SFBAJGS members are long aware of our Transcription Project, ably helmed for so long by the late Pierre Hahn and Jeff Lewy, which collected, scanned, indexed, and placed over 30,000 local Bay Area records from local cemeteries with the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR). We also posted the burial records from Beth Israel Salem Cemetery on our website. This project still holds a large unshared inventory of scanned and indexed files and awaits its next stewards.
It was in the spirit and purpose of the Transcription Project, that in May 2021 SFBAJGS Board member Steve Harris proposed a project to survey pre-1906-earthquake California Jewish Newspaper records: the papers, the repositories, the microfilms. The goal was to make available to the general public, information contained in all English-language Jewish newspapers published in Northern California.
Steve’s project would seek and scan existing microfilm to produce files that could be viewed online. Files already available on microfilm would be the easiest and least expensive to digitize. The challenge would be to find the best quality original microfilm for the fullest set of issues and to gain permissions to use them. The Board was enthusiastic.
Steve contacted them and reported they would charge us $125 per reel to digitize, create pdfs, and fully index the microfilm. Publications prior to 1927 have no copyright claims. Steve recommended that the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) host these records for us. They already host The ‘J’ Weekly’s historical issues.
In November, 2023, Steve reported to the Board that it had turned out that CDNC and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley between them hold first-generation microfilm of almost all the relevant newspapers and so became our sources.
Our project would fund the scanning (i.e., the digitization) of these microfilms and the indexing using OCR and other software. The resulting images and associated search files would be placed on the website of the CDNC, located at UC Riverside, where they could be freely searched and viewed by the public.
We are starting with The Hebrew, with issues published 8 January 1864 to 23 March 1906 (435 issues). The entire run was 1863 to 1921. CDNC sent their films to SRLF, Southern Regional Library Facility at UCLA to be digitized. The Society received and paid an invoice for $487.62 to digitize eleven reels of microfilm. The next step would be the OCR process, which cost about $1,200. CDNC follows the Library of Congress OCR standards, which are quite high.
In the end, we funded the digitization and post-production OCR and indexing of currently available issues of San Francisco’s The Hebrew from 1864 to 1906, ending a few months before the earthquake.
The images in this article are linked to source pages, so just click away! But be sure to return to Acrobat for the rest of the article.
This is one of the projects that your dues and donations support. We hope to digitize more issues of The Hebrew and more historic northern California Jewish newspapers. Your support can make it happen.
The Hebrew, and the Treasures Within
The primary motivation for SFBAJGS to make available the issues of The Hebrew was to provide a substitute source of birth, marriage and death records (BMD) for the many series lost in the quake and fire of 1906. Happily, each issue carries an item like this and each issue as well was the entire run is fully searchable by name:
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SFBAJGS Newspaper Digitization Project