The Jewish Guide to the Internet

From the homepage of this international organization you can find information about membership, conventions, awards and scholarships, publications, and news. Of particular note are the bibliographies available to members, the book club reading lists, and the criteria for library accreditation. You can also sign up for the group's listserv, Hasafran.

This home page belonging to the Tel Aviv Public Library describes in Hebrew the programs, collections, and services of the library and its 25 branches. You can search the union catalog in English and Hebrew,

The Bibliography of The Hebrew Book is a comprehensive interactive bibliography of all books printed in the Hebrew Language between 1473 and 1960 and includes over 120,000 titles and 13,500 authors. The site describes the product and offers access to subscribing organizations.

This French language site from the Alliance is a searchable database of the library of the organization, providing access to print and non-print materials.

This site presents digitized examples of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books, marriage contracts and Megilot Esther from the Barginsky Collection. The site was designed to accompany a physical exhibition in Amsterdam and New York.

The Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives collects and preserves documentation on all aspects of the Jewish presence in Quebec and Canada. The site is in English and French.

“Casa Shalom has a collection of over 2,500 books and 5,000 documents on Sephardic and Crypto-Jewish studies, mostly in English (with some Spanish and Portuguese, and Farsi). Our library is located in the library of Netanya Academic College. It is not a lending library, but our stacks are open to researchers.”

This 775 page pdf file lists all of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Vatican Library cataloged by the Jewish National Library.

Access to the catalogs of the books in English, French, German, Italian and Russian as well as a history of the library and its exhibition.

Created by the Schlesinger Institute, this library contains several collections of interest in the field of medical halacha. Among them are:
The ASSIA Journal in Hebrew, The JME Journal in English, The Nishmat Avraham Series describing halachot related to medicine, organized in the order of the Shulchan Aruch, Ha-Torah ve-ha-Refuah, articles from the Encyclopedia of Medical Halacha, The International Responsa Project, with responsa in the field of medical halacha, annotated bibliographies by Rabbi Meir Wunder, and The Forum for Medical Halacha.

Founded in Milan, Italy in 1990, the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center is an institute for Italian Jewish history and culture. The site, largely in Italian, describes the holdings of the center.

Created by The Feinstein Center at Temple University, this site is a database of American Jewish Historical Repositories provided in pdf format. 

Part of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, Denmark, “the scope of the collection can perhaps best be described in numbers.Twenty countries of origin have been identified together with fifteen languages. All in all 193 volumes of different types have been digitized. The majority of the manuscripts contain Halakhic texts and material related to the Talmud.”

Created by the Leo Baeck Institute, DigiBaeck includes 3.5 million pages of material that ranges from personal papers and photographs of luminaries like Albert Einstein and Moses Mendelssohn to letters, diaries, recipes, and other ephemera chronicling the lives of everyday German-speaking Jews over five centuries.

Searchable database of digitized materials held by the university in a variety of areas including art and archeology, Haifa, the performing arts, historical photographs of the Land of Israel, the geography of the Land of Israel, and the history of the ship in Israel.

“The Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress houses over 225 manuscripts; most of them in Hebrew but with a fair sampling of manuscripts also written in cognate languages such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Yiddish. It is a highly diverse collection, dating from the 11th to early 20th centuries and drawn from Jewish communities throughout the world”

Created by Michael Davidson, this page is "a virtual guide to the great Jewish libraries and rare book collections on-line housing Hebrew manuscripts, incunabula, and written antiquities." While it has not been updated since 2001, it still provides useful information.

David Elazar has created a classification system for Judaica used in many libraries. The books table of contents and excerpts from it are available here along with ordering information. The home page includes links to relevant sites in general and Jewish librarianship, a questionnaire, guest book, and a memorial page for David's brother, Daniel, who also figured prominently in the world of Judaica librarianship.

This database contains 525 books in German and Hebrew identified by leading scholars as Haskala literature. The database is hosted and run by the Judaica Division of the Frankfurt University Library in Germany.

From Yale University comes this site to help librarians catalog books written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, and any other language using the Hebrew alphabet. Chronological scope: from medieval biblical commentaries to contemporary Israeli poetry.

Part of the Holy Land Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, this searchabel site includes the Lenkin Collection of Photography, which consists of over 5,000 early photographs of the Holy Land, dating from 1850-1937 and the Paola and Bertrand Lazard Holy Land Print collections, including hundreds of early printed books, postcards, maps, drawings, and watercolors. Recent acquisitions include the Moldovan Family Digital Holy Land Map Collection and the Zucker Holy Land Travel Manuscript. Related materials at Penn are found in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's rich collection of early photographs, including nearly 1,500 original Maison Bonfils photographs, as well as in the Museum's historical records and field reports of archeological excavations at places like Bet Shean in Israel.

Once an independent product, this guide to articles, book reviews, feature stories, and other contents in English, appearing in more than 200 periodicals devoted to Jewish affairs is now part of EBSCO.

The home page of this librarians' group describes their courses, awards, special interest groups, publications, and local activities. It provides access to the groups online newsletter Egeret and its listserv, and posts employment opportunities. A set of links to library and information science web sites is also provided.

Use this portal to search for journals and periodicals held by Israeli university libraries. You can search by title, issuing body, keywords, and ISSN.

"The Center for Libraries is a professional body which renders services in various areas for all libraries in Israel, with a special emphasis on public libraries." Its Hebrew home page describes the group's services, online courses and digital ebook library, and has a section on Arab culture. Links to the pages of various Israeli public libraries are also available.

Located in Cape Town, South Africa, this Jewish public library was founded under the auspices of the South African Zionist Federation in 1959. In addition to online access to its catalog, it also provides access to digital versions of South African Jewish newspapers and magazines.

Along with information about the organization, its newsletter, and details about volunteering and donations to the group, this site has an online catalog of more than 10,000 books in its lending library for the blind. The catalog is searchable by author, title, keyword, subject, and catalog number. If you register, you can also request magazines in audio format, large print books, and talking books from browsable catalogs. A Hebrew Braille chart is also available.

“The aim of the repository is to provide open access to publications and other material related to Jewish heritage in Serbia, ex-Yugoslav countries, and all over the world.” Information is available in English and Serbian.

This site provides full text access to the books that have been digitized by the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University. You can view the books by subject or by date digitized.

Information about the collection of this Jewish library in Montreal that is open to the public. The site provides access to the catalogue. A number of databases are also available to members. There is information on using the archives as well.

This portal is a joint project of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, the Potsdam University Library, the Cooperative Library Network/Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV), and the Judaica Network. It enables users to perform targeted searches in the Judaica holdings of the contributing institutions in Germany and Austria, in The Index of Articles on Jewish Studies of the National Library of Israel (RAMBI) as well as in the Digital Collections Judaica in the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main.

The ketubbot digitization project aims to create a worldwide registry of ketubbot in public and private collections throughout the world. Based on the collection of National Library of Israel, the site has a searchable database of marriage documents.

The Lamm Jewish Library of Australia sees the merger of Makor Jewish Community Library with the communal libraries of Kadimah, the Holocaust Centre and the Jewish Museum, as well as the archives of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society and the Australian Jewish Historical Society. This site provides information about the events and services of the library as well as access to its catalog.

“The Leiman Library is a private collection of Judaica located in Kew Gardens Hills, in Queens, New York. Its primary strengths are in Bible, Talmud, Rabbinics, Jewish Thought, and Jewish History.” The site has digitized part of its collection, including rabbis on stamps postcards from Far Rockaway.

"Librarians for Fairness is an organization dedicated to bringing positive programs about Israel to libraries across the nation and to promoting democratic values. We work to ensure that information about Israel is represented fairly in our libraries through books, periodicals, audiovisuals, online resources, and scheduled events." The site contains archived articles of interest, free materials for libraries and a set of relevant links.

The searchable homepage of the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress lists its events, offers contacts for reference help, and features an online guide to its collection in this area.

Librarian Steven M. Bergson has compiled this list of Judaica library web sites world wide. While the site hasn't been updated since 2007, it is still a useful resource.

This Spanish language site from the Historical Library of the University of Complutense has digitized copies of 21 codices in Hebrew available online.

This site presents high quality digitized versions of significant manuscripts from the library of the Jewish Theological Seminiary in New York including the signature of Maimonides and fragments from the Cairo Genizah.

“Ets Haim is the oldest still functioning Jewish library in the world. It was founded in 1639 and has been housed in the historical complex of the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam since 1675.” It is digitizing its manuscripts and making them available online on its website.

The National Library of Israel is pleased to launch an initial version of the "Mapping European Jewish Libraries" database, which brings together information about Jewish libraries' holdings in Europe into a single searchable platform. There are collections of Jewish materials in many different institutions across Europe: libraries of Jewish organizations and communities, libraries of Christian institutions, national and public libraries and academic libraries, and this is the first time they can be referenced from one place . The library records can be retrieved by their names, addresses, type of institution and material types in their collections - manuscripts and incunabula, modern books and periodicals, and non-print media. This is a prototype that we would like to extend, the database currently includes approximately 200 libraries, and we encourage users to search the database and update us regarding any other libraries with significant Jewish collections worldwide that should be included (a form to add a library can be found here).

This wiki from the Association of Jewish Libraries provides access to resources that will be of use to Hebraica catalogers.

Site that provides access for libraries to Hebrew books in print and ebook format.

This online catalog is one of the foremost bibliographic sources in the field of Jewish culture. It contains 200 000 entries, representing the holdings of the member libraries, which include the Library of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU), the Library of the Séminaire israélite de France (SIF) and the Paris Yiddish Center-
Medem Library.

This site in Italian and English provides information about this library devoted to the history of Jews in Venice, Italy. You can search the library catalog. There are also documents in pdf format that you can download. “Renato Maestro library opened in 1981 in Venice’s historic Jewish ghetto. The library was established to promote the written and archival heritage of the Jewish community of Venice.”

This site in English and Italian provides information about this library in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, Italy. Of particular interest is the online catalog of materials, including a music catalog, and the ability to download material.

From the University of Washington comes this digitized collection of materials from members of the local Seattle Sephardic community. It includes more than 500 original Ladino books and thousands of documents composed in Ladino as well as other relevant languages, such as Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew and French. Dating between the 16th and mid-20th centuries, the books already comprise one of the largest Ladino libraries in the United States.

"The project plans to create a digitized relational database for the study of pre-modern Jewish philosophy, science, and belles-lettres, based on the standard reference-work, Die Hebraeischen Ubersetzungen des Mittelalters und dir Juden als Dolmetscher (The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Interpreters, henceforth HU). Written by Moritz Steinschneider in 1893, HU is a thousand-page bibliographical study of over eleven hundred medieval Hebrew manuscripts composed during the golden age of Jewish philosophy and science."

The Israel Union Catalogs are operated by the National Library. There are three catalogs. The union catalog contains the bibliographic records in the catalogs of the Israeli university and college libraries, as well as selected research institutes and other libraries. The Israel Union List of Serials (ULS) contains bibliographic records of more than one hundred thousand periodicals from 170 academic, special and public libraries. The Union List of Electronic Journals (ULE) lists the electronic version subscriptions of libraries which are members of the MALMAD Consortium, with links to the journals themselves.

From this site you can access the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, the Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library, the Sami Rohr Library of Recorded Yiddish Books, the Wexler Oral History Project, the Noah Cotsen Library of Yiddish Children's Literature and yizkor books from the New York Public Library.

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is a vibrant, growing collection of text and images curated by leading Jewish Studies scholars. It offers unprecedented direct access to excerpts from thousands of primary sources reflecting Jewish creativity, diversity, and culture world-wide, spanning biblical times to the 21st century when complete. Registration to use the digital site is free.

The Schocken Institute for Jewish Research in Jerusalem includes The Zalman Schocken Library, The Saul Liebermann ("Ha'Garash") Collection, The Yerushalimsky Archive, The Schocken Archive, and The Hebrew Books Press of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. These library collections are searchable through the JTS library site at www.jtsa.edu.

Created by the Avi Chai Bookshelf Project, this site provides access to the library holdings of various Jewish yeshivot in North America.

From the National Library of Israel comes this union catalog of Israeli libraries.

The Wiener Library in London, England specialises in modern Jewish history, the rise and fall of the Third Reich and the survival of Nazi and Fascist movements in the post-war world. It also includes rich collections on antisemitism, the Middle East and post-war Germany. Its website describes the library's holdings and offers a searchable interface to its 700 of its documents. Online access to its catalog is planned for the future.

Created by and for librarians in Jewish high schools, this site provides resources and tools for Jewish day school librarians.

The Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library houses a large collection of yizkor books. Their Digital Yizkor Book Viewer provides page-turner technology to read or consult crystal-clear digital images of complete Holocaust memorial books, exactly as issued. 650 of the 700 postwar yizkor books at The New York Public Library are accessible online in their entirety.