For you History lovers - Detroit Jewish News Foundation unveils digital archive

[Vic01]

The Detroit Jewish News Foundation invites students, historians, and web-surfers worldwide to “click their way through history” by accessing a new digital archive of Detroit Jewish News editions dating back to March 1942.

The more than 267,000-document database, now available online free of charge to individuals, represents a page-by-page history of actual newspapers [[with photos and ads) spanning more than 70 years, including countless volumes rescued from a devastating fire at the Jewish News offices in Southfield in January 2002. This trove of information was previously stored in boxes, on bookshelves and on microfilm and was inaccessible to the public. The digitization project, funded by generous donors, took a little more than a year to complete. The archive is now among the largest of its kind in America — Jewish or secular.
State-of-the-art technology allows users to quickly and easily search the database with keywords including names, events, topics, etc. with Google-like speed. The search can be narrowed by date or date range. PDF copies of pages or issues can be emailed or printed.
“The Jewish News is a snapshot in time,” JN Publisher Arthur Horwitz says. “Whether it’s World War II, creation of the State of Israel, the Six-Day War, Soviet immigration, issues today in Washington, it’s all there but with a Jewish context. This archive is valuable and will be valuable for generations to come. It is truly the community’s DNA.”

The website was designed by Media Genesis of Troy, Mich.; ArcaSearch of Paynesville, Minn. is the repository for the document database. It will be periodically updated with new issues of the Jewish News.
Access the Detroit Jewish News Foundation at www.djnfoundation.org.

About the Detroit Jewish News Foundation: The independent, nonprofit Detroit Jewish News Foundation was established in 2011 to pursue an educational, cultural and scholarly mission that provides opportunities to learn, discuss and know the story of the Detroit area Jewish community. Its first project was to preserve, digitize and make available the entire content of the Jewish News, dating to its founding in 1942.

[sumas]

Thank you for this info Vic.

[WaCoTS]

i considered making a post here for this as well.
then i got lost in the archives and forgot all about it, lol!

this is an incredible resource to have opened up and i thank them for it.

[Herman Krieger]

I was a free lance photographer for the Jewish News in 1944. I was pleasantly surprised to find in the archives an item about me entering the the US Army Air Corps, and about 15 photos that I had taken for the Jewish News.
www.efn.org/~hkrieger/bio.htm

[SDCC]

I'm a historian, thanks for starting this thread, and the replies are fascinating.

[dtowncitylover]

There goes any productive things I had to do for a long time.

It's awesome to see this and juxtapose it with the Grosse Pointe News archives, the WASPy news.

I wish they would have done it like the GPN archives, where it's split between the different decades. I shouldn't have to scroll so far to get to the 80s, 70s, 60s, etc.

[Lowell]

This is a great site to wander through. Today I found this from 1951 while looking for something else. Picture of Golda Meir [still Golda Meyerson] keynoting an Israel independence day rally at State Fair arena with announcement of David Ben Gurion coming to the D.

[p69rrh51]

I have been using the site to research Jewish architects for quite some time.

[donpablo]

I was a free lance photographer for the Jewish News in 1944. I was pleasantly surprised to find in the archives an item about me entering the the US Army Air Corps, and about 15 photos that I had taken for the Jewish News.
www.efn.org/~hkrieger/bio.htm

Herman, I see you lived across the street from where the Collingwood massacre happended 13 years later. Did you know about that incident when you lived there?