A covert facility at Harvard University has been tasked with preserving virtually everything published in Israel, in a bid to protect the country’s cultural and scientific record should the state one day cease to exist, Israeli media reported on Sunday.
Haaretz, in a report headlined “At a Secret Harvard Site, a Massive Archive of Israeliana Is Preserved – in Case Israel Ceases to Exist,” said the archive holds tens of thousands of volumes and materials spanning multiple fields, all meticulously catalogued and housed in vast underground halls.
According to the paper, Israeli poet and novelist Haim Be’er recounted that organizers of a late-1990s literary conference at Harvard took him to what he called an “extraordinary place.” From the outside, the building resembled a Greek temple, he said, before he was led down into a sprawling basement.
Be’er described entering “a massive space filled with printed materials,” where young women worked continuously at computers, cataloguing items rarely found in conventional academic libraries.
He said the collection included “synagogue pamphlets, kibbutz newsletters, memorial booklets for fallen soldiers, Simchat Torah flags, advertisements and political campaign materials.”
Harvard has not commented publicly on the report.
Haaretz said staff at the university do not treat these items as trivial ephemera but as vital social documents that trace shifts in Israeli society, language, politics and religion over time.
The archive, the report added, is not a standard academic project but an “alternative memory system” for Israel. Its independence from state institutions is seen as an added safeguard in the event of political upheaval or national crises.
Be’er, who visited the facility, described it as a “full backup of Israeli culture,” suggesting that storing the material in the United States acts as a form of “civilizational insurance” to preserve Israel’s cultural and social history in a comparatively stable environment.
According to Haaretz, the project was spearheaded by Jewish scholar Charles Berlin, appointed in the 1960s to head a new Harvard division devoted to documenting Jewish life and culture across generations.
Harvard librarians say the division now holds around one million archival units, each potentially encompassing dozens or hundreds of documents, including tens of thousands of hours of audio and video recordings and at least six million images.
Haaretz quoted Moshe Mosk, Israel’s state archivist from 1984 to 2008, as saying he declined to share sensitive collections with Berlin because he was uneasy with the project’s underlying assumption that Israel might not endure.
Israeli writer Ehud Ben-Ezer, who also worked with Berlin, said the scholar faced sharp criticism, including from a young Israeli historian who accused him of documenting Israel out of pessimism about its future.
Ben-Ezer added that Berlin believed the project was justified regardless of any catastrophe scenario, noting that archives inside Israel are vulnerable to floods, fires or neglect due to poor storage conditions.