Our Story

JEM was founded in 1981 with a straightforward mission: broadcast the Rebbe's major weekday public addresses, live via satellite.

Over the course of twelve years, those broadcasts grew into a worldwide network of public viewings and cable TV channels, with an audience spanning continents, time zones, languages and religions. Reflecting the diversity of the viewership, during these addresses, the Rebbe would discuss a wide range of universal topics, on matters of concern to Jews and non-Jews.

Those broadcasts were recorded, and they form the core collection around which The Living Archive was built.

After the Rebbe's passing in 1994, the focus shifted to meet a new reality. The recordings were no longer an afterthought. For many individuals, they were a primary means, of learning and connection. For the first time in history, people could learn directly from the teachings of, and be inspired by the life of, a Jewish leader after his passing. Directly — not through secondhand accounts or printed transcripts, but in his own voice and image.

In the years that followed, JEM grew from a one-person project to a small production team, into a diverse operation. What had started with satellite feeds and a skeleton crew expanded into a full publishing enterprise — a team of editors, researchers, and producers, along with dedicated editing and post-production systems — releasing the Rebbe's teachings through an ever-widening range of formats: unabridged talks, the acclaimed weekly Living Torah videomagazine, documentaries, inspirational videos, children's content, and educational programming.

Within several years, JEM's materials were reaching hundreds of thousands of people every week, in communities across the globe.

In 2004, while working with the tapes, the production team began to notice troubling problems. The quality was beginning to falter. Previously smooth tapes began to jam and clog up the playback heads.

Before long, they learned what archivists across the field were slowly beginning to recognize: the recordings were deteriorating. Magnetic tape has a shelf life. Binders break down, oxide sheds, audio drops out, colors shift. Film also begins to degrade -- photographs fade and curl. Every archival facility holding twentieth-century media was working against the same clock. Major institutions — the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and hundreds of others — were raising the alarm.

The timeline was shorter than anyone wanted to admit.

The stakes were specific. Decades of public talks, private encounters, children's rallies. Visits from heads of state, scholars, and public figures — all captured on film and video. None of it was replaceable from any other source. If the media continued to degrade, if it failed before it was migrated, the recordings would be gone.

The problem was not confined to JEM's holdings. Through its close relationships with dozens of photographers and videographers who had been documenting life around the Rebbe for decades, JEM learned that they were facing the same crisis. And the problem was not limited to video. Audio recordings were deteriorating. Photographic negatives were fading, curling, stuck together in their sleeves. The scope of the threat was far wider than anyone had initially understood — and the people holding these collections had no capacity to address it. The remedies were expensive, highly technical, and required specialized equipment and expertise that individual collectors simply did not have.

The materials were recorded on many of the dozens of formats the twentieth century produced: open-reel, ¾" U-matic, ½" Beta SP, VHS, SVHS, Hi-8, Mini DV, DVCam, 16mm film, 8mm Kodachrome, Super-8 Sound, one-inch videotape, 35mm photo negatives, reel-to-reel and cassette audio.

Each format deteriorates in its own way. Magnetic tapes suffer from hydrolysis — the binder that holds the oxide to the tape absorbs moisture over time, turning sticky, shedding particles, and clogging playback heads. Some tapes required baking at controlled temperatures to temporarily restabilize the binder long enough to allow a single pass through a machine. Open-reel videotapes developed edge damage and warping. Film stocks faced vinegar syndrome — the slow chemical breakdown of acetate base, identifiable by its sharp smell, which once started cannot be reversed, only slowed. Kodachrome held its color better than most, but the Super-8 reels still needed cleaning, splicing, and careful inspection frame by frame. Photographic negatives had begun to stick to their sleeves; separating them without damage required precision work under controlled conditions.

Each format also required its own playback equipment — and some of that equipment was already becoming scarce. Functioning ½" open-reel decks, for instance, were no longer manufactured and had to be located, acquired, and in some cases rebuilt. The same was true for certain U-matic and one-inch machines. Finding technicians who could operate and maintain these decks was a challenge.

JEM partnered with the country's premier restoration laboratories and worked through the materials systematically, over a period of years. Each tape or reel was physically inspected and its condition documented. Restoration was performed as needed — cleaning, rehousing, baking, splice repair. The content was then reformatted onto archival-grade preservation masters: uncompressed digital video for tape and film, high-resolution scans for photographs, and lossless digital audio for sound recordings.

From these masters, working copies were generated for production and access use. The originals were placed in climate-controlled secure storage at multiple locations, ensuring redundancy against fire, flood, or any single point of failure.