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as the vault in which Herzl's materials were placed, for the British who had taken over the National Institutions Building. He later told that at 9:15 AM, a whistle blow was heard and British went to the square to receive breakfast. For many years, the archive had served, with its directors' consent, as a hiding place for concealing secret materials of the "Haganah" and Herlitz took advantage of the opportunity afforded to him by the break the British took to move the materials the "Haganah" people placed in the vault elsewhere.
Dr. Herlitz himself was injured twice: The first time was in February 1948, when rocks thrown from Abu Tor hit a bus he was on, while travelling from his home in East Talpiot to work in the Archive, an event that caused him to move to a rented room in Beit HaKerem and later to Rehavia; and the second time was from shards from the bombing at the Keren Hayesod Wing on March 11, 1948. In May 1948, Uri Pollak, an employee of the Archive for three months, was killed in the line of duty at Camp Schneller in Jerusalem.
Will the Zionist Archive Become the State Archive?
The Archive continued to operate throughout the siege of Jerusalem, a period of gunfire and bombings. Shells fell around it, but its location in the basement ensured maximum protection. In July 1948, the Archive personnel felt insulted when they read in several newspapers that the Central Zionist Archive intends to leave Jerusalem and move to the Tel Aviv area. In a special announcement published by the Archive Director, Dr. Herlitz wrote: "The employees of the Archive have worked throughout the months of the war without stopping even for a single day, and no certificate was removed from Jerusalem. On the contrary, the Archive is about to expand the scope of its operations in the near future."
And indeed, the establishment of the state drove Dr. Bein, with Dr. Herlitz's support, to propose to Ben-Gurion that he declare the Central Zionist Archive as the state's archive and to direct to it the future materials of all the entities that operate on its behalf. Initially, Bein's moves seemed promising. In August 1948, he met with Hanna Even Tov, the then Director of the Secretariat of the Prime Minister's Office and the feeling was that the idea was maturing nicely. What a surprise they were in for at the end of October 1948, when they were informed of the establishment of a separate archive for the state, "the State Archive," headed by Sophie Udin, who had until then managed the Zionist Library in New York. We cannot know what drove Ben-Gurion to make this move. It is possible that the deciding motive was his acquaintance with Sophie Udin, an acquaintance that grew over the Forties during his lengthy visits to the Zionist Library in New York.
Even before the end of the fighting in October 1948, the Archive published the following announcement in the newspapers:
The prevailing conditions, particularly the siege on Jerusalem, resulted in irregular delivery of newspapers, journals, books and other publications, which appeared in the past six months, to the Archive. We are therefore appealing to all the institutions of the Yishuv and the state, to our settlements, to the newspapers and journals, to publishers and authors of books and booklets about Zionism and the building of the land, to produce
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