Located not far from the center of Jerusalem, the National Library of Israel holds among its many treasures medieval haggadahs, ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the suicide note of the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. Aviya Kushner recounts its origins:
In 1890, a Jewish doctor in Bialystok, Yosef Khazanovich, started to charge his patients in books instead of rubles for making house calls. He sent 10,000 books to Jerusalem, and in 1902 Midrash Abarbanel was officially opened—the first free library in Palestine; that was the beginning of what is now the National Library. The Seventh Zionist Congress, held in 1905, decided to build a national library with Midrash Abarbanel as its foundation. So yes, there was a [national] library before there was a state. For years the library was run by its first director, Samuel Hugo Bergmann, a close friend of Franz Kafka. . . .
People—both visitors and employees—are the true delights of a visit to the National Library. On my visits to figure out what exactly it held, I checked out the trilingual circulation desk and saw Ḥasidim, Ḥaredim, secular students, and two women in hijabs; there were also career eccentrics, pulpit rabbis, and Gershom Scholem obsessives, along with two chatty women in the cafeteria who did not hesitate to tell me that they were researching Israeli songs. In the bathroom I encountered tourists. And everywhere, I saw scholars—passionate devotees of the library, many clearly in a state I can describe only as determined bliss.
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/culture/398752/why-israels-national-library-is-such-a-treasure-trove-for-the-jewish/