The Central Zionist Archive (Israel) (Hebrew-ha-archion ha-zioni ha-merkazi, hereinafter - CSA) is one of the main institutions of the country for the storage and study of documents, where a huge amount of materials on the history of the Zionist movement is collected. The archive was created in Berlin in May-June 1919 by Georg Goerlitz on the order of Arthur Hantke, a member of the executive Committee of the Zionist Organization 1. In the 1920s and 1930s, the accumulation of books, photographs, newspapers, and documents from Zionist missions in Europe and the Jewish National Fund began. [www.zionistarchives.org.il].
After the Nazis came to power, it was decided to move the archive out of Germany. According to the archivists themselves, 154 boxes of documents were unloaded in Palestine at the end of 1933. Opened in Jerusalem in 1934, the archive also began collecting materials on the history of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, as well as personal collections of prominent figures in the Zionist movement. Thus, the archive of one of the leaders of the movement, Theodor Herzl, was brought to Jerusalem from Vienna in 1937.
The creation of the Jewish state naturally influenced the work of the Central Jewish Agency: documents from Yishuv institutions in the 1920s and 1930s 3 and various departments of the Jewish Agency (EA)4 were deposited. Since the second half of the 1950s, the archive has been tasked with acquiring materials from Jewish organizations dating back to the period of the Catastrophe of European Jewry (1933-1945). as well as continuing to collect personal archives of leaders of the Zionist movement. In 1956, the XXIV Zionist Congress5 recognized the CSA as "the historical archive of the Zionist Movement, the World Zionist Organization, and the Jewish Agency" and encouraged these organizations to "archive those documents that are no longer needed for their current work", which contributed to the replenishment of funds [www.zionistarchives.org.il] ...
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