Every synagogue has a rabbi. Most probably have a cantor. Many of them have executive directors, custodians, front desk staff and Hebrew school directors.
But very few have an archivist.
At Congregation Mikveh Israel, Jonathan Goldstein does just that: he’s the archivist.
That may seem strange, until you learn that the Center City shul was founded in 1740. Considering its 285-year history, Mikveh Israel absolutely needs someone dedicated to cataloguing and managing its rich tradition.
“It’s important for multiple reasons. One, it’s our duty as members of the community and people on the administrative staff to be the custodians of this for future generations. This week, one of the descendants of one of our founding members was looking into his past, and through my maintenance of the archive, I was actually able to find a box that contained a full family tree that one of his descendants donated to the Mikveh Israel archive,” Goldstein said.
For Goldstein, stories like that are why he does what he does.
“That’s really the important part. This is kind of a working and living archive that people use, and that’s my philosophy,” he said. “If this was just a closet that we threw things in, no one ever [would ever go] and [it] wouldn’t really have any utility. But people come in and they reference it.”
Goldstein also serves as the director of digital marketing at Mikveh Israel, a role that is quite different from that of archivist. He said that, as many synagogue employees now, the nature of this job is one in which he wears many hats.
Most of what he does is cataloguing and digitizing the synagogue’s archive in order to both preserve the physical artifacts and make them available to be easily referenced online.
What that often means is taking items that are donated to Mikveh Israel and putting them in special acid-free boxes and scanning them for the web. He also does special work for events or holidays.
For example, there is an annual dinner with nearby Christ Church that has been going on for more than 200 years. Goldstein is usually tasked with finding items to fit the bill.
“We had a dinner [this past week], and I went to the archive and actually found and took out original brass printing plates from the [Philadelphia] Inquirer,” he said. “We also had a newspaper article from The New York Times dating back to 1952 about these fellowship dinners.”
Goldstein’s role as archivist and director of digital marketing is a homecoming of sorts, as members of his family belonged to Mikveh Israel during some of the 1970s. A history major at Temple University, Goldstein jumped at the chance to work to fill this role when he saw it posted online earlier this year. For the past decade, Goldstein worked in e-commerce. Now, he gets to really dig into his culture and the rich history of Mikveh Israel.
“I honestly never thought that I’d go back into it, but I’m very glad I did. I forgot how much fun it is,” he said. “Mikveh Israel has an archive with pieces going back to the 1700s and it’s very much a privilege to be the custodian of it.”
As the custodian of this collection, Goldstein sees some pretty cool items. He has gotten to handle printing plates for a ketubah, or Jewish marriage document, used by the legendary Isaac Leeser, the first man to print the English translation of the Tanach. Recently, he pulled out an original diploma from the Jewish Theological Seminary that dates back to the 1920s, conferring a spiritual leader of Mikveh Israel as a hazzan.
The archive is, of course, always changing and being updated. Goldstein described a special piece that has just been added in the last week or so.
“Last week — and we unfortunately don’t know who this person is — but a person laid a beautifully knit, gigantic American flag that memorializes the tragedy of Sept. 11 on our lawn under the statue of Uriah Levy, who was a Jewish figure in the American Navy,” he said. “So we’re actually going to be displaying that piece. Then once we display it, we’re going to be cataloging and putting it in the archive. So it truly is a living archive.”
The Jewish people are a lot older than the United States, but American Jewish history is an important slice of the many thousands of years of stories. Goldstein is here to make sure that Mikveh Israel contributes to its own part of those stories.
“While it’s not necessarily a long time with regards to the Jewish people, for America, going back around 280 years, it is kind of a breadth of history,” he said.