Dear colleagues and friends,

Last year I was deeply saddened by Conny Kristel’s death. She was a wonderful colleague, truly a model of conscientiousness and commitment. I am guessing that you all know a good project that was hampered (or worse) because egos stood in the way. Not so with EHRI under Conny. How befitting that the first Conny Kristel Fellowships will be dispensed this year.

Given this history, it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that I began my tenure as EHRI’s new Project Director on March 1. But there is no worry. Having been involved in several EHRI undertakings, my sense is this is a gathering of experts who are not only committed to a good cause, but who also treat each other well. And they know and feel that the work is all the more important today - a time with so much bad news about distortion and denial of the Holocaust.

Pecunia Olet: Aryanizing Jewish Shops in Gödöllő, Hungary

The latest EHRI Document Blog post by Borbála Klacsmann (University of Szeged) focuses on the aryanization of Jewish shops in Gödöllő, Hungary. Starting with the ground plan of the Gödöllő city hall, the post follows the decision of the town council to cancel the rent of Jewish shopkeepers situated there and the story of the shops afterwards. The post also opens a discussion on the processing of the aryanizations.

The author of this EHRI Document Blog post is Annelies van Nispen, giving inside into some of the work of WP13 on geo-referencing services for archives. Using a concrete example from NIOD's archival data, this blog post details an experiment in how to make collections searchable and findable on a map like Google Maps or Open Street Map. By extracting geographical units from the descriptions in EAD, this technique makes it possible to identify different pieces of information in archival descriptions and use this to enrich the metadata and the EHRI vocabularies.

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem are pleased to invite applications for a research workshop entitled, Jewish Experiences and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The workshop is scheduled for August 5-16, 2019 at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.