All 80,000 items in Albert Einstein’s archives, including personal correspondence with half a dozen lovers and a poignant postcard to his ailing mother, are going online.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns the Einstein collection, is slowly uploading high resolution photographs of scientific papers, letters on social issues including nuclear disarmament and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other texts.

The collection includes more than 40,000 of Albert Einstein’s personal papers and over 30,000 additional Einstein and Einstein-related documents discovered since the 1980s by the archive’s staff and the editors of “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.”

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Most have been locked in storage at the university and only half of the collection appears online.

Archivists said Monday’s launch of the online repository will give scholars around the world direct access to Einstein’s papers.

The expanded site will initially feature about 2,000 selected documents related to Einstein’s scientific work, public activities and private life up to the year 1921.

The university has also published a complete inventory of all 80,000 items in the Einstein collection.

Albert Einstein was a founder of the Hebrew University and one of its most loyal supporters. In his will he bequeathed all of his writings and intellectual heritage to the Hebrew University, including the rights to the use of his image.



