The idea for a lending library of Jewish books in Tucson took shape in the fall of 2005 when Deena Schoenfeld, director of Arts and Culture at the JCC, put a notice in the bulletin asking people to donate Jewish books they no longer needed or wanted. Bob Cohen, a member of Congregation Anshei Israel, had read Aaron Lansky's book "Outwitting History" that summer.

Lansky's book detailed the origin of his mission to rescue old Yiddish books and find a "home" for them. His goal was to preserve Yiddish culture which was swiftly disappearing with the death of the generation of Jews who spoke and read Yiddish.

Cohen believed that what was so important for Yiddish books and the cultural aspect was even more important for Jewish books in English. He wanted to provide them with another "life" that could nourish the Jewish intellect and spirit of another generation.

Schoenfeld and Cohen decided their mission was to encourage the People of the Books to read more Jewish books through the establishment of a community lending library easily available to everyone, Jew and non-Jew, in the community.

At that time there was only one operating synagogue library in Tucson and its 3900 books were available only to members of that synagogue. The public library system had an estimated 4,000 volumes of Jewish content which were available to everyone. The University of Arizona library had approximately 7500 volumes related to Jews and Jewish life and culture. The Pima community college system, with about 397,000 volumes, had about 1350 books containing Jewish content or subject matter. The latter two college collections could be accessed by the public on a fee basis. The only other collection of Jewish materials resided at the Jewish Federation on the bookshelves of the Coalition of Jewish Education and the Holocaust collection in the CRC.

A volunteer committee was formed to create the new library. It consisted of Bob Cohen, Marilyn Marcus, Dena Martin, Donna Ramirez, Herb Feder, Martin Mannlein and Ron Kaufman as technical advisor. When the library opened, there were about 2200 volumes. The classifying and cataloguing was accomplished primarily through the efforts of Ben Kaur, a graduate student in Library Science at the University of Arizona.

The majority of the money that was required to bring this project to fruition was raised by the committee. All of the books donated have come from private collections in Tucson.

The library occupies and shares the Senior Activities Room on the second floor of the JCC. The number of books in the library is limited by the number of volumes that will fit on the bookshelves. When that number exceeds the capacity of the library, the library committee will have to consider what to do with an increasing number of "excess" volumes.

A compilation of all the volumes listed by author, title and subject is available in the library and accessible on-line via this web site. In the future, the 500 volumes in the Coalition of Jewish Education's library will be added to the library website. In addition, the video collection of the JCC and the materials, books and videos from the Holocaust Center at the Jewish Federation's Community Relations Center will also be added.