3-year project includes predecessor local Jewish papers, back to 1944

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

Thanks to funding from the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton, the full 30-year run of The Dayton Jewish Observer to date and the complete runs of the Dayton Jewish Chronicle (1958-1995) and Jewish Federation News (1944-1995) will be digitized, searchable, and accessible to the public for free.

The three-year project, under the auspices of Ohio History Connection, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2028.

Access to these publications will also be available for free via the Historical Jewish Press website of Tel Aviv University and the National Library of Israel.

Jewish Federation CEO Cathy Gardner said it’s the Federation’s gift to the community in honor of The Observer’s 30th anniversary.

The Observer is published by the Jewish Federation.

“Keeping our community up to date on Jewish news in our region has always been The Observer’s highest priority,” Gardner said. “Another very important role The Observer plays — as did our predecessor local Jewish news publications — is to provide a historic record of Jewish life here in our region. This digitization project will bring our Jewish history alive, from generation to generation.”

The first third of the digitization project is underway in partnership with Dayton Metro Library, which is loaning its complete Dayton Jewish Chronicle collection to Ohio History Connection for scanning.

Dayton Jewish Chronicle
In 1958, the Ohio Jewish Chronicle, based in Columbus, began publishing a Dayton edition. Daytonian Anne Hammerman became its editor and in 1961 started publishing it as the Dayton Jewish Chronicle. Subsequent publishers of the weekly were Irene Seiden, and Philip Zukowsky and Leslie Zukowsky.

Jewish Federation News
When Dayton’s Jewish Federation reorganized itself as the Jewish Community Council in 1944, it began publishing a newsletter, the J.C.C. News.

In the absence of a local Jewish newspaper — and with the extent of the Holocaust beginning to come into focus — the council looked to Max Kohnop to serve as its editor.

Kohnop was the Sunday editor of the Dayton Daily News from 1939 to 1964. He would continue as editor of the J.C.C. News for 43 years, until 1987, by which time the council had returned to the name Jewish Federation.

Kohnop’s successors as Jewish Federation News editors were Federation employees Linda Patterson and Don Cohen.

It was Cohen in his role as Jewish Community Relations Council director who staffed a Federation committee chaired by Ellen Faust to start a new monthly Jewish newspaper for the Dayton area.

Federation President Ralph Heyman and Executive Vice President Peter H. Wells fast-tracked it as a priority.

The Dayton Jewish Observer
When I arrived to start the publication in 1996, it already had a name — The Dayton Jewish Advocate — the winner of a name-the-newspaper contest the Federation held months before.

Until I received a call from the publisher of The Jewish Advocate newspaper in Boston, no one here knew the phrase Jewish Advocate was trademarked by that publication.

Before we changed to The Dayton Jewish Observer, I called every publication with Jewish Observer in their names to confirm they had no objections.

At our website, daytonjewishobserver.org, you can search for stories from The Dayton Jewish Observer dating to 2009. You can also find electronic versions of our print publications dating to 2014.

And in a few years, you’ll be able to see and search for everything we’ve ever run in print.

We’ll keep adding to our digitized collection as long as there is a Dayton Jewish Observer.

To read the complete July 2026 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.