Below are PDFs listing various collections housed in the UCLA Department of Special Collections on a variety of themes/topics about Jewish life in Los Angeles. Each includes a brief description of the collections' holdings related to Jewish life in Los Angeles. For more detailed lists of the collections' contents, check out their finding aids in the Online Archive of California.
The materials housed at the UCLA presently number in excess of 170,000 volumes of materials relating to Jewish history, religion, language, society, and culture from around the world. Current and retrospective materials in all languages are collected in print, microform, and electronic formats and include monographs, serial publications, reference works, dissertations, and conference proceedings. The largest number of holdings are not directly related to Jewish life in Los Angeles, but rather provide insight into Jewish history more broadly. These include the Early Italian Hebraica Collection, which is included in the Ahmanson-Murphy Early Italian Printing Collection; Hebrew manuscript holdings, including the Rosenberg-Lewin Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts, Cummings Collection of Hebraica and Judaica, and the Feldman Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts; and a collection of Yizkor books numbering over 500 volumes (see below).
Most area materials are housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library, which concentrates on acquiring research-level materials in the humanities and social sciences. Publications in other disciplines are collected by specialized campus libraries; the Biomedical Library, the Science and Engineering Libraries, the Arts Library, the Music Library, the Law Library, the Management Library and the Maps and Government Information Library collect area materials in their particular subject fields. The College Library collects mainly English-language area materials in a broad range of subjects at the undergraduate level.
Over 400 of the collections housed in UCLA's Department of Special Collections include materials related to Jewish life in Los Angeles. All of the Library's finding aids, as well as many other libraries and institutions in Southern California are available from the Online Archive of California, a link to which is provided below. Below are the most comprehensive collections, and the box to the right includes PDFs listing of various collections housed in the UCLA Department of Special Collections on a variety of themes/topics. Each includes a brief description of the collections' holdings related to Jewish life in Los Angeles. For more detailed lists of the collections' contents, check out their finding aids in the Online Archive of California.
Check out these UCLA digital projects:
The Department of Special Collections has recently acquired the records of the founders of Tree People, an environmental nonprofit that unites the power of trees, people and technology to grow a sustainable future for Los Angeles. The collection is currently being processed and should be available to researchers this fall.
The Department of Special Collections has also recently acquired the Samuel B. Gach Papers, a collection of materials from Anne Gach and Samuel B. Gach, the longtime Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the California Jewish Voice.
Use these sites to locate images of, and metadata for, art, artifacts, archives and monuments relating to Jewish Studies. Some are freely available, others are subscription services, so remote access may be necessary when accessing from off-campus.
The UCLA Library holds a range of video recordings pertaining to Jewish Studies. These include feature films, television series, documentaries, and news programs. Some videos are available for check out at various campus libraries, while others are available for viewing through the Instructional Media Collections and Services located in Powell Library. Title lists for a number of specialized collections are provided below. Please check the UCLA Library Catalog for complete holdings.
The mission of the UCLA Library is to provide access to and delivery of information resources to UCLA students, faculty, and staff in support of the research and instructional mission of the university. Relying on its highly skilled staff, the Library encourages innovation, capitalizes on appropriate technologies, forges effective partnerships and aggressively promotes excellence.
