A Proposal for a Jewish Community Library

One of the delights of living Downtown is the LA Public Library. It is a beautiful building that combines old architecture with newer construction. Once a landmark visible from a distance, it is now surrounded by larger and less publicly minded structures. Inside its walls one can find services for children, English language learners, those learning new skills and how to use new technologies, students of foreign languages and a humane and civilized sheltering space for many of the area’s homeless.

There are times when I go to the library just because it is one of those places where I know that there are some surprises in store. However, there are other times when I go because I need something. It’s true, I have a bookstore of my own to mine for my needs and I have my own collection on shelves at my warehouse, but there are a lot of books and a lot of ideas and every collection has its limits. There are many books I know, but don’t have, and others that turn up in bibliographies and searches with vague promises that they might fulfill. On the days when the library has them I feel like an explorer at the gates of a lost city of gold. But not every day goes that well. Every collection has its limits.

The hospitality that Rabbi Golden and I have received from the staff of the library over the past few years has been a great honor. Rabbi Rosenfeld has become a regular there as well. But the fate of the Jewish book in Los Angeles has seen better days.

It has been, perhaps, twenty years now since the Federation shut down the community library that was hosted in their headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. Some of the collection went to other collections, but most of it was dispersed or discarded. As a consolation a community space was set up at American Jewish University. It was a bright, pleasant room that housed a nice children’s collection built by Lisa Silverman, and a collection of popular Jewish books in shiny dust jacket protectors. It even included, unexpectedly, but delightfully, a collection on Jewish magicians and their art. It was unstaffed, but adjacent to the main circulation desk and the users of that one room had access to the collection of the library of AJU, at that time considered to be the best Jewish collections on the West Coast. Those patrons benefited from a knowledgeable staff that was generous with their time. However, when AJU sold their campus to the Milken School that collection and that commitment came to an end. For the average member of the Los Angeles Jewish community their best bet is the public library. Thank goodness for them.

The AJU library itself is now mostly housed in Simi Valley on the Brandeis-Bardin campus. A small part of the collection is available to the students of the Ziegler Rabbinical Program that is housed in an office building in Beverly Hills. The Ziegler space there is small and not meant to be a space accessible to the public. The fate of the collection is unknown, but the situation is not promising.

The library at Hebrew Union College’s campus has recently been relocated from one side of the building to the other. A large part of that library's academic journals were jettisoned recently. Their website is currently out-of-date and reflects few of the changes that have already occurred there. HUC as a whole had been under serious financial pressure for some time now and larger decisions about the fate of that library and the staffing there are made on the basis of the needs of HUC across all four of their locations (three in the US and one is Israel). As such, it is probably too much to ask that they would be focused on the needs of the needs of Los Angeles Jewry beyond the HUC community.

For decades Los Angeles’s Yiddish speaking community benefited from the Yiddish collection held by the Yiddish Culture Club. That facility was also sold off and the whereabouts of the collection, if it still exists, are unknown.

Synagogue libraries were once a regular part of the Jewish landscape, but those days are mostly passed. Even very large synagogues like Sinai Temple, that once had a well-staffed library, one of the best, if not the best in the United States long since laid-off most of their staff and is now primarily there to serve the Akiva Day School. The Sinai Library has an online catalog which makes awareness of the collection accessible to the public even though the collection itself is not.

(Joselit, Jenna Weissman in her book, “The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950,” discusses synagogue giftshops as a cultural phenomenon. Synagogue libraries were part of that environment and have served similar purposes. Synagogue gift shops are another endangered Jewish institution.)

The semi-defunct Southern California Historical Society archives are currently inaccessible as far as I know and I am not sure if there are any plans to make them accessible.

Yaffa Weissman, who used to be the Judaica Librarian at USC has retired and has not been replaced. David Hirsch formerly of UCLA, one of the great Jewish librarians, is also retired now and has been replaced, though not by an equal (an admittedly unreasonable high bar). These collections prioritize the needs of their students and faculty. Borrowing privileges are available for a few or if one has connections at the institution.

None of the existing institutions that I have mentioned have the simple mission of acting as a Jewish Community Library. Some of them are compromised by the institutions that they are a part of. Their service to the needs of the Jewish community is secondary or tertiary to their primary missions. Those primary missions are nowadays led, almost without exception, by administrators with no real sympathy or interest in libraries. In fact they often resent the cost of them, their staff, their acquisitions budgets and the space that they take up that could be used for something “more popular,” or “necessary.” As I mentioned above, LAPL is well intentioned. The flaw that they have as a Jewish community library, is only that their purview is large and they cannot, by the nature of the institution, favor the Jewish community. There are others whose flaws as community institutions I won’t mention.

The basic requirements of a Jewish community are a place to worship, a place to bury the dead, a mikva for ritual immersion, charity collectors and others to give that charity out, and a Rabbi to advise on matters of ritual law (and a Bet Din if the size of the community warrants it). In the old days a study hall or a prayer hall would have some collection of books for study, a furnishing of the place as vital as the Torah scrolls in the ark.

The range of the Jewish library has grown in depth and breadth. The collection of books that used to grace those few (often chaotic) shelves is no longer enough. We live in a world that demands more types of knowledge of Jewish life, lore, arts and law, now more than ever. I believe that that need has grown into a basic need in any Jewish community for a Jewish Community Library.

Rabbi Golden and I, from the inception of Der Nister, have viewed Der Nister as something more than just a synagogue. Our purpose is to enrich the lives of Jewish individuals and the larger Jewish community as well. We like to dream big, but we have always been keenly aware of the limits of our time and ability. Creating a Jewish Community Library in Los Angeles is a project that Der Nister can start.

Start. It is not one that we will complete. Rather, we would like to initiate the project and build it up so that we can devolve it into an independent 501(c)3 non-profit public benefit corporation. We believe in our own good intentions, but ultimately, if we cannot count on other Jewish institutions that do not have as their mission being a library, then it would be presumptuous of us to claim that we would be any better.