Lansky worked with board chair Myra Fein to secure a ten-acre site in a former apple orchard on the edge of Hampshire College&rsquo;s campus in Amherst, Massachusetts.Moore says '[The architecture] It needed to recall the shtetl [the iconic Jewish town of Eastern Europe]'. With classrooms, exhibit space, a small theater, a reading library, a bookstore, offices, and a central book repository, the building is bright, airy, and forward-looking&mdash;a singular style that Lansky describes as &ldquo;heymish modern.&rdquo;

 Larry Kaplen arranged a leadership gift of $2 million from the Kaplen Foundation, and the planned addition was designated the Kaplen Family Building. . Tucked behind the original building, the new structure would be barely visible from the street but it would appear bigger inside than out. Its 22,000 square feet include the 350-seat Kligerman-Greenspun Performance Hall, the Klarman Student Center, and the Brechner Gallery. Also the Lief D. Rosenblatt Library&mdash;a state-of-the-art, fireproof facility that would provide long-term, climate-controlled storage for the Center&rsquo;s core book collection. 

The Center had occupied a succession of spaces since its founding in 1980, including a factory loft, a red-brick schoolhouse, a spice warehouse, a roller rink, a nineteenth-century silk mill, and a defunct shopping mall. In 1991 the organization received word that it would have to vacate the borrowed schoolhouse that served as its headquarters.

&amp;nbsp;&amp;ldquo;We did not bulldoze the site,&amp;rdquo; Moore explains. &amp;ldquo;We fit the building into the land.&amp;rdquo;  

 Allen Moore headed straight to the Harvard Library to research Jewish architecture of Eastern Europe.&amp;nbsp;He was particularly intrigued by the vernacular roof lines of the venerable wooden synagogues of Russia and Poland, almost all of which were destroyed in the Holocaust.&amp;nbsp;  

&amp;nbsp;&amp;ldquo;It needed to recall the shtetl [the iconic Jewish town of Eastern Europe],&amp;rdquo; Moore says, &amp;ldquo;but not in a Disneyland-like way.&amp;rdquo;  

To reach the front doors, visitors cross what he describes as &amp;ldquo;a noisy Billy Goats Gruff bridge.&amp;rdquo; Although the image comes from Norwegian folklore, it carries with it an authentic Jewish resonance: goats were a common presence outside of shtetl homes, and they figure prominently in Yiddish literature&amp;mdash;so much so that the Center adopted a kleyn vays tsigele&amp;mdash;a little white goat&amp;mdash;for its logo.  

 The topography of the site had a significant influence on the design.&amp;nbsp;The ten-acre parcel had a west-to-east grade that allowed Moore to hide the massive volume of the Center&amp;rsquo;s high-ceilinged book repository by placing it in the back of the building. He designed the building&amp;rsquo;s approach to convey a sense of drama and anticipation: to reach the front doors, visitors cross what he describes as &amp;ldquo;a noisy Billy Goats Gruff bridge.&amp;rdquo; Although the image comes from Norwegian folklore, it carries with it an authentic Jewish resonance: goats were a common presence outside of shtetl homes, and they figure prominently in Yiddish literature&amp;mdash;so much so that the Center adopted a&amp;nbsp;kleyn vays tsigele&amp;mdash;a little white goat&amp;mdash;for its logo.  

The Aramaic song  sung each year at the Passover seyder, through the present day.  

In Moore&amp;rsquo;s parlance, &amp;ldquo;other honest materials.&amp;rdquo;  

The ten-acre parcel had a west-to-east grade that allowed Moore to hide the massive volume of the Center&amp;rsquo;s high-ceilinged book repository by placing it in the back of the building.&amp;nbsp;  

Rescued in 1991, when the newspaper moved to computerized printing. The&amp;nbsp;Yiddish press played a vital role in the lives of immigrants&amp;nbsp;in the twentieth century 

 The Remington is the quintessential Yiddish typewriter. According to Nick Block, not only did the Remington Typewriter Company (based in Ilion, New York) produce the very first Yiddish typewriter in 1903 but Remington also established the standard Yiddish keyboard layout and continued as one of the two largest producers between 1910 and 1940, the heyday of Yiddish typewriter production. Although this particular Remington typewriter was made in 1928, 25 years after the first Yiddish Remington, it still has a solid, rectangular frame very similar to the earliest model (the earliest design is pictured in the 1906 advertisement below). This 1928 version of the Yiddish Remington has a couple of special touches: &amp;ldquo;Remington Writing Machine&amp;rdquo; painted in Hebrew above the carriage and at the bottom of the frame, and shift keys labeled in Yiddish.  

The simple keyboard layout of the Corona XC-R lacks all but one of the special keys included in the standard layout used by Remington and Underwood&mdash;it retains only the komets alef, located in the upper left-hand corner. Despite the omission of the other keys, Nick Block explains that it was designed to be a Yiddish typewriter, as evidenced by its &ldquo;XC-R&rdquo; model name, the &ldquo;R&rdquo; indicating that the carriage moved right to left, and the designation &ldquo;Y&rdquo; (probably for &ldquo;Yiddish) that was used for the parts for this model. This minimalist approach to the keyboard, while somewhat surprising because the Corona XC-R bucked the standard set by Remington and Underwood, fits in perfectly with the overall goal of the Corona XC-R&rsquo;s design: simplicity.A &ldquo;Corona Special&rdquo; manual that I found in a case with one of our XC-Rs states on the first page that &ldquo;while possessing all the labor-saving devices of the modern correspondence typewriter, Corona is extremely simple in construction and operation, there being only 690 parts as opposed to 2,000 or 3,000 in the ordinary machine.&rdquo; This streamlined design is also very portable: the Corona&rsquo;s carriage folds down to make a compact rectangle that fits right into a small case. the Corona XC-R was used by the Yiddish playwright Abish Meisels and the Jewish Daily Courier journalist Morris Indritz. Also, a Corona 3 XC-R, now kept by The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, was used by Philadelphia correspondents for the New York-based The Jewish Morning Journal

Jews cause ours, Italian Paper says of Harvard issue 

Yiddish Book Center

 The Story of the Yiddish Book Center: This engaging, often funny documentary chronicles the adventures of an enterprising 23-year-old named Aaron Lansky, who rallied together an international network of volunteers and set out to rescue the world's Yiddish books. More than thirty years later, the Yiddish Book Center has rescued more than a million Yiddish books and helped save a rich diverse, and surprisingly modern literature from oblivion. A Bridge Of Books celebrates a pursuit that has become a powerful vehicle for the transmission of history, culture and identity across several generations. 