BROOKLYN, NY — The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a grant to the group responsible for preserving the more than 4,000 hours of raw audio and video footage of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory.
Federal Grant Helps Preserve Lubavitch Archival Footage
BROOKLYN, NY — The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a grant to the group responsible for preserving the more than 4,000 hours of raw audio and video footage of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory.
According to Elkanah Shmotkin, director of Jewish Educational Media, the $5,000 allocation will help fund a study of the group’s archives to assess how much its more than 1,600 recordings – some dating back to the 1920s – have decayed. The data will be used to determine how best to preserve the material, which was originally stored on quick-to-degrade magnetic tape.
The JEM collection contains film documents of Jewish life in the United States from as early as 1929, with particular emphasis on the talks and events surrounding the Rebbe. On an average day, a team of young Chabad-Lubavitch scholars clacks away from a Brooklyn, N.Y., office, adding subtitles in four different languages to the Rebbe’s Yiddish talks for inclusion in the group’s weekly “Living Torah” video compilation.
Digitizing the collection, however, has been an equally top priority. The tapes “are of serious interest to the general public,” said Shmotkin, “and we owe it to history to preserve them.”
