Project aims to create Kansas City Jewish Community Digital Archive
Imagine a website where you could search for a name and see every time that name showed up in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle and other scanned documents—births, baby namings, b’nei mitzvah, volunteer events and celebrations, and special moments in Jewish family and community life.
Type in a name or word, and see what spills out from more than a century of Jewish life here in Kansas City and Kansas City Jews around the world.
A team is working to make this a reality through what it’s calling the Kansas City Jewish Community Digital Archive. In addition to a representative from the State Historical Society of Missouri, the project team includes three leaders in the local Jewish community: Andrew Kaplan, Dr. Norman Kahn, and Alan Edelman, who is serving as secretary-treasurer of the group.
“It’s bringing history back to life, a walk down memory lane,” Kaplan said.
The plan is to use “optical character recognition” software to scan words off pages into a searchable index.
The genesis of the effort is a story unto itself, as related by Kaplan. It started in early 2000, as part of an advertising discussion between The Chronicle and Commerce Bank. Kaplan is an executive vice president of the bank, and he was part of the conversation that included then-Chairman Jonathan Kemper.
The discussion related to a special publication celebrating the 100th anniversary of the paper, and it was really that conversation that led to the idea of ensuring that all 100 years of The Chronicle be digitized for posterity.
“And it snowballed from there,” Kaplan said.
In further exploring the issue, Kaplan was surprised to discover the Barton P. and Mary Davidson Cohen Charitable Fund had several years ago paid to have all the back issues put on microfiche. That collection, which dates from the start of the publication thru 2010, is available through the Johnson County Library.
And that got the team thinking about partnerships with other repositories, including the Jewish Community Archives of Greater Kansas City housed with the State Historical Society of Missouri at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Some of the collection is digitized and available online, including family papers, records from the Jewish Community Center, and scrapbooks from the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy.
But much of the archive remains stored only in boxes at UMKC — to the tune of about 1,000 cubic feet.
As to what all is in there, Kaplan said, “Nobody knows.”
So, here’s where things stand to date:
The project team has raised about $40,000 so far. That has been enough to build a prototype of the website and to get some content into it. Fundraising is now underway to get the rest of the material digitized, including collections from other locations, and to have enough money on hand to pay the annual cost of maintaining the website.
The team hopes to have the website live by early fall, with content that at least includes all the issues of The Chronicle along with all the material already in electronic format from the Jewish archives at the historical society.
Even The Chronicle alone is a huge win, said Kaplan, who has reviewed the microfiche issues at the library. The content and the advertisements, he said, not only tell the story of Jewish Kansas City, but of the community as a whole.
“It’s the records of the matriarchs and patriarchs of Kansas City Jewish life,” Kaplan said. Searching the website, “you run into all these people and families you see every day,” he says.
Kahn said the digital archive would fulfill a dream of his 98-year-old mother, Sybil Kahn. The site would provide an archive for the work she has done to preserve the history of Kansas City’s old garment industry. She has documents and one-on-one interviews.
Sybil Kahn initially thought the material would be shown off just in a kiosk in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, but it has grown much larger than that.
“Visionaries collected this history before us,” Kaplan said. “Now the technology is finally here — the tools are nothing short of phenomenal — to share it online.”
History needs you, too
Members of the community have an important role to play in preserving Jewish history. Please consider donating personal papers or collections of organizational or business records by contacting Alan Edelman at .
Brendan Howard is a freelance writer in Olathe, Kansas.
