, we’re learning from magazines about the lives, struggles, and resilience of entire communities.
Biljana Albahari from the National Library of Serbia reported on the challenges of Jewish press preservation in the Balkans. Though thousands of titles have been identified, most did not survive Nazi destruction. “The National Library of Serbia was deliberately bombed and burned by the Nazis,” she said, adding that digitization is not just technical work, it’s an act of restoration and remembrance.
The third panelist was Dr. Lyudmila Sholokhova, a curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection at the New York Public Library. The participants at this session presented an international aspect to the projects and conference, which was Israel-centric.
On Tuesday, the first full day of the conference, the building was closed in the afternoon to the public when Israeli President Isaac Herzog took Germany’s President Frank Walter Steinmeier on a tour of the NLI as part of the 60th anniversary celebration of diplomatic relations.
However, the conference went on in a secure area as scheduled, according to Lara Lampert, who said it was her second visit to the NLI. Furthermore, she told JNS, “I am glad I came.”
The event closed Wednesday evening with a roundtable titled “They Wrote About Him in the Newspaper,” moderated by NLI spokesperson Vered Lyon-Yerushalmi. Prominent Israeli journalists and historians reflected on the legacy and future of Jewish journalism, as both a historical source and a living tradition.
The milestone conference was hosted in partnership with TAU as well as the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and Gesher L’Europa, with support from a wide range of academic and cultural institutions dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of Jewish heritage.