by Laura Fontana, Mémorial de la Shoah

From the 30^th of July to the 4^th of August 2017 the Mémorial de la Shoah of Paris and the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum (VGSJM) of Vilnius, with the kind support of the University of Trieste that hosted the event, jointly organized a six-day seminar on The Nazi Occupation and the Extermination of the European Jews. Methods, sources and interpretations: a focus on Italy and Lithuania. 12 participants from several European countries (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Italia, Austria, Germany, Denmark and Greece) as well as from Israel attended the workshop, held within the framework of EHRI.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) is offering a limited number of fellowships for Ph.D. and Post Doctoral Candidates Conducting Research on the Holocaust.

The application deadline is January 3, 2018 for the Fall 2018 - Summer 2019 funding Year. Maximum Award Amount: $20,000 Per Year.

The newest contribution to the EHRI Document Blog comes from Astrid Ley, who takes a close look at the unpublished memoir of Gerardo (Gerhard) Nassau she discovered during her recent EHRI fellowship at The Wiener Library in London.

Job Description: Cataloguer

Full-time, temporary post based in Central London, WC1

Salary: £25,500

Responsible to: Head of Collections

Job Description: Acquisitions Librarian

Full-time, permanent post based in central London, WC1

Salary: £24,500

Responsible to: Head of Collections

Part II of the EHRI Document Blog post entitled "The Profile of the Perpetrators" is out. Based primarily on Arrow Cross administrative and private records held in the Hungarian National Archives, the authors focus on the personality, social background and motivations of the members of the killing squad. The blog post features an updated interactive map of Budapest as well as documents from three different archival collections, unique photos and film footage.

In 2017 the beautiful city of Milan formed the background for the annual General Partner Meeting of the consortium that develops the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Nearly seventy people, active for any of the 24 partner institutions and based in one of 17 countries that participate in the making of EHRI, gathered to present, discuss and evaluate the results and future of the project.

Challenging the Paradigms of Memory Politics in Europe

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

Vienna, 27 November – 29 November 2017

Call for Papers

Martyrdom has a long tradition in European culture. In the nineteenth century, the cult of death became a major symbolic element of nation-building, shifting the focus from the heroic commander to the suffering soldier.

A member of EHRI Work packages on Communication and Dissemination (WP2) and Training and Education (WP4), Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene is chief of the History Research Department and acting head of the Memorial Museum of Paneriai at the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, Lithuania, as well as a PhD candidate at the Communication Faculty of the Vilnius University.

In 1999, I started working as an historian at the Holocaust exhibition in the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. In 2002, I published my first book about the Holocaust in the Trakai region. In 2010, I was appointed as a chief of the History Research Department and was a curator of the renovation of the Holocaust exhibition and the editor of the exhibition’s catalogue.

In the latest EHRI-Document Blog post, Michał Czajka from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (ŻIH) draws his attention to the earliest document in the collection of testimonies at the ŻIH, a testimony by Alter Ogień from 1944, written in Yiddish. He follows the story of how Alter Ogień survived the Holocaust and uses the example to give an insight into these early documents, showing what information they can offer, but also describing what they don’t tell us.