For Dudu Amitai, the manager of the archives at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, deciding what types of things should be kept or thrown away is more than just an issue of minimizing clutter. It’s an question of curating how our current reality will be seen by future generations.

“The job of an archive is to reflect the reality of the institution we represent,” Amitai told a crowd of about 60 people at the Academy’s center in Jerusalem Tuesday night. “The decision of what to preserve and what not to preserve means first understanding what exists right now, and then thinking about what about it will be relevant for a person in the future.”

Amitai presented his dilemmas this week at the Academy of the Hebrew Language’s “Archives Night,” part of a series of talks given around the country this week in honor of International Archives Week. For some, it provided a unique opportunity to look behind the scenes at the history of 40 of the country’s largest institutions.

“International Archives Day has traditionally been held on June 9, but in recent years, it has been expanded to a full week,” noted Lavi Shai, chairman of the Israeli Association for Archives and Information, which manages the week’s festivities.

“As we launched this series this year, we decided to open up participation to all sorts of archives around the country, including those of organizations and cities. So far, it has been a phenomenal success, with great response.”

Over the course of the week, archive nights have been held at such diverse and historic organizations as the Jewish National Fund-KKL, the Knesset, Yad Vashem, the National Library of Israel, Israel Railways, the Israel Meteorological Service, the Israel Film Archive, and many others. Events around the country drew crowds of people interested in hearing........

© The Times of Israel