The Mehlman Library

Director: Sharona Amity Email: sharonamity@tauex.tau.ac.il Phone No.: 03-6407917 Opening Hours: The Library is currently closed for renovations

Starting Sunday, January 7, 2024, Mehlman Library is closed for renovations. 

The Mehlman Library contains more than 100,000 volumes. It is based on the Mehlman Collection, which was donated in the early 1970s by Dr. Israel Mehlman, a researcher, bibliophile, educator, collector, and also an early founder of Tel Aviv University. His unique, personal collection of Hebrew books – one of the largest and most significant private collections of such materials in the world – included some 25,000 items. Among them were numbered over 2,500 of the rarest volumes of Judaica from the very cradle of printing (fifteenth century) up to the twentieth century. 

The materials from his collection contained in Mehlman Library include books, rare volumes, and academic journals representing all fields of the history and culture of the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora: religious texts, polemics, Chasidism, philosophy, history, and Hebrew and Yiddish literature.

Over the years, the library has been further enriched by the donation of many books and manuscripts on Jewish studies in general and the history of the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora in particular. Among the notable collections which have been donated to the Library are the bequests of Anschel Reiss, Prof. Berl Mark, and Adv. Kosoy – all devoted to the history of Polish Jewry – as well as the library of the researcher Hersch Smolar, containing about 400 books, which is also devoted to Polish Jewry. The library also holds a special collection in Spanish on the history of Spanish Jewry, and a collection on the history of Canadian Jewry. Enhancing the library are two important bequests – one from the estate of Prof. P. Czerniak devoted to the Holocaust and accounts of several survivors, and the other, a collection of hundreds of books from the estate of the late Menuha and Moshe Gilboa – as well as the private collections of Prof. S. Shapiro and Dr. Ilana Kedmi, which include historic and literary materials in Hebrew and other languages.

The Uruguay-Israel Friendship Association contributed a collection, starting from 1973, of the important Jewish newspaper Semanario Hebreo, published in Tel Aviv. In addition, 20 volumes of the New York based Jewish Daily Forward (1923-1941) are on a permanent loan. The Library also contains many periodicals in various languages (including Slavic languages), which were published in Israel and in the Diaspora in different periods.

A large portion of the Mehlman Library collection is electronically catalogued as part of the Central Library's catalogue. The rest of the collection is manually catalogued by author's name, book title and issue. Likewise, a large collection of journals has been catalogued. The manual catalogues are available to the public.

Library Services:

• Reference services - The instruction are available upon request. please send Email: sharonamity@tauex.tau.ac.il

• In-Library use of library materials*
   

*_{The books are available for reading in the reading room only.}

• Photocopying, printing and scanning - The library has a copy machine that can be used for photocopy, print and scan.
   

Payment is by credit card from any bank or photocopying card.**

** It is not possible to pay with bills or coins.

New at the library:

• Library's collections organizing project: In the framework of this project, the books that are available on the first floor are marked as:
  
  - OM (Open material first floor).
  
  The rest of the books are marked as:
  
  - MBC - Mehlman Basement 
  
  - MSB - Mehlman Spesial Books
  Donated by Dr. Israel Mehlman
  
  Study of books from the collection is allowed upon presentation of an ID.
  
  Copying pages of most of them is possible by mobile phone.

• We started a joint project with the National Library aiming to display digital versions of historic Jewish newspapers in Hebrew, Yidish and Ladino.
  
   

The library is located at Tel Aviv University, Carter Building, ground floor.

Email: diaspora@tauex.tau.ac.il

Tel: 03-6407917

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