Jan Seeley, administrator at Temple Beth Solomon of the Deaf in Northridge, CA reports on their “TBS Archive Project”:
I have been working on the TBS Archive Project for the last four years documenting the Los Angeles Jewish Deaf starting with HAD in 1947, then Unison Club and then TBS through 2020.
Unfortunately over time many of the news clippings and articles had deteriorated and yellowed and were too fragile to save, but I was able to scan many of them and then using optical character recognition (OCR) technology I was able to recreate many of them as close to the original as possible.
All the records were gathered from documents from TBS, HAD, and Unison Club photos, The Congregation News issues, beginning in 1961, scrapbooks constructed by Lotte Friedman, Sisterhood archives and newspaper articles from the B’nai Brith Messenger, the LA Times, The Jewish Journal and a variety of local newspapers.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Alvin Klugman, of blessed memory, for his love of history. Without his passion much of these materials would have been lost.
I am assembling this history complete with the photos, newspaper articles and stories of TBS’ day-to-day life into a large 25″ X 20″ black, archival quality book. All materials used in the book are also high quality so that it will last into the future.
California State University, Northridge is very interested in archiving as much San Fernando Valley history as possible and TBS is an extremely unique part of that history. CSUN itself has been especially intertwined with TBS when it opened its National Center on Deafness.
Once the TBS archive is completed our plan is to turn it over to the CSUN Special Collections, housed within the Oviatt Library on the campus. No one will be able to check it out or remove it from the library, but it can be viewed at the library. I will keep you updated on our progress.
Jan
Source: Congregation News
