Abraham Freidus and his assitant Ada Kasanof

Unknown photographer

Abraham Freidus and Ada Kasanof

ca. 1910–11

Abraham Freidus (1867–1923), the first chief of the Jewish Division at The New York Public Library, and Ada Kasanof (1890–1983), his assistant, pose at their desks in the offices of the Astor Library, before the Library relocated to its current home on Fifth Avenue. Freidus was a renowned librarian and bibliographer and was particularly instrumental in establishing the reputation of the Library’s Jewish Division. He developed the classification system for Jewish materials that the Library still uses today. He left just a few printed works, mostly published under the Library’s auspices, including a List of Jewish Drama (1907) and List of Works Relating to the History and Condition of the Jews in Various Countries (1914). But the examples of his thorough style as bibliographer as well as reminiscences of his contemporaries help us reimagine the atmosphere of intellectual curiosity that reigned in the Jewish Reading Room.  

Ada Kasanof was born in Moscow in 1890 and came to the U.S. in 1892 with her family. She lived in Boston and studied law at Saint Lawrence University in Canton, New York, before moving to New York City in around 1910. Kasanof served as Freidus’s assistant in 1910–13 and also worked briefly as an attendant in the Slavonic Division, known today as the Slavic and East  European Collections.