He took his work very seriously and so too did The Temple, for
they gave him ample secretarial support and retained what he
wrote and what was written about him. It was as if they all knew that the
day would come when scholars would want to use these papers for research.
The original home of the archives was at
The Temple - Tifereth Israel in University Circle, where it was
available to scholars. In the early 1990s the Western Reserve Historical
Society was asked to assist by organizing the papers and
microfilming them. Financial support for the undertaking
came from The Temple and the Jewish Community Federation.
The huge collection of materials came over to the WRHS
around 1992. The Silver Papers project personnel were three
archivists: Tracy Backer, Deborah Shell and Jeffrey
Zdanowicz, and a microfilm technician Bernard Watford.
They improved the organization
of the materials, microfilmed the archives, and
developed a finding aid (179 pages, dated 1994). As a
consequence of Silver's energy and creativity and his synagogue's
respect for his sermons, scholarly articles, civic
activities, correspondence and clippings, the Abba Hillel
Silver Archives are huge. As we are told below, to organize
them took 5,779 file folders and to capture them 235 reels of microfilm.
A brief program on Sunday, November 13, 1994 (see CJN story
below) celebrated the completion of the archiving and
microfilming. Raphael Silver spoke on behalf of the family.
The Silver papers remained housed at the WRHS. Later
in the 1990s, with the encouragement of the Silver family
who believed that his papers would be better preserved and
more available to scholars at the WRHS, the WRHS became
their permanent custodian.

The Cleveland Jewish News of Nov. 10, 1994
announced the microfilming of the archives
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