The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at Temple University Libraries is pleased to announce that the Franklin H. Littell collection is open and available for research.
View the finding aid on the Libraries’ website, along with portions of the papers which have been digitized. Dr. Littell’s extensive library is cataloged and is available for use along with the papers in the SCRC reading room on the Ground Floor of Paley Library.
Franklin Littell (1917-2009), emeritus professor of religion at Temple University, led a distinguished career that spanned more than seventy years. He was a pacifist and activist, proponent of the Christian Laity and an advocate for new religious movements, an historian, political commentator and supporter of the State of Israel. He devoted ten years to work with the Protestant Churches and Laity in US-occupied Germany and more than fifty years to the study and remembrance of the Holocaust and German Church Struggle. He career is marked by strong beliefs in interfaith understanding and religious liberty.
The Littell and Sachs families donated Dr. Littell’s papers and library to Temple in 2010, where they were the focus of a three-year cataloging and processing project. Processing of the collection was funded through a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc., and generous support from Norman Braman.
The Leo L. Honor Papers, a recently processed collection now open for research, is one of a few collections in the SCRC that document the growth of Jewish education in Philadelphia in the twentieth century. Dr. Leo Lazarus Honor was an educator who for much of his career taught Jewish teachers how to teach, and, in the process, mentored a generation of Jewish educators. Dr. Honor was an advocate for religious education and believed that an engaging curriculum of Jewish studies would encourage young people to identify with their heritage from an early age. Honor was well known for emphasizing religious education based on unity, rather than uniformity. His dedication to the Jewish teaching profession and his inclusive approach to religious education made Honor a leading and well-respected Jewish educator.
For more information about the Leo L. Honor Papers, view the online finding aid
-Jenna Marrone Olszak, Project Archivist and Jessica M. Lydon, Associate Archivist, Special Collections Research Center
Rabbi Pinchos J. Chazin (1914-2006) was a well-known and much admired spiritual leader in Philadelphia’s Jewish community. For forty-three years, he inspired and engaged the congregation of Temple Sholom with sermons and weekly lectures that connected scripture with contemporary culture in a way that was both meaningful and motivational. Rabbi Chazin’s sermons were invariably positive, encouraging congregants to explore their spirituality and delve deeper into Jewish tradition. He also displayed compassion for the foibles of human nature, an ability that impressed many people who heard Rabbi Chazin speak.
“Your work as the spiritual guide of Temple Sholom must be a taxing one,” wrote one correspondent in 1950, “but one can’t help feeling your sincerity of purpose….It did a lot to create and instill the desire to delve deeper into the beauties of Judaism, and what it stands for.” In 1970, another correspondent noted, “You are unquestionably the finest rabbi in terms of learning and expression and humanity that I have ever known, and one of the finest human beings I have ever known, as well.” And in 1979, a congregant succinctly wrote, “For the many years that you have acted as Rabbi in Temple Sholom you have opened the doors to ourselves and our children to the true meaning of Judaism and warm friendship.”
Chazin’s personal papers including his weekly sermons, book review lectures, eulogies, cantatas and related materials are now open for research in the Special Collections Research Center. To learn more about this collection, review the online finding aid http://library.temple.edu/scrc/pinchos-j-chazin-papers
Fans of the Special Collections Research Center likely know that letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other archival materials usually come to us in collections – large and small groups of materials either created or collected by a person or organization. Often, the histories behind the gathering together of these primary source materials, and the long road from creation to their final home in SCRC, is as interesting as the content of the materials themselves.
Less well known is that we also frequently receive our rare books in the form of a collection, as well. While books tend to be rather individual in nature, as collections they have personalities and histories as unique as any archival collection.
One of SCRC’s book collections is the Philip Gardiner Nordell Collection, which consists of over 250 books, primarily rare British imprints on religion from the 17th and 18th centuries. The collection documents the different predominant and often conflicting ideas during this period, particularly related to religion, religious liberty, and rationalism in England and the New England colonies. Included in the collection are many books on “fringe” groups such as Anabaptists, Ranters, and atheists, as well as many works on witchcraft. Authors represented include Francis Bacon, John Cotton, Thomas Hobbes, and Cotton Mather.
Frontispiece from a first edition of Leviathan; Or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill, by Thomas Hobbes (London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, 1651).
Philip Gardiner Nordell (1894-1976) was a man of many talents and interests. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1916, and was an All American in the running broad jump. He claimed to have invented the predecessor to boxed cake mixes in the 1920s, founding a business that combined the dry ingredients for muffins, allowing the baker to simply add water. Nordell’s primary research interest was early American lotteries, which he studied for over 30 years. His personal collection of early lottery tickets and related newspaper announcements, brochures, and broadsides, is now at Princeton University.
Map from Tobias Swinden’s An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell (London: Printed by W. Bowyer, for W. Taylor [etc.], 1714).
Nordell also assembled his extraordinary collection of books documenting religion in Britain and New England in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a 1965 letter, he said: “My central aim in gathering the collection has been to furnish important source material helpful in appraising the comparative mental patterns in old and New England.… In different words, the collection furnishes much of the basic source material to form a sound judgment as to the truth of an observation made in the 1640’s, that while New England was becoming old, old England was becoming new.”
Katy Rawdon, Coordinator of Technical Services, SCRC
Scott Ellencrig, four years old, demonstrates traditional blowing of the ram’s horn, September 21, 1960
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Photograph Collection
The ritual blasts of the shofar marks the beginning of the Jewish New Year on Rosh Hashanah, a time of personal reflection and examination of the events of the previous year. A shofar is an instrument made from the naturally hollow horn of a ram or other kosher animal such as an antelope, gazelle, or goat. These horns are not solid bone, but contain cartilage which can be removed. The ram’s horn is traditionally used because it acts as a reminder of the Binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis in which Abraham sacrifices a ram in place of his son. The shofar is sounded up to 100 times during synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah. The ten days of Rosh Hashanah culminate in the celebration of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting, prayer, and repentance. To mark the end of the fast on Yom Kippur, the shofar is sounded once more.
The sounding of the shofar is not limited to Jewish religious services. Secular, humanist observance of the Jewish High Holidays often time includes the blowing of the shofar to signify bringing the community together and a reaffirmation of Jewish cultural values.
Sholom Aleichem Club News & Comment, September 1988
Sholom Aleichem Club Records
The First Jewish Catalog, a do-it yourself guide to Jewish life first published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1973, offers step-by-step instructions for making your own shofar:
Step 1: Boil the shofar in water for 2-5 hours. The cartilage can be pulled out with the aid of a pick. If the horn is small, this should only take half an hour.
Step 2: After the horn is completely dry, measure the length of the hollow of the shofar, cutting 1 inch further with a coping saw or hacksaw
Step 3: Drill a 1/8” hole with an electric drill from the sawed-off end until it reaches the hollow of the horn.
Step 4: With an electric modeling tool, carve a bell shaped mouthpiece similar to that of a standard trumpet. The modeling tool may also be used to carve designs on the outer edge or the body of the shofar.
Illustration by Stu Copans in The First Jewish Catalog: a Do-It-Yourself Kit
Jewish Publication Society Records
The Libraries have acquired on microfilm The Lesbian Herstory Archives, part 7 of the Gay Rights Movement. This collection consists of a full 150 reels of primary-source material along with a 73-page printed collection guide. Media types represented include “clippings, flyers, brochures, conference materials, reports, correspondence, and other printed ephemera”. The earliest documents date to the 1950s and the era of the Daughters of Bilitis organization. Additional information about the nature of the collection is available from the LHA website. The Lesbian Herstory Archives complements existing primary-sourceprinted and digital collections such as the Gerritsen Collection and Women and Social Movements. It also complements GenderWatch and the new-to-Temple LGBT Life, two databases that index journal articles and other secondary sources. LGBT Life in particular contains indexing and abstracts for more than 130 LGBT-specific core periodicals and over 290 LGBT-specific core books and reference works. It also includes comprehensive, full-text coverage of The Advocate (1996 to date) and other important LGBT publications. —David C. Murray
The recently released version 4.1 of America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts includes: -Cross-database searching between Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life -User-friendly searching, including inverted author names and punctuation alternatives -Ability for users to save search histories to a personal profile -Natural language date searching, in addition to the traditional decade and century searching -Speed improvements for faster searching -A display option for expanding all of a user’s search result records at once -Addition of a “print-this-entry” option for each record in a search results display -Ability to easily limit searches to English language entries only -OpenURL-support for book entries in the Historical Abstracts database –Brian Schoolar (Electronic Resources Librarian)
Temple now has access to the premier database for medievalists, The International Medieval Bibliography Online (IMB), which contains over 300,000 articles in thirty different languages. The articles come from journals, conference proceedings, essay collections, and festschriften chosen by a “worldwide network of fifty teams to ensure regular coverage of 4,500 periodicals and a total of over 5,000 miscellany volumes”. Extensive indexing–including separate indexes for subjects, people, places, repositories, and time periods–allows for precise searching. The IMB covers the period from 300 to 1500 CE and the geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, making it relevant to scholars of classics, religion, philosophy, art and archaeology, history, literature, and Islamic studies. In addition to the IMB, here are some other electronic resources relevant to the study of various aspects of the Middle Ages: Encyclopedias:
