National Library of Israel

And quite a major piece of literature, especially for the Breslov Hasidic community.

40 years in the making and his autograph manuscript, that means, doesn't mean that he signed it, it means that his original manuscript is today housed in the National Library of Israel.

What he does in this book, or in this series of books, is he redefines and this is going to be something very important for our discussion today he redefines Halakha as we know it because the way we understand Halakha is you open up the Shulchan Arif and you go see can you do this you can't do this you can do this you can do this at such and such a time you must have so much to do and then so much you can't do etc etc A very technical, legal, ritualistic, legalistic discussion.

That's how we understand halacha traditionally.

I'm Noah Levi.

As we approach the third anniversary of the October 7th attacks, the National Library of Israel is undertaking a significant initiative to preserve collective memory.

According to jpost.com, the library is launching a call for the public's help in collecting and preserving memorial books and personal works.

These include writings created by family members, friends and organisations in memory of those killed in combat, as well as works left behind by those murdered on October 7th and later published.

So the way you do this in Mishnah, I'm going to show you something really cool.

The way you do this in Mishnah, is you go to a website from National Library of Israel, the National Library of Israel, and you have Iyun B'Kitvei Ayat, and you say, okay, I want to look at Masechet, I want to go to Masechet, Kelim.

I'm telling you, it took me a long time to find all these incredible, incredible tools.

See, I want to go to Kelim, and then you check, you pick the parakh.

All of these Girsahot that we have, all of them that we found, all of them had the Girsah, okay, of, like that we have in this Mishnah.

Tamei.

In fact, I'll just show you, I looked it up in the Yachin and Boaz, there is no Shinu Nushaot here, which is really interesting, because he quotes the Bartunura and says, and he just kind of ignores the fact that there's no line here, there's no even comment about the Girsah, because if you look at the Kitvei Hayad, Kitvei Hayad means the original versions that are written down that we have, and you can look them up on this website, this National Library of Israel, you just look it up.

Look for Kitvei Hayad, you Kitvei Hayad, you can do amazing things, you can really go down the rabbit hole.

And so I was very honored to be part of collecting those interviews and making sure they were disseminated around the world.

Once I left the Shoah Foundation, where the archive had been permanently placed in the National Library of Israel as a part of its preservation for the future, we began to realize that in addition to the Holocaust stories, there were thousands of Jewish stories around the world that could be told as a part of telling the story of the Jewish people as a whole, hence our Jewish story.

And all these interviews are available for people to see, but they're also stored for posterity, so it's a living history.

As part of that project, you've been in Australia for the last few weeks interviewing people.

She was known under these three names.

And I checked the sources from Israeli National Library.

She did exist.

They even have some drawings from her alchemical laboratory and so on.

Part of what we were reading for was just to learn about how you were experiencing these things as something that was very much embedded in it.

I'm very happy to say that the National Library of Israel decided to take off my Israel updates and archive them as a sort of like a log of how an American Jewish community received its information from Israel.

Wow.

Wow.

And I put into the chat the link to YIVO's Ruth Rubin website, which is a great, very easy to use interface.

But it's also, I definitely recommend the National Library of Israel has a lot of this material digitized.

It's definitely worth checking out.

And hopefully our viewers can go find the songs that they remember from their childhood.