Source: Haaretz
A recent article in Haaretz writes about The Historical Jewish Press, which will contain hundreds of thousands of pages from Jewish newspapers from the 19th century to the present, and was officially launched recently. The project is a joint initiative of the national library and Tel Aviv University that will give researchers, teachers, students and the general public rapid, easy and unprecedented access to periodicals. The website, currently holds more than 400,000 pages from 20 Hebrew, French, Judeo-Arabic (Ladino), English and Hungarian-language newspapers that until recently were hidden away in dusty archives. Full-text search of the periodicals is available on the site.
Among the collection's highlights: Davar, the Histadrut newspaper founded in Tel Aviv in 1925 by Berl Katznelson and published until 1996; Hatzvi, founded by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda; Hamagid, a weekly published in a number of European cities between the mid-19th century and the early 20th century, and Hamelitz, the first Jewish weekly in Czarist Russia.
The first Hebrew daily, Hayom, also from Czarist Russia - it was published in St. Petersburg from 1886 to 1888 - is there too, as is the Palestine Post, the forerunner of the Jerusalem Post, and Maariv from the start of publication until 1968. Also on the site are Jewish newspapers from France, Germany, Morocco and Egypt, among other places.
The source materials were scanned from microfilm and print held in the Israel National Library and other archives around the world. This project is part of the National Library's initiative to digitize and upload valuable materials to the internet for the free use of the public.