JTA unveiled on May 3 a new, free digital news archive with 250,000 JTA articles from 1923 to the present, available at http://archive.jta.org.

The archive is the only collection of English-language reporting covering the Jewish world in the 20th century available online. Until now, those interested in Jewish reporting over the last century or so had to find libraries that housed the yellowing tearsheets of Jewish news dispatches.

“There is no American Jewish source with this reach,” says historian Jonathan Sarna, the Brandeis University professor who oversaw the JTA archive project. Sarna is also a JTA board member. “The archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future.”

JTA was founded in 1917 to be a voice of and for the Jewish people at a time when news of what was happening to the Jews of Europe and Russia was hard to come by.

JTA remains a leading source for news of Jewish interest and concern, providing content to about 80 newspapers and publications around the world, including the St. Louis Jewish Light.

“For anybody who wants to see how Jewish history has meaning and implications for us today, we need the JTA historical archive,” said Steven M. Cohen, director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. “It opens up a whole world of the past.”