Archivist in the Spotlight: Preserving Scottish Jewish history with Alison Scott

For our fifth Archivist in the Spotlight, Alison Scott, Archivist at the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre, reflects on her first year in the job, from wondering if her non-Jewish background would create a challenge, to finding a personal connection with the lives she was cataloguing.

Preserving Scotland’s Jewish heritage

I was appointed to a 3-year project with the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre in February 2025. I have been an archivist for 35 years and I’ve worked in local government, university, business and national archives both here and in New Zealand. For the last 17 I have worked exclusively on cataloguing projects both freelance and for institutions. However, in common with some of the other archivists in this Spotlight series, I am not from a Jewish background. I have worked with specialised collections in the past, for example medical records and engineering blueprints, but in my current situation there is the extra dimension of cultural respect and sensitivity. Would my work experience be enough to help with the project? Or would my lack of community knowledge be a limitation?

The Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (SJAC) has been operational for nearly 40 years. Since 1987, it has been collecting historic material relating to the experiences of Jewish people in Scotland over the past 200 years. 

The Centre is based in the Grade-A listed Garnethill Synagogue in Glasgow (opened 1879). As well as storing the community’s archives, there is a timeline along the Centre’s corridor giving the history of the community; a reading room with displays on Jewish life; and a permanent exhibition on how many Jewish people made the journey to Scotland from all over Europe. Alongside the Archives Centre is the Scottish Jewish Heritage Centre, which runs tours of the Synagogue and education classes for schools about the Holocaust, Jewish immigration to Scotland and the Jewish religion. The astonishing and humbling aspect of all this is that it was the work almost entirely of volunteers.

With all these achievements, you may wonder why they needed an archivist. It’s testimony to the organisation’s ongoing desire to improve the Centre that they applied for and obtained external funding to ‘professionalise’ their catalogues and processes. For me, the opportunity to work with such a dedicated team and long-standing institution was something I really appreciated.

Tackling Challenges as a Team

The first few months were a process of familiarisation with the existing systems and creating new ones where needed. The first priority was an accessioning system. Material is donated to the Centre or collected by the staff all the time. When I started, I was faced with seven shelves of unprocessed donations often with no information on who they were from or when they arrived in the Centre. So, with an accessions register in place and with the invaluable help of the Centre Director, Harvey Kaplan, we have been going through this backlog, allocating accession numbers and entering them in the register along with any provenance information. Alongside this, I formalised the deposit agreement process to ensure the Centre was holding material it had permission to make available. 

All of these new processes have to be communicated to other Centre staff who are rarely in the building at the same time. We now have regular team meetings, which help a lot. With the accession shelves now under control, the bit of extra work needed to process donations has a visible result.

Another hurdle was the different interpretations of the word ‘cataloguing’. It took me a while to realise that the number component in a collection reference was just a box number and did not reflect any kind of archival arrangement. Box listing had been used in the past to make collections accessible quickly, but with the bigger collections, not having items arranged into series makes things difficult to find. This is further compounded in some cases where items in boxes have not been numbered. Archivists tend to think these things are obvious but to a voluntary organisation where work has been done by many different people, it really isn’t. With over 140 linear metres of storage and nearly 200 collections, it was overwhelming to know where to start. 

Again, working in a team was the solution. Harvey had already made some decisions on priorities. The first collections I worked on related to the smaller Jewish communities in different parts of Scotland. Aberdeen, Inverness, Dundee, Ayr, Falkirk, Greenock – all at one time had or still have active Jewish communities. As the Centre represents the whole of Scotland, it’s important that those collections are visible alongside those of the bigger congregations in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In cataloguing, I work closely with Harvey, who can explain terminology and translate any Hebrew or Yiddish. However, few of the collections are exclusively religious in content. Most have the same types of records recognisable anywhere: minute books, correspondence, photographs. Although the content may be different the process remains the same.

Another challenge was the vast amount of digitised material. In many cases, this consists of digitised versions of items in the collections, but in some cases, the donations are born digital. Matching digital versions with their hard copy parents, incorporating them into the catalogues and coming up with consistent descriptions on the availability of digital substitutes have all become part of the process.

Finding Inspiration

As my first year progressed, the challenges felt surmountable, and I could begin to relish what I was encountering every day. What has impressed me most is the sheer breadth and variety of Jewish community organisations. From the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society to the Maccabi and Habonim youth groups, there are few aspects of life unrepresented.

A particular highlight for me was working on the records of the Glasgow Jewish Institute. The Jewish Institute was the main social centre for the Gorbals Jewish community. Its records go back to the 1910s and in its heyday, it had a membership of 2,000. According to a brochure from 1953, the amenities included a bar, billiards, bridge club, chess club, dramatic club with its own theatre, entertainment, Ladies’ Section, literary society and table tennis.

The biggest collection I have worked on so far is the records of Garnethill Hebrew Congregation – the archives of the building I work in. As the records relate to the original Glasgow Hebrew Congregation and not just the building, they go back to 1858. In 2029, the Synagogue will celebrate its 150^th anniversary so it was important that the collection is ready in time to be used for upcoming celebratory exhibitions and research events. 

By way of contrast, SJAC also holds the personal collections of many hundreds of individual Jewish people who have made Scotland their home. As part of the Scottish Holocaust Era Study Centre, many of these stories are made available to visiting tours and school groups. One with a personal connection to me is the story of Lore Zimmerman and Susanne Schaefer. They came to Ayrshire as part of the Kindertransport and were given a home by the Hamiltons at Rozelle House. My great uncle and aunt were estate workers at Rozelle and my mother spent her summer holidays there. She fondly remembered playing with Lore and Susanne. When I told her about my job at SJAC, she remembered their names. I was able to show her photographs of them and tell her about their later lives from the very archives I was working with.

The Future

So far, I have catalogued 33 collections. With another two years to go I might get to 50% of the holdings. But what about the other half? 

Before I started, the Centre was uploading its catalogues into the Your Scottish Archives portal. The YSA website, developed by the Scottish Council on Archives, exists as a ‘one-stop shop’ for archival collections from across Scotland. As such, it’s an easy way for smaller organisations like SJAC to get their catalogues seen and accessed. A requirement of uploading into YSA, though, is greater consistency in cataloguing. In fact, the need for this was one of the reasons for creating my post.

With the twin drivers of YSA requirements and the continuation of professional standards beyond the end of the project, introducing cataloguing guidelines and communicating these are an important part of what I do.

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