JERUSALEM / ISTANBUL

A secret facility at Harvard University is dedicated to preserving everything published in Israel as part of an effort to safeguard the country’s cultural and scientific output in case the state ceases to exist, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

The report, published by the Haaretz daily under the headline “At a Secret Harvard Site, a Massive Archive of Israeliana Is Preserved – in Case Israel Ceases to Exist,” said the archive contains tens of thousands of volumes and works across disciplines representing Israeli culture, all cataloged and stored in large underground halls.

According to the newspaper, Israeli poet and novelist Haim Be’er said organizers of a late-1990s literary conference at Harvard took him to what he described as an “extraordinary place.” He said the building looked like a Greek temple from the outside before he was led into a vast basement.

Be’er said he entered “a massive space filled with printed materials,” adding that he saw young women working nonstop at computers, each documenting items not typically found in an academic library.”

He said the archive included “synagogue pamphlets, kibbutz newsletters, memorial booklets for fallen soldiers, Simchat Torah flags, advertisements and political campaign materials.”

Harvard has not issued a comment on the report.

Haaretz said staff at Harvard do not view these items as marginal ephemera but as valuable social documents that capture changes in Israeli society, language, politics and religion over time.

According to the report, the archive is not a standard academic initiative but functions as an “alternative memory system” for Israel. Its independence from Israeli government institutions, the newspaper added, gives it greater security in the event of national crises.

Be’er, who visited the site, described it as a “full backup of Israeli culture,” saying that storing the materials in the US serves as a form of “civilizational insurance” to ensure the survival of Israel’s cultural and social history in a politically stable environment.

The report said the project was led by Jewish scholar Charles Berlin, who was appointed in the 1960s to head a new division at Harvard devoted to documenting Jewish life and culture across generations.

Harvard librarians said the division now holds roughly one million archival items, each potentially containing dozens or hundreds of documents, including tens of thousands of hours of audio and video recordings and at least six million images, the newspaper said.

Haaretz quoted Moshe Mosk, who directed Israel’s state archive from 1984 to 2008, as saying he refused to share sensitive collections with Berlin because he was uncomfortable with the project’s premise that Israel might not survive.

Israeli writer Ehud Ben-Ezer, who also worked with Berlin, said the scholar faced harsh criticism, including from a young Israeli historian who accused him of documenting Israel out of doubt over its future.

He added that Berlin believed the project did not require a catastrophe to justify it, noting that archives in Israel are vulnerable to floods, fires or neglect due to being stored under poor conditions.