Collection

The documents contained in this collection reflect Mendel Kaplan’s leadership in Jewish communal life on the local, national, and international stage from the early 1970s until 2009.

The collection is organised according to the country and archives or databases in which material was found. The Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town extends its sincere gratitude to the various archives, institutions and private individuals that allowed us to digitise this material. The Kaplan Centre does not claim ownership of material found in institutional archives or private collections.

The material in our collection may not be reproduced, displayed, broadcast, or published without the further written permission from the institutions it belongs to.

When using documents in this collection to produce new work, please reference the archive it was found in rather than The Sincerely Mendel Collection, unless the items you are referencing belong to Mendel Kaplan’s Home Office and Office in Storage, the material recovered from Cape Gate, or the Sharon Kaplan Home series. For ease of reference, we have recorded, and used as folder names, all original archival reference codes as far as possible. Some institutions did not have archival reference coding systems. In these instances, it may be best to reference the institution and the file name assigned by us.
 
The file naming protocol for this collection prioritises dates, then type of document, then persons, title of document, or events. Many of the documents were undated, so we attempted to estimate (circa) based on the context and date-ranges of the files they were found in. In cases where it was impossible to estimate, the filenames start with 0000-00-00.
 
All documents (English, Afrikaans and Hebrew) have been run through optical character recognition (OCR) software to make pdf text searchable. No verification of OCR was done as the timeframe for such an effort was prohibitively large. Ergo, any misrecognitions by the software were not corrected. Researchers must adapt their search terms in light of this.
 
All material was collected by Marina Geldenhuys and David Fachler during the period April 2023 to December 2024. Additional material may be added from time to time.