The Penn Libraries holds the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica, a collection of 13,000+ items (and counting), valued in excess of $12 million. It is the most important private collection of its kind, documenting the social and economic development of early Jewish life in the Western Hemisphere. The core of the Kaplan Collection covers the period before mass Jewish migration to the Americas in the late 1880s. Read more about the collection here.
This website serves as a discoverability tool with flexible searching capabilities for the items in the Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica. The metadata for each object comes from Arnold Kaplan’s personal database which has lengthy descriptions and other details. Our tool links to Colenda, the repository for Penn Libraries, so users can access high-resolution, downloadable, IIIF images of items in the collection.
For help using this website click here.
