Archivist in the Spotlight: Building a New Home for Jewish Learning with Cassy Sachar

In the fourth part of our ongoing Archivist in the Spotlight series shining a light on the people preserving, sharing, and celebrating Jewish heritage across the UK, Cassy Sachar, Senior Librarian at Leo Baeck College, tells us about the creation of their library’s brand new reading room.

A Library That Reflects Our College

When I talk about our library at Leo Baeck College, I always start with its extraordinary breadth. We are a progressive rabbinical school with collections spanning roughly five hundred years of Jewish learning, culture, and creativity. Our shelves hold everything from cookery and art to philosophy, pastoral care, and social justice. It has always felt important to me that our students can explore every facet of Jewish knowledge – intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and communal.

Our archival collections are just as remarkable. Among my favourites are the indexed sermons of Rabbi John Rayner, which total over a thousand documents and almost all typewritten apart from one handwritten the week John F. Kennedy was shot while Rayner was visiting America.

All these collections have shaped generations of rabbis who have trained at Leo Baeck, and I feel being their steward is deeply meaningful.

A Space for Learning, Community, and Wonder

For decades, we’ve dreamed of moving the library out of its basement home. For years, the plan has been to create a new space in the bright, spacious first‑floor room that once served as a synagogue hall. Plans came and went, but ultimately couldn’t be realised.

Then, while I was on parental leave, everything changed. I received a phone call letting me know that an anonymous donor had gifted us the means to finally make the move possible. It was surreal, overwhelming, and profoundly humbling.

Creating this new library was far more complex than simply moving books upstairs. Because the room sits above ground level, structural engineers told us exactly where shelves could go and how high they could be. Surprisingly, those constraints sparked creativity.

By working closely with SquareFeet Architects, we transformed limitations into features: a bright study space with black beams, glass vitrines, warm wood accents, and two adjoining rooms that can open into one another for events. The design preserved the original architecture while making it modern. I wanted the space to feel studious yet welcoming – a place rooted in history but alive with conversation, curiosity, and community.

With 60,000 volumes in our full holdings, we knew not everything could move upstairs. Instead, we decided to create a curated collection for the reading room of 13,000–15,000 books that includes essential materials, highlights our specialist strengths, and features new works that reflect the evolving landscape of Jewish thought.

Choosing them has been unexpectedly joyful. We held “book‑selection parties” with faculty – fuelled by biscuits and cake – where colleagues debated, reminisced, and laughed over which titles absolutely *had* to make the cut.

As visitors enter the new reading room, if they can make it past the delights of the New Books Shelves, they are led to one of our display vitrines. These glassed-in cabinets work with open display shelving to allow our most precious items to be exhibited safely alongside related material, which can be handled more freely.

Our inaugural exhibition “Beautiful Books” celebrates the riches and diversity of our collections and explores the significance of making, reading and preserving beautiful Jewish books. It’s a fascinating opportunity to explore where Jewish books meet art and design over the past 500 years. Alongside the exhibition, as well as welcoming groups to explore the significance of these beautiful books more deeply, we will be holding a Craftivism Workshop, learning about using craft processes as a campaigning tool and a multi-sensory reading of the Book of Ruth, exploring the Shavuot reading through art and language.

Everything about the new library is, in many ways, an evolving experiment. And that’s really exciting.

Unlocking the Archives

One of the biggest opportunities the move creates is the ability to bring together archival material that, until now, had been scattered across locations throughout the College.

A couple of the collections I’m most excited to feature are the Bogdanski Papers and the Rabbi Bruno Italiener Archive.

A box labelled only “Bogdanski papers” had been donated around 10 years ago but remained untouched. Inside, we found the personal research and musical compositions of Majer Bogdanski, a Polish-born singer and composer who became a key figure in preserving and creating Yiddish music in London. It also contained some heartbreaking correspondence documenting his search for his wife after the Holocaust. That story speaks not just to Jewish history but to the immigrant experience as a whole – the idea of people leaving their families and not knowing what has happened to them and then trying to find them again. It’s incredibly powerful.

Rabbi Bruno Italiener’s Archive holds photographs, research notes, and early‑twentieth‑century glass slides. He was a Rabbi in pre‑war Germanyand a scholar of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. As someone who researches this area myself, seeing his working process – his marginalia, his methods – feels like being invited into his mind.

These discoveries reaffirm why this new space matters: we can finally display, teach with, and celebrate materials that have never been shown publicly before.

A Space for Everyone

All of this has happened while our small team continued running daily services for the students and staff at Leo Baeck. Balancing preservation work, a capital project, and the demands of a living, breathing library has been intense. But the new space has “good bones,” and despite the challenges, the work has never stopped feeling meaningful.

More than anything, I want this new library, now officially named the Lily Montagu Reading Room, to be a place where people feel welcome to explore, touch, question, and wonder, whether you’re a student, faculty or a visitor. I want everyone to know Jewish learning is alive – tactile, relational, dynamic – and this new space allows us to show that.

To find out more about visiting or attending our events, see our webpages https://lbc.ac.uk/library-resources/visit/ or email library@lbc.ac.uk 

Leo Baeck College Library

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