Connecting Collections: A Day for Archivists Working with Jewish Materials

On 17 September, Sheffield Central Library became a hub of ideas, stories, and collaboration as archivists, curators, and heritage professionals gathered for a networking day focused on Jewish collections.

The Knowledge Exchange & Networking Event For Regional Heritage Professionals working with Jewish Collections was organised by Frankie Drummond Charig, Project Archivist at Sheffield City Archives and Libraries, in collaboration with Hidden Treasures. It brought together archivists and projects from across the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The day was about more than sharing projects though—it was about building a community of practice.

Rebecca Singer welcomed everyone on behalf of Hidden Treasures saying, “Whether you’re a mainstream organisation, or a volunteer with the Jewish community without any formal training—this is a day for you.”

Why This Day Mattered

The aim was simple: to create a space for candid conversations about what’s working, what’s challenging, and what’s next. We heard from 17 organisations about the work they are doing. It was a fantastic opportunity for people to connect with their peers and colleagues across the region, discover what others are working on and get inspired.

The day highlighted five projects that demonstrated the different ways organisations have worked with Jewish material:

Liverpool Record Office: 50 Years of Merseyside Jewish Community Archive

Liverpool’s Jewish community has been depositing records since the 1970s, creating one of the UK’s most significant community archives. The collection spans synagogue records, personal papers, and oral histories. 

Chloe Smith reflected: “It’s been a real exercise in co-production. The community’s involvement has been essential—without them, the project would have taken twice as long and looked completely different.” Vicki Caren, Specialist Officer – Archives at Liverpool, told us about the significance of the collection. The city’s Jewish community was established in 1745. It’s the first in the north of England and largest outside of London until mid C19th. The Merseyside Jewish Community Archive is the largest and oldest community archive held at Liverpool Record Office with approximately 200 collections and the links with Merseyside Jewish Representative Council (MJRC) go back 50 years with the first deposit in 1975. You can find out more about Liverpool’s Jewish archive collection here.

The project established and maintained contact between the MJRC honorary archivist and LRO archivist/ team leader. It has enabled Chloe Smith’s recruitment as Project Archivist, the cataloging of material collected in the past 20 years and an exhibition in Liverpool Central Library as well as other vital work.

Chloe gave the group several examples of problems that she worked to solve through the project. These included the MJRC being widely recognised as a successful community partnership model for combining grassroots collecting with institutional support but little had been done to formally document how the partnership operates in practice since the early 2000s. They sustained and documented the MJRC/LRO Partnership, capturing the working methods, roles, and community knowledge involved to support transparency and replication in other places.

Another was Jewish archival practice evolving with the community. It was recommended that the Merseyside Jewish Representative Council develop a more focused collecting policy to include underrepresented groups and adapt to demographic shifts and representation gaps in the contemporary Jewish community.

The issue of balancing privacy with access is common. The project developed a clear policy towards depositor-request closure periods and audit closed collections. Chloe emphasized that community-specific concerns around privacy and sensitive data must be balanced with access.

Chloe concluded that the MJRC/LRO partnership model provides a proven case study for future best practice and that by aligning with The National Archives’ Hub for Community-Led Research it can inform the work of other migrant origin, diasporic, and religious communities.

Holocaust Centre North: Memorial Gestures

Holocaust Centre North shared its innovative artist residency programme, Memorial Gestures, which invites artists, writers, and translators to respond to archival material. The results have been powerful—new artworks, exhibitions, and conversations that make history resonate today.

On a practical basis, the residencies are 8 months long, research based and culminate in a group exhibition and publication. Holocaust Centre North have developed a series of workshops for the artists that include an introduction to the history of the Holocaust, contemporary antisemitism and training on ethical research practices in co-production with vulnerable people and sensitive topics. From this starting point, the artists then work closely with the collections team to decide on a research focus and produce work in response to these encounters with the material.

The project has shed new light on the collections and the different approaches and interpretations from the artists have been fascinating for the HCN staff as well. One thing that CEO Alessandro Bucci and Archivist Hari Jonkers quickly realized was the impact that the subject had on the artists. “We realised early on that working with traumatic material requires pastoral care. Sometimes artists just needed to go for a walk by the canal after a day in the archive.”

This year’s exhibition took place at Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley, Leeds. Alessandro and Hari showed us some of the incredibly diverse artistic responses to the collections from large scale textile work to photography collage to minimalist installations.

Holocaust Centre North see this work in direct relationship to their ideas of how to ensure that the atrocities of the Holocaust are remembered by future generations without recourse to living eyewitnesses, foster a responsible culture of care when engaging with stories of persecution, migration and loss and understand what has been lost, stolen, destroyed – those things that do not take archivable form. Memorial Gestures may be a different way of engaging with Jewish archives but it works towards many of the same aims more traditional routes do.

North East Museums: Unlocking North East Jewish Heritage

This ambitious project, based at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle, has created a digital map of Jewish heritage across the region. It brings together synagogue records, oral histories, photographs, and business archives, making them accessible to researchers and the public.

As the Project Coordinator, Julie Ballands, explained: “We know academic researchers can navigate catalogues, but for many people, they’re a barrier. We wanted something more immediate, more inviting.”

The digital map project aims to build on the work already being done as part of the Lahav project; digitise the material held by Tyne & Wear Archives relating to North East Jewish communities; uncover and digitise related material held in other regional, national and private archives that relate to the Jewish community in the North East; make this digitised material accessible to the public and academic audiences through an online platform; tell key stories of the North-East Jewish communities through the online platform and facilitate and support research into the Jewish communities of the North East.

It also gave six students at Newcastle, Northumbria and Durham Universities the opportunity to do research projects ranging from using the oral history collection to look at womens’ roles in business to food production and kosher practices. 

The online platform took the form of a map and can be found at the Unlocking North East Jewish Heritage website. This location based approach allowed for a stand-alone resource, capable of hosting text, image, audio and video assets that was user friendly and accessible. It gave the ability to categorise, tag, and link points on the map, create trails linking places, include historic maps as well as modern and the potential to include academic references and other links all in a format that both researchers and public could use.

The project has had a successful funding bid for an additional year. This means they can continue to develop and upload content for the online platform. Julie says that the content will focus more on people’s stories and businesses. They’ll also work with other regional archives and support digitisation of further material as well as continuing to develop the archives collection through collecting relevant material and support a collaborative PhD with Durham University. They hope to raise awareness of the online portal resource to encourage further research and engagement and importantly, engage with local, national and international audiences and encourage dialogue and enriching of records and stories.

National Holocaust Centre and Museum: Dialogue Boxes

The Centre introduced us to its Dialogue Boxes, a handling collection designed to spark conversation about themes like becoming a refugee, resistance, and liberation. “We wanted to move away from faceless masses and help people meet the individuals behind the stories,” said Claudia Linda Reese, the Senior Researcher at the Centre.

The “boxes”, funded by the Headley Trust, take the form of interactive cases that schoolchildren and visitors can explore independently or as a group. Some of the items are genuine artifacts and some are recreations but it’s the immediacy of the stories the developers hoped to capture.

The house box Claudia showed pictures of tells the story of becoming a refugee. It includes items such as a earthenware hot water bottle and photo albums which prompt questions like what did they leave behind?, how were they welcomed? And how did they experience arrival? The experiences the children have with this “dialogue box” gets them talking and thinking about refugees in different ways. The stories suggest that they are not a faceless mass and that they are never people from nowhere. The individuals and objects help children relate to not only Jewish refugees from history but also more recent refugees.

Sheffield City Archives and Libraries: “Sheffield Jewish Archives” Cataloguing & Engagement Project

The final case study came from Frankie Drummond Charig who spoke about the project she has been working on to catalogue and create engagement opportunities for the Jewish archives held by Sheffield City Archives and Libraries. Frankie took us through the project which started in 2022 and was funded by the Jane Goodman Charitable Trust. 

The around 80 boxes of material included everything from the records from local synagogues to meeting minutes of Jewish societies to family photographs. The variety must have been both a joy and a challenge. Frankie says they began cataloguing but were very aware they needed to involve the local Jewish community to give advice and give a richer picture of Jewish life in the city. She spoke to the Rabbi of the Sheffield United Synagogue, academics and the Jewish society at Sheffield’s universities and asked Hidden Treasures to help make contact with other experts who could help.

One particularly useful event was bringing members of the community together to identify and label photographs. It was a simple set up, with photocopies of the photos and then families and individuals asked to simply write their memories of who or what they were. Frankie says she felt like there was a sense of urgency about the workshop though – that the community saw this as their chance to preserve this history.

This was just one of several events that engaged Jewish and non-Jewish with the archives and one of the important outcomes identified for the project. Frankie took us through some of the hoped for outcomes which ranged from stronger ties between City Archives and the community, improved public access to records and collaboration with academics, and the outputs that addressed these. They included the online catalogue, a digitized sample of the collection with online access, public events such as a Jewish History Day and an exhibition at Sheffield Central Library and culminating in a publication, ‘From Shtetl to Steel City: The Lost World of Sheffield Jewish Life’ by local academic Professor Judy Simons.

Frankie concluded with her take on the ingredients for a successful archive project and the challenges of being externally funded. She says it starts with a healthy budget but also needs project management and oversight from both senior internal staff and external project consultancy and/or a steering group. Some of the challenges included ensuring there was alignment on expertise-specific issues like cataloguing, data protection and copyright as well as bearing in mind who the project is actually for and what audience it benefits. Lastly, she emphasised the need to build and maintain good donor/community relationships both as experts you can draw knowledge from and as vocal supporters for the work.

Key themes and takeaways of the day

Throughout the case study presentations, the introductions and the discussions several important themes came through that spoke to all the projects and organisations:

1. Collaboration is everything

“It’s about making connections so that when opportunities arise, we know who to call.”

2. Digital access matters – but context is key

Digitisation alone isn’t enough. Interpretation and storytelling bring collections to life.

3. Inclusive and ethical cataloguing

How do we describe collections in ways that are accurate, respectful, and inclusive?

4. Community engagement enriches collections

From oral histories to artist residencies, involving communities ensures relevance and depth.

5. Sustainability and legacy

Many projects are time-limited and grant-funded. Participants stressed the need for strategies to keep momentum going.

The day ended with a lively discussion about next steps and how useful days like this were. We discussed a centralised hub of resources for those working with Jewish materials and more online networking and training sessions. There was a suggestion for a safe, supportive forum for sharing challenges and solutions—possibly on a European scale.

But most of all, people agreed that the day was just a great opportunity to meet each other and discover what colleagues across the region were working on, share challenges and solutions or simply put faces to names. What came out of it was a strong sense that this work continues to be important and valuable. As one participant said: “It’s about making sure these stories don’t just survive—they thrive.”

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