| Abstract: |
The Cleveland Jewish History Sources Collection is a card file assembled between 1954-1956 by the American Jewish History
Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, to support a planned volume on the history of Cleveland, Ohio, Jewry.
This intention was realized with the publication of History of the Jews of Cleveland by Lloyd P. Gartner in 1978. Source material
for this card file, which covers the span from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, includes both
the national Anglo-Jewish press and local Cleveland sources, including the general press, the Anglo-Jewish press, and Jewish
communal records. Rabbi Jack J. Herman and Judah Rubinstein were the local Cleveland researchers for the project. The collection
consists of 16,000 index cards containing information about Cleveland's Jewish community that was obtained primarily from
newspapers. These cards have been arranged into fourteen broad categories: Arts; Charities; Clubs and Societies, Various;
Community Services; Economic Life; Education; Political Affairs; Population; Sermons and Lectures; Social Life; Synagogues;
Synagogue Related; Umbrella Organizations, and Zionism. Within these categories, primary and sometimes secondary sub-headings
are arranged alphabetically and then chronologically. As prescribed by the AJHC, each research finding was typed on 4x6, un-ruled
index cards and described in the following top-down order: top left, the city and chronological period; top right, topical
classification; single line description of the finding; excerpt(s) from the finding. In many instances, the researchers stapled
to the card photocopies of pertinent portions of the source material. The collection, however, contains exceptions to this
general procedure: a number of 3x5 cards with handwritten entries (evidently, unprocessed research findings) and a number
of 4x6 cards with attached paper negative photocopy, i.e., white-on-black and mirror-image text.
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