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Home > Special Sections > Charitable Giving
Grant Enables Jewish History To Be Digitized
Conservationist Melissa Buschey is charged with preserving some 900 rare documents through the latest methods of digital photography, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Morris and Beverly Baker Foundation. photographs michael datikash by Eric Herschthal Thick, clear polyester sheets encased each piece of paper, which would later be digitally photographed to be accessible online. Buschey and her colleague Amy Armstrong had come to call the heavily-pocked text the “Swiss cheese document.” Without the careful encasement of each page and its digital photograph, the Swiss cheese document would have eventually become illegible—a scholar’s gold mine lost to impending parchment decay. But that didn’t happen. The document was preserved because of their work and so will roughly 900 more rare manuscripts—some dating from at “It’s a perfect fit here,” said a wide-eyed Buschey, who specialized in paper conservation in her graduate studies at New York University. She received a master’s degree in art history and conservation earlier this spring. Just three months on the job, Buschey is filling an important gap left when another grant by the Carnegie Foundation ran out in 2004. For the past four years, Armstrong has been the sole preservationist fighting the battle against mold, humidity, parchment and several hundred years of manuscript decay. With Buschey’s help now, though, the 900 rare documents might yet survive. They are the last left from the J.T.S. Library’s total of 11,000 rare Hebrew manuscripts—the world’s largest—that have already been preserved on microfilm. For the average library-goer, these preserved manuscripts do not matter much. But to graduate-level students and professional scholars, primary documents like these are vital. “Obviously, modern scholarship cannot exist without these manuscripts,” said Dr. David Kraemer, the JTS Library’s head librarian. Kraemer, who solicited the donation, is also an accomplished scholar who has used rare manuscripts many times before for such books as “The Mind of the Talmud: An Intellectual History of the Babylonian Talmud” and his most recent “Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages.” After a visit to Kraemer’s book-lined office, which overlooks the JTS courtyard and its main buildings at 122nd Street and Broadway, he walked to the preservationists’ laboratory. There, Kraemer met Armstrong and Buschey and together they talked about the seminary’s storied manuscript collection, the trouble with preserving it and the importance of the $100,000 donation. The grant comes in large part from the Morris and Beverly Baker Foundation, which has served mostly Jewish educational and cultural projects for more than ten years. Kraemer, and others interviewed, cited the humility of the Baker Foundation gifts—they rarely put their name on plaques or buildings. Beverly, who oversees the foundation, is about “the nuts and bolts,” Kraemer said. “There’s no plaque anywhere for any of this.” He took this reporter to the library’s roof and swung out an arm gesturing towards a large grey air-conditioning unit. “This is Beverly Baker,” he said. A few years ago, Beverly gave a $250,000 foundation donation to install a climate control system for the library’s rare book room. The air conditioning unit is the visual extent of the gift. “It’s not, quote-unquote, sexy,” Kraemer said of the foundation’s exceedingly practical gifts. But it is absolutely necessary, he noted. The Morris and Beverly Baker Foundation was founded in 1985, but became active after Morris, a highly successful developer in Windsor, Canada—just north of Detroit—died of cancer in 1996. Morris left 75 percent of his fortunes to the foundation, and put his wife in charge. “The bad news is that my husband died,” Beverly, now 74, said in a phone interview from her home in West Bloomfield, Mich. “The good news is that he gave me this foundation to run.” The foundation is an endowment; the annual budget taken solely from its investment dividends and collected interest. Baker said the foundation has given away between $500,000 and $750,000 a year, with some 80 percent going to Jewish-related education and cultural activities. Recent donations include ones to the JTS Library, for a Yiddish preceptor at Harvard and to the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. But the secular world has benefited too, with donations to a cancer center at a Windsor hospital and a scholarship to the musical school at the University of Michigan, among other organizations. Both Morris and Beverly graduated from the University of Michigan in the 1950s, and met afterwards, in 1957, on a blind date. Beverly, a former music school teacher, said she directs most her foundation’s monies to educational and cultural projects — as opposed to building projects, or “bricks and mortar,” as she calls it. “I’m not interested in buildings, I’m interested in what goes on inside the buildings,” she said. The JTS Library is the largest owner of rare Hebrew manuscripts in the world, with some 11,000 in total, some dating as far back as the 10th century C.E. The library began accruing manuscripts when the institution, Conservative Judaism’s main hub, was founded in 1886, but it wasn’t until Solomon Schechter hired Alexander Marx, a German Jewish scholar and librarian, that the collection grew exponentially. Marx came to the JTS in 1903 and was its librarian until his death in 1953. “Under his leadership,” Kraemer said of Marx, “that’s when we got a real good chunk of our holdings.” A major problem—for the JTS and any library holding rare texts—has always been how to preserve them. Librarians and scholars are currently enthralled in a debate over how Google plans to digitize millions of old books, some of which only have one extant copy remaining. Google plans to digitize as many books as quickly as possible, which means tearing out pages to scan them. Critics fear the loss of the original book itself, while Google argues that the information it holds is much more important. For years, librarians have relied on microfilm, which requires photographs of the book’s pages for scholars to later consult. But scholars still have to go to the particular library holding the microfilm to see them. And the microfilming process is crude, requiring heavy glass plates to be placed on extremely fragile pages with aging book spines. “You can’t photograph it without it falling apart,” said Armstrong. But digital photography and newer methods of preserving the pages have made microfilming almost obsolete. Today, Armstrong and Buschey often use pricey polyester plastic sheets—which can cost up to $50 a page—to encase individual pages of a manuscript. Then they hire a digital photographer to photograph the work. Once digitized, the book can be made accessible to anybody with Internet access. Most of the JTS’s 11,000 books have already been preserved on microfilm—except these last 900 that will be preserved with the new $100,000 donation. “A very high priority is how I would describe it,” Kraemer said of preserving these last books. He has been librarian since 2004, at roughly the same time that the Carnegie Foundation money ran out, which stalled Armstrong’s progress significantly. “It was pretty lean,” Armstrong said of the past four years. But now she has Buschey, and the $100,000 donation, to help. |
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