Israel Folktale Archives

The Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), named in honor of its founder Prof. Dov Noy, is a unique, rich collection of more than 21,000 folk tales, based on Jewish oral tradition and Israeli folk narratives, and collected from more than 5,000 narrators from 70 ethnic groups in several languages, with documents dating from 1956 to 1999. The IFA folktale collection capture the essential features of various cultures&column; including the customs, beliefs, norms and values of Jewish immigrants from around the world, as they were shaped over the hundreds of years spent in the Diaspora, as well as the folk narratives of other ethnic groups currently living in Israel, including Bedouin, Christian, Muslim and Druze, in an attempt to encourage an open dialogue between the diverse cultures and ethnicities in Israel.The collection was completed after the large waves of immigration from Ethiopia and the USSR. Following this period, the digitization process of the collection began, Which includes typing, scanning, indexing the stories and rendering them accessible. In order to transform the collection into an international asset, an archive website was also created, to provide researchers and critics from all over the world with access to the collection.