Among the 1,200 writers for the new edition were 63 from New Jersey — including college professors, rabbis, and journalists — who submitted entries on topics ranging from the Rabbinical Assembly to opera singer Lina Abarbanell.

“In essence, our attempt was to build on the tremendous reception and reliability of the original” — published in 1971 — “which placed an obligation on us to make sure that whatever we did improved upon it and didn’t…challenge or diminish its reputation,” Berenbaum said.

The 35 years between volumes “was a tremendously long period of time, especially at the pace in which Jewish history is evolving,” he said. “Instead of just doing a patchwork, it’s a wholesale rewrite.”

So many contributors appear in the new edition, Berenbaum said, because “nobody has an encyclopedic knowledge of Judaism today — too vast, too great, too many areas of knowledge and learning.”

None of the contributors expect to get rich from writing their essays. For them, it’s a labor of love and scholarship; payment amounts to pennies a word, working out to about $50 for a 500-word essay.

Berenbaum assembled a team of 50 regional editors, who reviewed the original material to decide what to keep, what to change, what to remove.

“We asked them the question, ‘What’s not there?’ And what’s not there often became as interesting a question as what is there before a whole range of things had developed over the past 35 years.” At the time of the first edition, Berenbaum offered as an example, Golda Meir was the prime minister of Israel. “That, to my children, seems like ancient history.”

“We have a different treatment of New Jersey,” Berenbaum said. “The interesting thing is what happened over the…years.” For one thing, he said, “the Jewish community migrated. The entry on Camden is now a Camden County entry.” A similar change was made for the entry on Newark, whose once thriving Jewish population has moved to other areas of Essex County. “We have a series of other counties that all of a sudden were considered because the previous principle of organization was on the basis of ‘city’ and that doesn’t really count for how Jews live today. There might be no dominant city, but there sure as hell is a massive Jewish community that is worthy of inclusion.”
Linda Forgosh, curator and outreach director for the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest, penned one of those new entries, writing about the Jews of Morris and Sussex counties.

While revising the entry on Essex County, Forgosh realized there was nothing about Morris and Sussex counties in the previous edition of EJ. She told Berenbaum of several synagogues in the area with more than 100 years of history. In turn, he asked her to submit the article. “So for the first time ever, ‘the Jews of Morris and Sussex’ was added to the mix,” Forgosh said.

In reading the 1971 Essex County entry, Forgosh also discovered it to be “in some cases historically inaccurate”; the historical society did not yet exist when the first edition of EJ was published.

She consulted with regional historical experts, including former JHS president Warren Grover and Alice Perkins Gould, author of The Old Jewish Cemeteries of Newark, and delved into “seminal histories” of Essex County to winnow down more than 150 years of Jewish history into fewer than 2,000 words.

Having worked on so many exhibitions for the society, Forgosh said, she understood the sense of “collective accomplishment” and began to pick the best representative of “the energy of Essex County’s Jewish community.”

Although obviously well qualified to write about the history of Jewish life in the region, Forgosh hesitated when asked if she enjoyed the experience. “It was something I wanted to do and knew I was obligated to do on multiple levels, but I would have probably wanted someone with better credentials than I to put their name to it only because of its lasting impact,” she said.

Rabbi Steven Bayar of B’nai Israel in Millburn contributed a 500-word essay on the synagogue’s emeritus rabbi, Max Gruenewald, an assignment he received when the original writer failed to meet his deadline. “It was great,” Bayar said about his participation. “It was really a high. I do writing professionally, but to be included in the Encyclopaedia Judaica….”

“When it first came out, I was in college,” said Bayar. “We always thought the mark of being on the ‘in’ of Jewish writing was being in the Encyclopaedia, even if it’s only 500 words.”

Writer and publisher Jeannette Friedman of Teaneck submitted more than two dozen entries for EJ, mostly on rabbis who immigrated to America after the Holocaust.

“I had submitted some that I wanted to do, like the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, but [Berenbaum] gave me a list of rabbis and said, ‘Go for it.’”

“It was an interesting experience,” she said. “You learn a lot by doing that kind of research, and you begin to see where the community is lacking in terms of writing up its history. We’ve got holes in American-Jewish history that need to be filled.”

Friedman, editor-in-chief for The Wordsmithy, a company that helps people write and produce books, assists Holocaust survivors in assembling their memoirs “so their kids and grandchildren will know where they came from.”

At times the research proved frustrating, especially for those who escaped the Holocaust whose “official data” have been lost, Friedman said. “That to me was the most amazing thing of all, that people who really gave contributions to the Jewish community will never be heard from and will sink like stones because there’s no real record of who they are.”

Rabbi Robert E. Fierstien of Temple Or in Brick was asked to write the entry on the Rabbinical Assembly, the worldwide association of Conservative rabbis, by the organization’s executive director, Rabbi Joel Meyers.

“I was honored to do it,” said Fierstien, who served as editor of A Century of Commitment: One Hundred Years of the Rabbinical Assembly in 2001.

Fierstien has prior experience in writing for reference works with such stringent requirements, having contributed to American National Biography and The Encyclopedia of Religion. “There’s a certain kind of style you use” when writing for reference works such as EJ, said Fierstien, whose article ran 500 words. “You have to use short sentences and get right to the point.”