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about his first day on the job in his book "My way to Jerusalem" ("Mein Weg nach Jerusalem"). This room in Berlin and what little material it contained became the archive that after a hundred years, is considered the largest and most important archive in the history of the Zionist enterprise and one of the public largest archives in Israel.
While the archive was officially established in 1919, a debate on establishing an archive had already been held in 1909 by the Zionist General Council and we have documents from the years 1914- 1915, from which we can learn that individual offices of the Zionist Movement had already begun a systematic gathering of materials and worked to establish local archives. The Head Office of the World Zionist Organization, which had been moved to Copenhagen during World War I, had also engaged in this and sent messages to the secondary offices that indicate an intention to establish a central archive. The initiative to establish a central archive for the movement was born with Theodor Zlocisti, an enthusiastic Zionist activist, and the person who implemented the idea was Dr. Arthur Hantke, the then Chairman of the Zionist Organization in Germany. He contacted Dr. Herlitz in May 1919, requesting that he take upon himself the position of Archive Director.
The archive began operations in a modest room that was allocated for it on the third floor of the building, which served the offices of the Zionist organizations. In 1924, all the Zionist organizations moved to a more spacious building, which was bequeathed to the Zionist movement by Jewish Surgeon, Dr. Friedrich Kabersky in his will. The archive received a much larger space, which would meet its needs but would be deep in the building's basement. That year, the place was visited by Dr. Hindos, an enthusiastic Zionist from New York, and upon his return, he published his experience from the visit to the building and the archive in a Yiddish newspaper. Regarding the archive, he noted:
The archive operates in the basement floor of this building. You go down on steep stairs, the basement is lit by a handful of lamps, it feels like you are entering the catacombs. [...] It has thousands of Zionist newspapers in various languages, articles about Zionism and all sorts of brochures etc. Everything is organized according to a system. [...] I asked Dr. Herlitz to show me the signatures of our previous presidents and he immediately found what I requested. And there, in front of my eyes, I saw the letters and signatures of Herzl, Ussishkin and many others. There was a sense of happiness (translated by Suzanne Berns).
During the archive's operations in Berlin (1919-1933) it had three sections: Library, Zionist Journalism and materials of the institutions. At first, these were the materials of the offices in Vienna, Cologne and Berlin, with materials from the head office in London being added later. This division persisted during the first two decades and served the Zionist institutions well for propaganda purposes. Herlitz was driven by Dr. Leo Lauterbach (the then Head of the Organization Department in the World Zionist Organization, who resides in London since 1921), and acted to locate and gather the Zionist newspapers that had flourished then in the diaspora in a variety of languages. This activity enriched the Newspaper Section and it constitutes, to this day, an important and unique source for the study of Zionist activity throughout the world. The intensive activity in this Section required assistance and indeed, in 1925, the archive was joined by a second scientific worker, Librarian Paul
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