Let’s start with last night. Dr. Rachel Ukeles, Director of Collections for the National Library of Israel gave a fascinating presentation last night at Adas Israel. The NLI is going to open a beautiful new building in Jerusalem near the Knesset later this year and move its collection there and move its extensive collection there from its current home on the campus of The Hebrew University. She talked about the history of the library, and about eight items of particular interest in their collection.

Starting with the phrase “the Jewish people may be the People of the Book, but they have not been the People of the Library”, she talked of the history of Hebrew manuscripts and books, how they were maintained, bought and sold, but never placed into what we would call a library. Even the first attempts at a comprehensive Jewish library in Palestine in the late 1800s failed because, in part, of opposition of Orthodox rabbis to having a “Jewish” library contain anything other than approved religious books.

But the concept of a library did take off and the university library also acted as a national library (with a lot of moving books caused by the location of the Mt. Scopus campus after 1948 in Jordanian controlled Eastern Jerusalem, causing moving the library to the West Jerusalem Hebrew U. campus). In 2007, the Knesset unanimously passed a law creating and directing the mission of a national library, and finally, in 2023, the library will have its own home, separate from the school.

Her selection of parts of the collection to discuss included the original manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, an old Gez-language Jewish bible from Ethiopia, a women’s prayer book from Salonica, and the original handwritten version of the song Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold).

I still have not been a regular event goer since the pandemic, and although this was not my first Adas evening event, it was one of the first. I was surprised to see over 100 people there, and it was nice talking to some folks I had not seen for years, and even helping a couple home after their car wouldn’t start.

Then, this morning, I left the house early to go to my Thursday morning breakfast group meeting at Beth El in Bethesda. We are now meeting in person one week a month, and staying on Zoom the other three. We will see what happens to our schedule in the future, but I know we won’t give up Zoom, because we now have a few members who are not able to travel to Beth El because they have moved to Florida and we don’t want to leave the Floridians out in the cold.

At any event, today’s presentation was on the City of Chicago (part 2) by Ed Kopf, who is good at this sort of thing because he spends a lot of time in Chicago, and because he used to be an American history professor. If I could pick out one important point he made in the development of Chicago, it was as a transportation and distribution center. A place where you had water transportation (the Great Lakes and a canal to the Mississippi), where railroads from all over the country came together, where there was an extraordinarily large amount of prairie land in the Midwest waiting for cultivation and livestock. Chicago became the home of meat packing, grain distribution, lumber transport and so much more. He pointed out those men (yes, men) who helped shape the city – railroad men, canal developers, stockyards owners and so on.

He also, of course, talked about cultural development and race problems, and fires and the Columbian Exhibition of 1893. All fascinating – and did you know that the Chicago River, which now flows to the west, at one time flowed into Lake Michigan? Well, that’s quite a story in and of itself.

Finally, I agreed to give my second presentation of the year on July 13. It’s going to be on Saul Alinsky, and much will be based on the biography of him written by my friend Sandy Horwitt, who passed away a little over a year ago. My premise (not Sandy’s) is that Alinsky, a very talented guy, was basically non-ideological in his community organizing (although he has become a symbol of left wing organizing) and that the person who had the largest success in putting Alinsky’s principles into action was none other than Newt Gingrich in connection with the development of the Tea Party. Stay tuned.