Policy against state collapse. Israel stores its cultural and scientific heritage in a secret facility

A secret facility at Harvard University in Massachusetts in the United States has been collecting Israel's cultural and scientific heritage for over half a century to protect the country's heritage against its potential collapse, as reported by the Israeli daily Haaretz.

The archive contains tens of thousands of volumes and works from various fields representing Israeli culture, all cataloged and stored in vast underground rooms.

An Israeli poet and novelist told the newspaper about this project Haim Beer, who, during one of the literary conferences organized at Harvard University in the late 1990s, was shown around the building's huge basementwhich, as he put it, “looked from the outside like a Greek temple.”

Beer saw a vast archive filled with millions of photographs, government reports, political leaflets, synagogue bulletins, kibbutzim archives, audio recordings, and even discarded “junk mail.”

In an interview with an Israeli daily, Beer described it as “full support for Israeli culture”, saying that storing these materials in the USA is a form of “civilization insurance”, to ensure the survival of Israel's cultural heritage and social history in a politically stable environment.

According to “Haaretz”, this project was initiated and led by Jewish scholar Charles Berlin, appointed in the 1960s to the position of head of a new department at Harvard University, whose task is to document Jewish life and culture over the generations. (PAP)

tebe/fit/