Librarian Michelle Margolis believes that everyone can love history...if they just know where to look.
I joke that I became a librarian because I was bad at math, but truth is, I’ve always loved books. After seminary, I studied history at a local university, and for pocket money I looked for a job at the college library. I walked into the Special Collections Department and said, “I like old books — can I work here?” That’s how I landed my first library job.
While I enjoyed the work, I wasn’t connecting with the books on a deep level because they didn’t speak to me personally. My boss encouraged me to earn a library degree and find a job at an academic library with Jewish books. Her advice led me to a summer internship at Baltimore Hebrew University (an institution that no longer exists). My job there was to sort through books that BHU had received through the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction project (JCR).
After World War II, the US Army discovered warehouses filled with books that had been confiscated by the Nazis, yemach shemam, and the JCR was later established to return the books to their former owners. But millions of these former book owners were no longer among the living, so the JCR sent the books to libraries servicing Jewish communities, mostly in the US and Israel.
As I sorted through these books, I realized I was touching history. Among the collection was one book from the 1700s. Not only had someone written personal notes in the margins while learning, but it had the stamp of a yeshivah, as well as a stamp from the Nazi archives.
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