Zikaron Hero: Dov Noy
Dov Noy is someone you’ve probably never heard of, who does something you may not have known that anyone does. Still, he is an important zikaron hero. Dov Noy is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Jewish folklore. He collects and studies Jewish folk stories and fairy tales. Dov Noy came to Israel from Poland in 1938. Today he lives in Jerusalem. During World War II he served in the British army. After the war he continued his education at the Hebrew University, Yale, and then Indiana University. In 1956 Dov Noy founded the Haifa Ethnological Museum and Folklore Archives. In 2004 he won the Israel prize. Folktales are a special piece of history of a people, but they are almost never written down. They are told out loud and passed from generation to generation. Jewish folktales have moved from country to country, continent to 33
continent, language to language as the Jewish people moved around the world. Because the tellers of these tales were ordinary people, not important rabbis or scholars, the stories fell below the radar and were not recorded. When he was a graduate student at Indiana University Dov studied under Stith Thompson, the founder of the modern study of folklore. Dov Noy realized that large pieces of tradition were being lost. He decided to devote his life to rescuing Jewish folktales before they vanished. The first step he took in accomplishing this mission was to found the Israel Folktale Archives in 1955. He was the founder of the entire field of Jewish folklore and the teacher of every younger Jewish folklore scholar throughout the world. When someone tells you a Jewish story, we probably know it because of the work of Dov Noy. He has collected and cataloged more than 23,000 stories. That, too, is an act of zikaron.
