The EHRI project is currently in its final phase, and all hands are on deck to get our work finished in time for the Presentation of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure on 26 March 2015 in Berlin.

Lasting impact

Successfully finishing our current work is of course vitally important. Nevertheless, we have recently also put much effort into ensuring that EHRI has a future well beyond March 2015.

Matthew works in Visitor Services for The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide in Russell Square, London. He has been part of EHRI for nearly a year and a half and works on the EHRI Newsletter.

I have been working at the Wiener Library since June 2013 as the Library's Visitor Services and have worked with Petra Drenth and Reto Speck on the EHRI newsletter for around the same period.

On the 22nd of October 2014, Judith Levin and Veerle Vanden Daelen presented the current working version of the EHRI portal to a group of researchers for the first time. The participants of the EHRI workshop on Early Attempts at the Historical Documentation of the Holocaust (Prague, 20-23 October 2014) formed this first group of pioneers. They were able to have a look at the EHRI directory of over 1,850 repositories holding Holocaust-related archival sources, and some 3,000 manually added collection descriptions. Needless to say, the bulk of the collection descriptions will only become visible in a later stage, when the IT-imported information will be added to this work-in-progress. Nevertheless, EHRI already wanted to collect feedback on what is available and hear what the target audience’s first impressions were. 

The EHRI workshop Early Attempts at the Historical Documentation of the Holocaust was organised by the Jewish Museum in Prague, on October 21-23, 2014. It brought together experts from 13 countries to discuss and present their research on the early documentation of the Holocaust during and after WWII. The workshop extended the first EHRI workshop devoted to the early documentation of the Holocaust which was held in Budapest in 2012.

Anne Langer, Assistant at the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, co-organised this recent EHRI workshop and explains the programme of the event.

The international EHRI-Workshop, Names of Shoah Victims: From scattered Sources to Individual Personal Stories was held at EHRI partner Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in cooperation with Yad Vashem from October 20-21. The participants, from all over Europe and the US, 27 representatives of leading Holocaust research institutions from 12 different countries as well as various guest auditors, gathered at the Information Centre at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

2-3 December 2014, The Hague, The Netherlands

This EHRI workshop will focus on the information policy required in a digitally joined-up world and is intended for people responsible for the information strategy at archives, museums, libraries and other institutions that hold collections. It is not a technical workshop. The objective of the workshop is to improve the collaboration between the collection holding institutions, IT-service providers and Information Customers, such as EHRI.

Registration

Programme

Christine Kausch from Germany was an EHRI fellow at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam in September 2014. She used her fellowship to do research for her PhD-thesis, which deals with Jewish refugees from Germany who came to the Netherlands in the 1930s. Her research focuses especially on aspects of the refugees’ daily life in the years 1933-1945.

"An object from the Holocaust is not only a physical entity; it carries within the suffering of those who owned it beyond the historical events of that period of time. The questions of how the object was used, under what circumstances it was damaged or where it was hidden are a very important part of the story it has to tell." Dr. Haim Gertner, Director of the Yad Vashem Archives, and member EHRI Executive Team

The international EHRI workshop "Heritage and Memory" was held at EHRI partner Yad Vashem last September.