Katie Dietrick, the archivist for the Nathan and Theresa Berman Upper Midwest Jewish Archives at the University of Minnesota, has an extensive collection to sort through.
But sometimes it’s the smaller parts of the archive that catch her attention. One day, sorting through the few boxes from the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis, she saw two registration books.
“I found them, and immediately fell in love with them,” Dietrick said. “It’s a simple list of who’s registered, but when you dig more into it, you realize just how interesting this collection is as a data set.”
The books are a log of students enrolled at the school from 1913-45. They include basic information: First and last names, Hebrew names, birthplaces, parents’ (usually fathers’) jobs, and other assorted details.
But, basic information points to larger stories, especially in such a formative time for the Minnesota Jewish community. The logs span two world wars, the Great Depression, and the wave of mostly European Jewish immigration cut off by the Immigration Act of 1924.
For example, in the early years, many fathers of students are listed as being junk peddlers or factory workers. Over time, different and more lucrative careers are listed – showing how the fresh immigrant community integrated and professionalized.
To really dig into those stories, Dietrick knew the registration books needed to be more accessible.
“These are amazing, however, they are stuck on paper, and they are handwritten, sometimes hard to read,” Dietrick said. “So I thought, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could transcribe these ledgers…[to get] this into a spreadsheet and [be] more readable. Then we can look at patterns and manipulate the data.”
That’s how the “Transcribing Talmud Torah” project was born. The initiative uses an online crowdsourcing platform to let people anywhere in Minnesota (or the world) help digitize the registration books. Dietrick has a how-to guide for newcomers, and invites the Twin Cities Jewish community to be part of the project.
“I’m asking people, please help me do this work…simply, this is a lot of work that I can’t do myself,” she said.
“But also, I thought other people would be really fascinated…by these names. I’ve already had people say, ‘I found my mother, I found my aunt, or a family member,’” she said. “I thought it would be interesting for the community to see this history themselves and to participate in it, to help with this project, so that they might feel some sort of connection to these stories, whether they find family members or not.”
The project launched in early April, though some people – with no relation to the Minnesota Jewish community – had already been working on it. There’s a network of people interested in archival research and digitization who find work like this.
While helpful, there are some things they might not be able to do, like working with Hebrew. That’s an important part of transcribing the registration books, given that Hebrew or Yiddish names are listed for students and their parents.
Reading Hebrew is a skill, let alone knowing how to use a Hebrew keyboard on a computer for this kind of transcribing work.
Once the registration books are digitized, Dietrick hopes to dig through the data herself and let other researchers explore it.
They’ll be able to answer questions like: How many students lived within walking distance from Talmud Torah? What are the specific trends for common careers, like tailors or machinists? What do the parents’ business addresses say about the way Minneapolis businesses developed?
“I really do want to have it be available for whoever wants to do research using this,” she said. “That is the point of the archive. There is no value in us storing and preserving archival materials that are not used.”
In the meantime, Dietrick wants to make sure community members today benefit from the project. That can be as simple as enjoying the groove of transcription work.
“Once you get into the routine of it, it’s almost meditative, because all you’re doing is you are reading something and you are [doing] data entry,” she said.
But the work is also about making sure Minnesota Jews stay connected to their history.
Transcribing the Talmud Torah books “allows for these materials to come alive in a new and interesting way, and I hope that it also reminds people that this collection is theirs,” Dietrick said. “This Jewish community [archive] is built by and for the Jewish community.”
