Welcome to the JHC library

Julia Monique Reichstein

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.

Andrew Carnegie

In mid-2017, the Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC) library, for the first time, will become a public lending service. However, are you familiar with the extensive and specialist resources and services we already offer? And are you aware of the role you can play in the continued growth and development of the JHC Library?

Here is an overview of the resources and services we offer.

The library holds approximately 7000 books in its collection, housed in two spaces within the JHC. Our Main Library, located on the first floor, holds the General Collection, spanning the historical 1933-1953 timeframe. The Main Library also houses a number of special collections. These include locally published Holocaust memoirs, many published through the Lamm Library’s ‘Makor Write Your Story’ program; Yizkor books; the Janusz Korczak collection; the Reference collection which includes encyclopaedias, listings, theses and court transcripts from war crime trials; Holocaust fiction; and young adult Holocaust literature, both fiction and non-fiction.

Our second space, the Satellite Library, is located opposite the Anne Frank room. It holds our foreign language Holocaust titles spanning 12 languages. Our largest language holdings are Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish.

In addition to our collection, the library also provides a number of research services. These are access to the Online Library Catalogue, JHC Collections Online, and to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive: Spielberg Shoah Foundation Testimonies.

The JHC’s library collection has an online catalogue hosted by the Lamm (formerly Makor) Library’s website. A further six Jewish library catalogues, including that of our neighbour, Kadimah Cultural Centre and National Library, are represented on the Lamm Library catalogue: http://lammjewishlibraryaustralia.softlinkhosting.com.au

An exciting milestone for the JHC was the pilot launch last year of the online portal, ‘JHC Collections Online’. This enables visitors to the museum to have a virtual look at our archival, testimonial, art and library collections via designated computer terminals within the library. As the portal continues to evolve, it will become accessible to researchers the world over.

The JHC library is one of six institutions in Australia that can offer researchers direct access to the USC Visual History Archive: Spielberg Shoah Foundation Testimonies, a database comprising more than 50 000 eye-witness Holocaust survivor testimonies filmed around the world. Please contact the library to set up a booking time.

We extend Holocaust research assistance to historians, academics, students and writers inter alia. As well as filtering and sourcing reliable material, we are able to call upon our ‘walking knowledge bank’ – the extensive knowledge and experience of the JHC’s survivors, museum guides, volunteers and staff.

We also assist individuals with Holocaust family tracing. The library’s role is not to conduct people’s investigations, but to equip them with the relevant research tools and know-how so that they can fulfil their objectives.

The library is also privileged to serve as an additional learning space for school groups for the JHC’s education program. Since 2015, the library has hosted on average three school groups a week, providing an intimate environment for students to learn about survivor testimony from our survivor guides.

Established in 2012, the JHC Publishing House is committed to the revitalisation, preservation and dissemination of memoirs penned by the Jewish Holocaust Centre’s former and current survivor volunteers. Fourteen memoirs have now been reprinted, with a further seven in development.

Julia Monique Reichstein is the JHC librarian. For further information about the library’s services please phone (03) 9528 1985 or email JuliaR@jhc.org.au