For those of us Jews for whom the weight (sometimes the burden) of Jewish history is huge, libraries and archives are of huge importance, especially regarding those Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East which exist no longer or which have changed out of all recognition.
One archive not to be missed is the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem , often known by its acronym CAHJP . It is housed in a one-storey building in the "High Tech park" at the southern end of the Guvat Ram campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This is the campus near the Israel Museum and the Knesset. The high tech park is the terminus of bus number 28. Otherwise you'll have to walk 15 minutes from the main gates of the campus or corrdinate in advance with the Archive to get a permit to bring in a car.
Once you've found the building , down some stairs in a cluster of small startup and admin buildings, go the reading room in the center of the building and register. You will be shown the room opposite with the card indexes (they don't have a computerised catalog). The two main indexes are on the right side of the room as you enter - on the left the index of microfilmed materials and on the right the index of of hard copy materials.
From the Jewish communities I reserched (in Germany, Poland and Egypt) I can say that the archive's collection is very uneven. There may be a lot of material about the community you are researching or there may be almost none.
For every index card you find of interest you will have to complete a pink call card in two copies, give it to the librarian and you may have to wait up to an hour to get the material. Sometimes the material cannot be found which is very frustrating.
