- A secret facility at Harvard University is dedicated to preserving Israeli publications in case of Israel’s destruction.
- With consistent workers and more than 1 million items, the world’s top university has been preparing for Israel’s end.
In an effort to safeguard Israel’s cultural and scientific output in case Israel ceases to exist, a secret facility at Harvard University is dedicated to preserving everything published in Israel, according to reports by Israeli media on Sunday.
The report, published by the Haaretz Daily, said the archive contains tens of thousands of volumes and works across disciplines representing Israeli culture, all catalogued and stored in large underground halls.
According to the report, Israeli poet and novelist Haim Be’er said organisers of a late-1990s literary conference at Harvard took him to what he described as an “extraordinary place”.
He said the building looked like a Greek temple before walking inside and being led to a vast basement. He described it as “a massive space filled with printed materials.” He also said that he saw young women working nonstop at computers documenting items not typically found in an academic library.
He said the archive had: “synagogue pamphlets, kibbutz newsletters, memorial booklets for fallen soldiers, Simchat Torah flags, advertisements and political campaign materials.”
According to the Haaretz report, the archive is not a standard academic initiative and is independent from Israeli government institutions, giving it greater security in the event of a crisis.
The report added that the project was led by Jewish scholar Charles Berlin, who was appointed in the 1960s to head a new division at Harvard devoted to documenting Jewish life and culture across generations.
Harvard has not issued a comment on the report, but its librarians said the division holds roughly one million archival items, each potentially containing dozens or hundreds of documents, including tens of thousands of hours of audio and video recordings and at least six million images.
According to Israeli writer Ehud Ben-Ezer, who also worked with Berlin, the scholar faced harsh criticism, including from an Israeli historian who accused him of documenting out of doubt about Israel’s future.
