מעתמול · Wayback News
A daily newspaper from exactly 100 years ago
Published in Hebrew, every morning, dated one century back to the day.
Wayback News (in Hebrew: מעתמול, "MeEtmol", meaning "from yesterday") is a daily newspaper that reports the world as it stood exactly one hundred years ago. Today's edition is dated 1926. Tomorrow's will be dated the next day of 1926, and so on: the paper moves forward one day at a time, permanently a century behind the reader.
What you are actually reading
Each issue is written from inside its own date. There is no hindsight and no retrospective framing: a story about a strike, an expedition or a cabinet crisis is written the way a newspaper of that week would have written it, without knowing how any of it turned out. Prices, weather, shipping notices, sports results, advertisements and the Hebrew calendar date are all those of the day on the masthead.
The paper is written from a Hebrew-language vantage point of the period, which makes it an unusual window on the 1920s: the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine and its cities, Jewish communities across Europe and America, alongside the world news, markets, science and sport that any daily of the period carried.
Where the material comes from
Every issue is built from primary sources: digitised newspapers of the period, archival photographs and public-domain collections including the Library of Congress, the National Library of Israel, Wikimedia Commons and Europeana. Factual claims are traced back to a source before they are printed, and the issue is checked before it is published.
The reconstruction is produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence working over those verified archives. Real events only: no invented people, quotations or outcomes. Where the record is thin, the paper says less rather than filling the gap.
Reading it if you do not read Hebrew
The paper is Hebrew-only, and there is no English edition. Browser translation handles it reasonably well: in Chrome, Edge or Safari, open any issue and use the built-in "Translate page" option. The period register does not always survive the trip, but the reporting does.
A good deal of the paper is legible without any Hebrew at all: the archival photographs, the reproduced advertisements, the chess problem, and the front-page layout itself, which follows the typography of the period.
Start here
- Front page Today's issue, dated exactly one century back.
- Archive Every issue published so far, by date.
- Weekend supplement A longer Saturday edition: profiles, opinion, features.
Free to read, no registration. A new issue appears every morning, 100 years to the day after the events it describes.