AJL Regional Conference in Israel

AJL Regional Conference in Israel

AJL presented a regional conference in Israel at Bar Ilan University on November 5, 2009. On the program were four speakers:  

Shmuel Har Noy, Administrative Director of  the National Library of Israel, whose topic was Challenges of the New National Library of Israel.

Professor Aaron Demsky from Bar Ilan University, spoke on The Cultural Significance of Jewish Names.

Professor Elhanan Adler, Deputy Director for Information Technology of the NLI,  reported on Ten Years of Digitization at NLI .

Moshe Rosenfeld, talked about Discoveries of Hebrew Materials in Christian Repositories.

Some of the sessions at the conference were recorded and will be posted as podcasts on the AJL website.

According to Ya'akov Aronson, the organizer of this event, there were more than 50 participants from 12 different institutions. At the conference, Shmuel Har Noy, the Administrative Director of the National Library, invited the group to plan the next program at NLI. Seven people from five institutions volunteered to be on a steering committee to plan future events.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of a new branch of AJL in Israel. We are also planning to hold two simultaneous sessions in Israel and Seattle during our 2010 Annual Convention.