The Jewish National and University Library, David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project
The aim of this site is to provide open access to complete runs of the major titles of the early Hebrew press (19th and early 20th century).
These newspapers contain a wealth of primary material on Diaspora and Land of Israel history of the period. Access to them has, until now, been limited to a small number of research libraries which held either the crumbling originals or microfilm copies.
The first stage of the project comprises:
Halevanon (1863-1886)
Hamagid (1856-1903)
Havazelet (1863-1911)
Hazefirah (1862-1931)
Hameliz (1860-1904)
Hazevi (1884-1915)
All together tens of thousands of issues and over 100,000 pages.
Each newspaper has indexes by Common Era date, Jewish calendar date and volume/issue numbers.
Partial author and subject access is provided for Halevanon, Hamagid and Havazelet via an index created by Yad Ben-Zvi and University of Haifa in the 1980's. This index has now been upgraded to a web version, and enhanced with links to the fulltext of each article.
Technical information:
The newspapers have been digitized either from master microfilm or directly from the originals, creating B/W TIFF files.
Viewing the newspaper pages themselves requires the use of a special Java TIFF viewer (viewONE) which is downloaded automatically when viewing the images.
