YIVO Archives Acquires Important Collection on the Jews of Harbin and Northern China

The Toper brothers, Jewish fur traders, in rural China. (YIVO/Dan and Yisha Ben-Canaan Collection)

Dan Ben-Canaan and his wife, Liang Yisha, have donated a large collection of research materials about the Jewish community of Harbin and Northern China. Professor Ben-Canaan founded the Sino-Israel Research and Study Center at Heilongjiang University in Harbin in 2002.

The collection is in electronic format, and is 202 gigabytes in size. It is organized into over 2,400 directories, which contain nearly 40,000 files. Besides digital copies of paper documents and of photographs, the collection includes many film and audio files and spans the early 20th century to the 1990s. The audio materials consist primarily of interviews with former Jewish residents of Harbin and their families.

The Dan and Yisha Ben-Canaan Collection on the Jews of Harbin is one of the largest “born digital” collections acquired by YIVO to date. Donations of “born digital” collections (data on floppy disks, CD-Roms, and hard drives) are becoming increasingly common and the archival world is still in the beginning stages of grappling with how best to preserve them and make them accessible to researchers.