Inscribing Oct. 7: National Library of Israel aims to preserve realities of war

Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope… – Elie Wiesel 

Since Oct. 7, the act of documenting our experience has become a significant, unprecedentedly essential part of our reality. Whether it takes the form of testimony, artistic representation, war journaling, a WhatsApp chat, photograph, video, flier, or poem, our generation is proactively preserving our collective experiences and individual realities. 

Our individual goals for creating such materials may be limited in real time, albeit not in vain – correspondence with family, paying memorial, personal expression, educating others, or more. But the National Library of Israel’s Bearing Witness project is shedding light on the bigger responsibility that comes with cultivating our collective voice: recording it for posterity. 

“This is a significant project that has tasked a team at the library, alongside their partners, with the responsibility of documenting Oct. 7 and its aftermath. It involves a massive, ongoing collection of information, materials, and ephemera from a variety of sources, all of which will be cataloged, archived, and preserved for future generations. These materials come from Israelis, as well as Diaspora communities.

“This war is the most documented war ever because of the time we live in,” says Maya Gan Zvi, project manager for Bearing Witness. 

She highlights that “we are in a documenting state of mind, in Israel and abroad.” 

She recalls that by the morning of Oct. 7, “We already were inundated with documentation in the form of digital messages. In the context of this project, all of these are becoming part of an archive of collective evidence – whether that’s text messages, WhatsApp, or Telegram communication. 

“It was really a live-documented terror attack,” says Gan Zvi. “We saw videos published online by Hamas, as well as from victims or survivors – people who tried to escape as they communicated with their family and friends,” she adds. 

“Another channel was all kinds of civil initiatives, which started just a day after the event. For example, people with cameras and microphones who just went to the Gaza border to take pictures, interview survivors, and start to document the event.” 

Very soon, the National Library realized that it needed to collect everything from that day, which would soon become part of an ephemeral experience. 

“The project actually started on October 9, when the people at the library understood that this is a special and important event, and that they need to collect everything that is related to Oct. 7 and the war,” says Gan Zvi. “In our Jewish history, we unfortunately have an experience where we know we need to collect evidence.”

Documenting the Jewish collective via Israeli, Diaspora voices

The goal is to craft a vast, reliable, and open repository reflecting a broad scope of testimony, documentation, social media coverage, and public information for this national memory database. These run the gamut from oral and written testimonies, video and audio clips, social media posts, WhatsApp and Telegram messages, lamentations, diaries, ephemera-like advertisements or flyers, artistic material like music, and more.

A cohesive narrative is being formed not only of Oct. 7 but also a chronicle of the collective experience of the unfolding and ongoing Israel-Hamas war. To preserve the full scope of the collective experience, the materials include not only testimonies of what has been happening in Israel but also those from Diaspora Jewish communities. 

“There is an urgency to do so, on the one hand, to commemorate the moment as it is fresh inside of our collective trauma and memory,” says Gan Zvi. “On the other hand, this is also because of the volatile digital nature of the materials, which often disappear quickly.”

A mosaic of Israeli voices will shed light on the multifaceted aspects of this chapter in Israeli history, and provide a personal perspective. In addition to testimony and ephemera, the library is collecting more intimate submissions, such as war diaries and personal journals, as well as artistic endeavors like literature and visual artworks that have been created in response.

Written, visual media

Esther Chazon and Heddy Abramowitz, two Anglo Jerusalemites who were together on the morning of Oct. 7, have been documenting their experience consistently since that day. Their visual and written reporting processes started naturally: Chazon’s war diary began as daily email updates to her family, while Abramowitz, a Jerusalem-based artist and member of The Jerusalem Post’s editorial staff, intuitively started documenting her local experience visually through her photographic eye. 

“I started the journal because I have family in the US and wanted to update them,” says Chazon, a professor emerita of liturgical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It started as a nightly email and was personal at the beginning; it was aimed at giving family more information than they could get. They were thirsty for information and to know how we were doing.” 

Reading the diary is chilling. Already her first entry brings the haunting realities of an attack in the context of Simchat Torah to life, reflecting the nation’s shock and horror, and serving as a reminder of how caught off guard we were. By the end of the day, it is clear from Chazon’s last entry that she didn’t have a full grasp of the scope of the attack or a sense of the difficult reality that would unfold in the year afterward. 

Within less than two weeks, the tone of Chazon’s journal changed, along with its goals, reflecting the quick rise in antisemitism in the academic world that she is a part of. “Already, on the ninth day of the war, I got a letter from the executive director of the Society of Biblical Literature saying that if Israelis have to cancel because of war, that’s ok, and that they’ll refund the ticket – a classic antisemitic trope.”

Chazon and some of her colleagues put a task force together, writing a letter to the institution to point out the issues with their statement. And also with that, she says, “The evolution of the journal began.” She says she realized “what’s going on at the national and local levels, and also the significance of what we’re doing internationally. I started to highlight this experience, and sent out links to my family, explaining how they can do their own advocacy, with very clear instructions.” 

Reflecting on her contributions to the library’s archive, she points out that “while I was writing it, I don’t know if I had that long history perspective – but working with documents is a big part of my identity, so maybe it was there in the background. But that really wasn’t driving the journal; it was more about getting information out there and advocacy in the academic world.” 

For Abramowitz, a professional artist, documenting her experience through photography came naturally. “No matter where I am, I first need to connect with the camera,” she says. “Due to my work in journalism, I was sensitized to the singular time we were in from Oct. 7 on. 

“I was aware that my daily surroundings, as part of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, reflected the developments in ways that words didn’t. The streets of Jerusalem, whether through graffiti or little vignettes, have a poetic quality. The phenomena of the changing visual and textual poetry in the streets continued to draw me in,” she says. 

Over the past year, Abramowitz has captured the local Jerusalem atmosphere through her street photography. “One of the things that really interested me in the evolving street scenes were the changes. Some very large posters came and went, but more interesting to me were the handwritten additions that popped up on posters, adding information, adding the passage of time, and filling in the larger picture by stretching it in other ways. 

“There was a heartbreaking connection to seeing the images that were so easy to ignore. The little bumper stickers that seemed to mushroom everywhere really affected me. This slowly overtook me as being really important to notice and record. Once I became aware of the National Library archive for the ephemera of Oct. 7, I felt it was imperative that they join the archive,” she adds. 

From collection to massive cataloging and preservation 

The project is just one of many efforts to document testimonies from Oct. 7 and has sparked collaboration with other institutions. “This is a national effort. The National Library took upon itself to coordinate all of these efforts, but we can’t really do it alone – there are many initiatives making documentation, many individuals who collected video and media from Telegram,” says Gan Zvi.

Today, the library is working with other organizations such as Arave Center, the Civilian Emergency HQ Missing Person’s Array, Design Duty 2023, Edut 710, and the photo archives of Kibbutz Be’eri. Expanding the ability to collect such a wide range of media and testimonies is a key aspect of the Bearing Witness project. 

From collection to preservation, it’s the library’s job to catalog this information in a way that will be accessible to the public and preserved for future generations. This is not your average cataloging project. Not only does the library have to consider how they will organize these materials, but there is a lot of sensitivity that goes along with it, and the teams are building guidelines as they go. 

For now, the contributions are unfiltered, but the library’s next stage, which has already started, is learning how to establish this unprecedented collection and make it accessible to the public with great care – which includes ethical and legal responsibilities and idiosyncrasies of dealing with data in the digital age. 

“This whole event is manufacturing big data which we need to collect and handle very carefully; it needs to be preserved as close as possible to the original,” says Gan Zvi. “We also need to make sure this lasts for many years after us. Digital material is very ephemeral. There are many formats that you can open now, but in a year you may not be able to open them.

“We are working with information management organizations trying to collaborate. A consortium of these organizations and civil initiatives, grassroots initiatives, and individuals working together to make sure we can understand how these materials will be saved and be cataloged.” 

Materials have come in quickly. To date, the library has collected over 500 million Internet items, two million files, and over 1,000 ephemera and publication items. Each tells a small part of a collective story: the massacre of Oct. 7, the Israel-Hamas war, and the unfolding events, reactions, and political moments from the past year. 

We can all become part of this historical voice 

“People should be aware of the value of whatever they have, to make sure it is not only documented but also put somewhere where it will be preserved,” reiterates Chazon, when reflecting on the significance of her own journal as part of this project. “I am sure there are more people who have written, taken photos, and have documents. This would be a way of encouraging them in Israel and abroad to [provide documentation] themselves.” 

Through a portal on its website, the library invites everyone to submit relevant documentation from Oct. 7. For the Israeli community, this is focused on retrospectives, documentation of war, artistic expression, and more. From the global communities in the Diaspora, the library is seeking documentation of the impact of the war, expressions of solidarity, and manifestations of antisemitism. It also welcomes information collected on campuses in the US to document the impressions of Jewish and non-Jewish students, faculty members, and various organizations. 

“The one thing that is most important in the end game is to create a huge repository and archive from all of the materials from Oct. 7, about Oct. 7, from and about the war, and the experience and impact of Jewish communities around the world,” says Gan Zvi. “The library identified very soon that there will be an impact on the Jewish communities everywhere, and we see that there is a wave of antisemitism almost everywhere.”

Some of the artifacts already have become accessible on the library’s website. Readers are encouraged to view and share the plethora of testimonies archived so far. 

“We are at the point of comprehending, still digesting, and processing – in the midst of the war,” Gan Zvi says. “But in the years to come, the experiences we are having, even today as the war continues, will be impactful as a means to learn, to bear witness.”■

For more information: www.nli.org.il/en/at-your-service/who-we-are/projects/october-7