Archival Community Witnesses Film Preservation Effort

A delegation of archivists representing several U.S. government and private institutions joined several dozen members of Jewish communities in suburban Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., for a rare presentation given by Jewish Educational Media, the Chabad-Lubavitch organization responsible for preserving and disseminating footage of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory.

The April 10 event in the private screening room at the capital headquarters of the Motion Picture Association of America gave the audience of 50 people a taste of some of the fruits of JEM’s ongoing Living Archive project, a multimillion-dollar effort at halting the decay of nearly 4,000 hours of video footage and audio recordings of the Rebbe and his predecessor, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, of righteous memory.

“In today’s day and age, we know that nothing is more powerful, more able to recreate an experience, than video and audio,” JEM director Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin told those gathered. But “in the last few years, the tapes and the videos that we had previously been playing without a problem get jammed in the machine, or the tape head gets clogged. Audio pieces aren’t as crisp and clear as they were only a year before.”

“Here we have this treasure, this tool, this inspiration, Ö and it’s melting away,” he said later. “And the problem is not limited to JEM’s collection. Industry wide, archivists have realized that the best way to preserve audiovisual materials is by transferring them to digital media. But it’s an expensive proposition.”

Article continued (Chabad.org News)