Hana Halff is a senior at Smith College who is working to chronicle life on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks. She asked her best friend from high school to share her experiences.

“I pressed end to the recording, and we were both crying,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy. “We both recognized how we’ve repressed a lot of what happened in order to function.”

Halff is a student researcher for the National Library of Israel’s American branch (NLI USA) who is creating an archive documenting campus experiences across the United States and Canada in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks 18 months ago and the ensuing wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Since the organization began collecting last fall, it has amassed over 5,000 documents, including flyers, photographs, videos, syllabi, event announcements, student group statements, newspaper op-eds and written and verbal testimonies. For student researchers, documenting a year and a half of turmoil can be taxing when you also have to attend class.

“I wasn’t harassed or hit or anything like that,” Halff said about her experiences post-Oct. 7. “But I saw most of my school erupt.” Friends at the small liberal arts school abandoned her, and her Instagram feed was flooded with what she called “horrific” posts from her peers.

“I know it’s important to document history,” she said. “Maybe for other people, it relieves some of the pain. But for me, right now, I do it because I’m interested, and I think we have a duty to do it, but it doesn’t really offer much relief, but maybe it will soon.”

Halff volunteered for the project after one of her Jewish studies professors pointed her towards it. She had been creating her own archive, documenting her and her friends’ experiences because she “personally” felt it was important. She also shared her work with the Smith Alumni Against Antisemitism task force.

Pushing peers to submit online proved difficult. “It’s very emotionally taxing, and also it takes a lot of time to write a personal testimony, so people weren’t actually doing it, and they were nervous about being anonymous or anyone finding it,” she said. So she switched methods to taping short oral testimonies of people’s experiences, though she said it was “very difficult” for her emotionally to hear about so many of these traumatic events.

The college archive is part of the NLI’s Bearing Witness Archive, which launched within days of the massacres to gather and organize massive amounts of documentation from the attacks and their aftermath.

In Israel, NLI is “collecting as comprehensively as possible,” Raquel Ukeles, head of collections for the NLI, told eJP, but in North America, they zeroed in on campuses because they “have become a laboratory for early 21st-century identity politics and cultural discussions and debates.”

Established in 1892 as the Jewish National and University Library, in 2007 the NLI changed its name and shifted away from being mainly academic to becoming accessible to the entire Jewish world. The goal is to have the archive available on its website.

The NLI USA “is committed to documenting the full story from many viewpoints, with a lens of how this affects the Jewish people,” Adina Kanefield, CEO of NLI USA, told eJP. “The Jewish people are not monolithic at this time, and [NLI USA] [is] not an advocacy institution. We are the keepers of primary source material that reflects the full story of Israel and the Jewish people in its context.”

“Bearing Witness,” the title of the project, “automatically has a slant, so you won’t see that name associated with any of the materials that I put out,” Abby Horowitz, project coordinator of NLI USA’s Oct. 7 archives, told eJP. “We are collecting the documents and letting the documents speak for themselves.” She wants the archive to be “maximalist” and hasn’t turned anything down.

The archive focuses on 10 schools — Harvard University, Columbia University, The George Washington University, University of Florida, University of Michigan, University of Washington, Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles and one Canadian university still to be determined — but Horowitz is personally reaching out to schools that may not be on everyone’s radars.

“There’s a lot of campuses that have had smaller incidents that are nonetheless really problematic. They just don’t make the headlines,” she said.

During her research, she’s documenting plenty of antisemitism, but also non-Jewish groups supporting Jews on campus and faculty banding together in affiliate groups. Some schools are handling incidents well, with care, and Horowitz hopes people can learn from that too.

While NLI USA has partnered with Jewish organizations such as J Street and Hillel for collection, Horowitz aims to connect with organizations that may be skeptical of talking to NLI USA due to its connection to Israel, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, but there hasn’t been much progress.

“The argument I tried to make is that this is the chance to get their voices in the historic record,” she said. “For people who sometimes feel that they have been marginalized or silenced by the Jewish community or pushed out of the tent, well, here’s the chance to get their perspective back inside.” To accommodate people who may be leery, they don’t have to have their name listed in the archive and material can be embargoed and have restricted access.

“We recognize there are likely to be some inherent biases in who we get to submit things,” Horowitz said. “We try to get what we can, knowing it’s going to be imperfect. Every single archive and collection is imperfect.”

Halff has not yet contacted the anti-Zionist campus groups because she has deliberately distanced herself from them over the past 18 months. “It’s important to have their voice,” she said. “It’s something I plan to do soon. But honestly, I’ve been avoiding it.”

The larger, five-year, $10 million Bearing Witness initiative is backed by the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, Jewish Federation of Greater Houston, United Jewish Federation of Tidewater (Va.), William Davidson Foundation, Singer Family Foundation and investment executive and private investor Mitch Julis, among others.

“The Jewish student experience on campus has been transformed post-Oct. 7,” Julis, co-founder of Canyon Partners, LLC, told eJP. “I believe that documenting and preserving this time in the history of our young people is crucial now, and for 100 years from now, in the ongoing battle against Jew hatred and anti-Zionism.”

When prompted about what it’s like to sit in class with the same people whose actions she is documenting, Halff pauses and rethinks her earlier comments.

“I said it didn’t offer relief,” she said about collecting for the archive. “That’s probably a lie because that is one of the best things. When I go to class with people who I know have very different views or I know how they handled what happened after Oct. 7 or things that they said, I feel much better. Before I felt kind of invisible and very frustrated that they can have a voice, and I don’t really, or just hurt with no place to put that hurt. And now I kind of feel like I can work on this project and then go to class, and it gives me a sense of control.”