The Library will observe Israel's 50th birthday with a new exhibition in the South Gallery of the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building.
"Zion's Call: A Library of Congress Exhibition Marking Israel's Fiftieth Year" will be on view Sept. 17 through Dec. 19, Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Documenting the rise of modern Israel in the ancient land of the Bible, the exhibition combines early renderings of the Holy Land with modern records of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Additional materials depict the development of modern Zionism from the late 19th century until after Israel became a sovereign state.
The exhibition draws on the Library's extensive Hebraica collection that includes 150,000 volumes and scores of photographs, prints, films, tablets, manuscripts, maps, sheet music, cassettes, periodicals, compact disks and videotapes documenting Israel.
Left, title page for The State of Israel (1948), by Arthur Szyk. This lithograph depicts the history of Israel through images and symbols. It was commissioned as one of a series honoring the member countries of the United Nations. Only nine of these studies were completed by master artist and illuminator Arthur Szyk before his death in 1951. Used with permission of Historicana, Burlingame, Calif; center, this woodcut of the Temple in Jerusalem (by Yonah b. Ya'akov Ashkenazi) is one of several illustrations in Zikaron bi-Yerushalayim (Remembrance of Jerusalem), a 1724 guide book to sacred places; right, Alef Bet, published in 1923, has become a favorite of collectors of Jewish art.
The Library of Congress began systematically collecting Judaica and Hebraica in 1912, when financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff donated 20,000 volumes after purchasing them from bookseller and bibliographer Ephraim Deinard.
Today, the Hebraic Section combines valuable ancient texts with an extensive collection of materials about the culture and origins of modern Israel. The head of the section, Michael W. Grunberger, says, "The Library has been recording Israel's development since the nation's birth.
"Our Hebraic collection was already growing when Israel was founded," Mr. Grunberger said. "Right from the start, the Library of Congress has been preserving the spiritual and cultural heritage of Israel."
Many of the items tied to ancient Israel have been part of the Library's collections since its beginning. A Hebrew grammar written by Baruch Spinoza was among the books Thomas Jefferson sold to Congress after British soldiers destroyed the original congressional library during the War of 1812, as well as a compendium of rabbinical law and lore, known as the Mishnah.
Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East ended when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the sacred Second Temple in the first century, but since then pilgrims have recorded the landscape in artifacts gathered by the Library and featured in the exhibition. Over the centuries, pilgrims marked gravesites, shrines, territories of the 12 tribes of Israel, locations of biblical events, and geographical and topographical details, all of which are in the exhibition.
On display is a 15th century travel guide to religious sites in the Middle East that, because of its popularity among travelers, was published in five other languages besides its original Latin by 1498. In another part of the exhibition, a French cartographer named Nicholas Sanson engraved the territories of the 12 tribes of Israel in a hand-colored 17th century map.
The Call of Zion by E.M. Lilien, from Morris Rosenfeld's Gezamelte Lieder (Collected Poems); Lilien, an Austrian artist active in the Zionist movement, portrays the Land of Israel as a haven for the Jews of Eastern Europe.
A popular map of the Holy Land comes from a 1781 reprint of a famous Passover haggadah originally published in Amsterdam in 1695. The exhibit also features a 1696 engraving of the floor plan of the Temple of Solomon that shows the room known as the Holiest of Holies in Jewish lore.
Pulled from the 150,000 volumes in the Hebraica collection and included in the exhibition is the first Hebrew book printed in the Holy Land. Yom Tov Zahalon's Lekah Tov is a commentary on the Book of Esther that was published in Safed in 1577.
Tracing Israel's history to modern times are records and documents of the new State, including the original United Nations General Assembly voting sheet resolving to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews in 1947. The sheet contains the signatures of President Harry S. Truman; Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel; Eleanor Roosevelt; Golda Meir; and Abba Hillel Silver, among others.
A highlight of the exhibition is a digest of newsreel clips depicting the events surrounding the establishment of the modern state of Israel, assembled by the exhibition's director, Kimberli Curry of the Interpretive Programs Office. "The film touches on the unfolding events in the Holy Land, the activities of the United Nations, the mass immigration to Palestine of Holocaust survivors and the establishment of the state of Israel," Ms. Curry said. "These film clips enable us to see with our own eyes the dramatic story of the birth of Israel."
One photograph that is part of the Library's Matson Collection is also on view, showing the surrender of Jerusalem by its mayor to two British sergeants in 1917. "That one image," said Les Vogel of the Office of Scholarly Programs, "captures a moment of great historical import, as political control passes from the Ottoman Turks to a European power. It sets the stage for the British Mandate and subsequent turmoil over the fate of the Holy Land in modern times."
The movement to create a modern Israel can be traced to the late 19th century, when Budapest-born Theodor Herzl published a brochure called Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State, a treatise on creating a Jewish state to put an end to persecution and anti-Semitism. In 1897, Herzl was elected as the first president of the World Zionist Organization in Basel, Switzerland. His organization and the groundwork it laid were instrumental in the founding of Israel 51 years later.
Left, this watercolor wall plaque, painted in Palestine around 1870, depicts four cities of the Holy Land -- Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed; right, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, in a poster by Zev Raban commemorating the Jubilee of the World Zionist Organization.
Writing in his diary that year, Herzl prophetically declared: "At Basel I founded the Jewish State." Though his death in 1904 would prevent him from seeing the creation of Israel, his diary entry demonstrated his conviction that it was only a matter of time. "In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years," he continued, "everyone will perceive it." A lithograph of Herzl, his published diary and an 1896 copy of The Jewish State written in Hebrew are all in the exhibition.
The exhibition was made possible by a grant from the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation of Washington, D.C.
In addition to the exhibition, the Library will host a concert, poetry reading and film series as part of its yearlong celebration of "Israel at 50," produced with the cooperation of the Embassy of Israel.
