Green Light for Fellowship and Training Programme

Last week, the European Commission announced that EHRI would receive new funding from the Research and Innovation Programme Horizon2020 to sustain and further develop its main resources and services. Already in the process of transforming from a project into a permanent body for international Holocaust research, EHRI now, with this new funding, can maintain and expand its successful resources, such as the fellowships, training activities and the EHRI Portal. Hence, over the next 4 years, EHRI will follow two paths: developing into a permanent infrastructure and progressing as a longstanding, active project. Having both streams of funding is especially good news for our user community as it means that they can keep on using EHRI’s new and improved services, while behind the scene, foundations for a stable organization are being built.

Hidden sources

The aim of this third project phase is to move decisively beyond the achieved state-of-the-art. While the sources of most major Holocaust institutions are already integrated into the EHRI Portal, much valuable sources held by small local and micro-archives currently are inaccessible to the research communities. EHRI will develop protocols and tools that allow the open up of these hidden sources for Holocaust research.

New approaches

In this third phase, EHRI will further enable new trans-national and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Holocaust by developing innovative layers that connect thematically related, but physically dispersed, collections. It will greatly enhance its access provisions, and integrate new communities – local research and archive networks, universities, researchers working in closely related fields – into its network.

New programmes and activities

Later this year, EHRI will announce new programmes for its fellowships and training activities. A new interactive Online Course in Holocaust Studies and a MOOC can be expected.

Strengthen community

In the next four years, EHRI will manage to expand and strengthen its community of partners, experts, scholars, archivists, digital humanists and others. New partners to the consortium will be the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, Ukraine, and the University of Thessaloniki.

Resonance

Although EHRI is geared towards scholarly communities, the Holocaust is deeply rooted in the development of European societies. EHRI is a project with a reach and resonance well beyond the walls of academia. EHRI keeps the memory of the most traumatic event in European history alive. It helps to make new generations aware of what happened during Europe’s darkest hour, which is all the more important as survivors of the Holocaust pass away. By building a firm groundwork for its future, EHRI hopes to create indispensable weapons in the battle against Holocaust denial, xenophobia and antisemitism which have recently raised their ugly heads again across Europe.