BAKER (ed.), Judacia in the Slavic Realm, Slavica in the Judaic Realm: Repositories, Collections, Projects, Publications

The breakup of the Soviet Union has opened up the libraries and archives of Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and laid the foundation for a blossoming of historical research based on these newly accessible archival sources.The articles in this book deal with both archival, print, and manuscript collections either in the various countries of Eastern Europe, or in libraries and archives with major collections of East European material.In this review, I will concentrate on articles that should be of special interest to archivists.Marek Web, former Head Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, in his article "The Jewish Archival Survey: Tracing Jewish Records in the Former Soviet Archives" (pp.5-16), describes the work of the Jewish Archival Survey (JAS), that since 1992 has been combing archives in the former Soviet Union for records of interest to scholars of Russian Jewish history.One of the most important initiatives was the effort to track down and report on the location and ultimate fate of the major Jewish archival collections.In the early 1990s, published papers and research reports revealed the fate of the archival collections in the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, the Lenin Library in Moscow, the Russian State Library in St. Petersburg, and the Central Party Archives in Moscow to name just a few of the major repositories.During the Soviet years, Jewish collections were subject to confiscation, reorganization, sequestration, and even destruction, and often their ultimate fate was difficult to determine.A preliminary survey by Dmitri Eliashevich, published in 1994, listed 938 archival collections located in ninety-two government repositories in sixty-one cities, arranged in three categories: collections of Jewish provenance; records of state institutions and organizations designated for work in the Jewish sector; and general records containing material of Jewish interest.In 1991, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the YIVO Institute joined forces with the RSUH (Russian State University for the Humanities) (RGGU in Russian) to establish Project Judaica.The Project had two goals: the search for Jewish documents in the archives of Russia and the CIS, and teaching students Jewish history and culture in the framework of the RGGU.The JAS of Project Judaica involves a systematic search for Jewish documentary sources dispersed in the archives of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.The survey aims to locate archives of Jewish historical and cultural interest, create standard descriptions at the collection (fonds) or series (office of pri-

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