The Forward Association Inc

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“The forward association has devoted substantial effort and funds for the last 18 years to the archival description and conservation of one of the largest collections of photographs documenting the history of jewish communities in the united states, eastern europe and israel, spanning the entire 20th century. The yiddish forward, or forverts, published as a daily newspaper from 1897 to 1983, as a weekly until february of 2012, a biweekly until april 2016, a monthly as of april 2016, and fully digital beginning in early 2019, has always featured original photography commissioned for its pages. The photograph collection is global in scope, but is especially rich in its emphasis on 20th century jewish history, new york immigrant history, and jewish communal life in the united states. The photographic record amassed by the forverts editors paid particular attention in its early decades to class strife, strikes and unions, and then broadened its focus to jewish working class participation in the political and economic life of urban america. It chronicled the 1930s mobilization against fascism, the wartime home front efforts, the victories won by soviet and western armies, the desperation of the remnants of european jewry in the immediate postwar years to reconnect with relatives in the us, and to emigrate to the us or to israel. The forverts gave its mostly poor and working class readership a window on a wider world, and helped to articulate and crystallize the liberal ethos of american jews which has characterized our community ever since. It was a newspaper about yiddish as much as it was a newspaper in yiddish: in text and image, it has depicted the vast record of yiddish art and literature, in more detail and over a wider chronological and geographic span than any other periodical. And yet, by the end of the 20th century, this large and unique photograph collection was hardly known beyond the confines of the forverts' own staff. In 1998 the forward association hired archival staff to identify, catalogue and conserve its holdings. We now know that it contains glass negatives, metal and cardboard plates, bound rotogravure volumes, and over 40,000 gelatin silver photos derived from the original printing process of our newspaper. In the past 24 years we have created a computerized database with item-level descriptions of three-quarters of the images in the collection, and we have stored the processed images in acid-free envelopes suitable for archival storage. Since 2009 the archives have been housed in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled, protected space to ensure their safety. We already digitized about 5000 images, and in 2007 we published some 500 images from this collection chosen by alana newhouse, our former arts and culture editor, and chana pollack, our archivist, in a living lens: photographs of jewish life from the pages of the forward, issued by w. W. Norton. An exhibition was shown at the museum of the city of new york, also in 2007. As the riches of this collection have gained academic and public attention in recent years, we received, and responded to, a growing number of queries from artists, scholars, filmmakers and writers. We are now eager to complete this process with the cataloguing of the final quarter of this collection during the next few years. There are approximately 30,000 to 40,000 images remaining to be catalogued and we expect that the process will be completed in approximately seven years. Cataloguing (i.e. Describing, numbering and rehousing) each photo in our collection will then be followed by the digitization of the entire collection and the creation of a photo archive website that will allow the public access to these unique images, with a search function that will take full advantage of the many fields in our cataloguing process.”