George Blumenthal, a retired telecommunications executive, collects spectacular antiquities that demonstrate the historical Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. At the same time, he has spearheaded the digitization of some of the most important pieces of evidence documenting that presence.

In the post-October 7, 2023, world, Blumenthal said, these efforts have taken on a new urgency: fighting the ongoing surge in antisemitism and anti-Zionism. His commitment is personal, he said, founded upon his own family’s history.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Blumenthal’s father and uncle were taken to Buchenwald, but his mother was able to bargain for their freedom. His parents then made their way to the United States, where he was born, and they eventually settled in a suburb of Cleveland. They were the only Jewish family in the town, and Blumenthal recalled that some kids called him a “Christ-killer.”

He always believed that widespread anti-Jewish animus would return. “I just didn’t know that October 7 and Gaza would be the agent,” he said.

Blumenthal first got the itch to collect in the 1990s, when, on a visit to Israel, he walked into an antiquities shop in Jerusalem and was inspired to purchase four oil lamps, some etched with menorahs. He remembers asking the shop owner, “You’re telling me these lamps are from the times of Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the Maccabees?”

Those lamps—the oldest dates to the Bronze Age circa the 21st century BCE—are now part of Blumenthal’s approximately 100-piece collection, which he displays in his apartment in New York City. He also owns a Babylonian bowl, from approximately 500 CE, with the Shema written on it in Aramaic as well as the capital of a column from a synagogue, likely in the Galilee, featuring carvings of menorahs, from around 500-700 CE.

Among his many advocacy projects, Blumenthal is funding the educational website Israel in Their Land and, still in development, a Hebrew school curriculum. Both will present detailed evidence of the Jewish connection to Israel in an easy-to-understand way.

“I’m trying to democratize the knowledge of our people so it can be universally accessed,” Blumenthal said.

Over the past few decades, he’s been involved in digitizing one-of-a-kind documents such as the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Aleppo Codex, a medieval manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that was written in the 10th century in Tiberias; and a Mishnah Torah signed by Maimonides. More recently, he collaborated with the Central Zionist Archives to digitize the diaries of Theodor Herzl.

“I’m a Zionist,” Blumenthal said. “To me, Israel is the end-all and be-all.”

Peter Ephross, the editor of Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players, is a longtime writer about the Jewish world.