In the late spring of 2024, leadership at the Koret Center for Jewish Civilization (Koret Center), which is a partnership between ANU and Tel Aviv University (TAU), received via the TAU side of the partnership, an unexpected proposal regarding academic research for the future, drawing on current social media posts. Four PhD candidates in TAU’s School of History, along with the director of the university’s Sourasky Central Library (shown above), presented their idea for “The Civil Archive of the October 7th War.” As Tal Gottstein, executive director of the Koret Center explains, “They are building a searchable database of how civilians—not from a political or military perspective—are feeling now: How do the people who have been displaced now, from the south and from the north, feel? How do Israeli Arabs feel? How do people from outside Israel, who have moved to Israel, and now find themselves in the war here feel? How are the ultra-orthodox taking this, and people whose first language is not Hebrew?” 

As Dotan Brom, one of the archive’s founding members, elaborated in an interview for Haaretz in March 2024, “But if you try to really look at it scientifically or from our historiographical point of view, then you would want to not detach the events of October 7 from the context of history that happened before and after it.” Documenting in this way dovetails beautifully with the museum’s core vision of amplifying the collective narrative of Jewish life, with all its oscillations.

The database uses Omeka-S, a next-generation web publishing platform developed specifically for institutions, enabling them to connect digital cultural heritage collections with other online resources. If you think of social media threads as spontaneous testimony, the database will provide an archive of aggregated, integrated (by virtue of its cross-indexing) social commentary. 

The Koret Center has entered into a new partnership with TAU to make the database as comprehensive as possible, a truly “living document” that will serve as a valuable tool for researchers in decades to come. The Koret Center’s support for the project includes funding internships, helping design the database, and broadening its usefulness for scholars. The TAU team has recruited students to head Arabic and Russian language collection desks, and hopes to recruit an Amharic speaker in the near future. Other students will receive stipends to collect and catalogue posts, comments, and profiles reflecting diverse perspectives, including those in collections donated by civic organizations and initiatives documenting their work in the war following October 7th.

If the project proceeds well, the Koret Center will consider supplementary funding for conducting interviews to gather additional testimony. The Koret Center plans to invite visitors to the October Seventh exhibition to share their own stories for inclusion in the database. Gottstein elaborates, “We are publicizing our support for the database project, and we will provide a QR code that enables visitors to record their testimony.” She concludes, “The Koret Center is always looking for this sort of opportunity to connect TAU and ANU. There’s a coming-full-circle aspect to this: creating a partnership that brings more impact to the Jewish world than the sum of its parts.”