New Site Helps You Find Your Moment with the Rebbe

Gimmel Tammuz is upon us again, and in honor of this special day, JEM is at long last sharing with the family of Chassidim the much-anticipated beta release of their photo archive site, www.thelivingarchive.org.

Over eight years in the making, the site is a ground-breaking step in the realization of JEM’s mission to collect, restore, archive, and provide access to the priceless multimedia materials featuring the Rebbe and the surrounding Lubavitch life. It is these photos, videos, and audio recordings that provide the most vivid record of the Rebbe’s message to and impact upon the world.

The bulk of this archive is comprised of six seed collections, the life’s work of talented professional photographers, in addition to dozens of smaller personal collections, each of which has been discovered and acquired by the JEM team over the years. Afterward the collections underwent an exhaustive process of digitization, restoration, and color correction to achieve a final iamge that is faithful to the original. Included are the most striking and beautiful images ever taken of the Rebbe, some of which have never before been seen by the public.

In striving to achieve the final step of presenting these materials before the eyes of the world, JEM has built an immersive and full-featured web tool allowing users to browse and search the photos by person, date, event, and other tags, as well as order prints for their own home or office. The community-driven functionality of tagging, commenting on, and captioning photos will afford many the joy of finding their own moment with the Rebbe immortalized on film, with the option to print and share that special moment in time with their children and others.

This pre-release beta glimpse has been launched in honor of Gimmel Tammuz, and, while nearly complete, there remain a number of performance upgrades and tweaks that will be completed in the coming weeks.