On 13 July 2023, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science submitted to the European Union the step 1 application for EHRI, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, to establish itself as an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).

As EHRI prepares to become a permanent research infrastructure, it is increasing its outreach towards user groups that have so far had less engagement with EHRI, but where the EHRI consortium sees potential value. As such, EHRI has organised two initiatives in 2023 to work more closely with Holocaust Educators.

By Rachel Pistol, EHRI-UK National Coordinator, KCL, and Maria Dermentzi, KCL

On May 4-5, 2023, EHRI organised two workshops that were hosted by the Wiener Holocaust Library (WHL) in London, UK. The first day focused on the work of the Work Package (EHRI-3 WP11) that is tasked with engaging and supporting micro-archives, while the second day was a special EHRI-UK workshop, run through EHRI-PP (Preparatory Phase).

A third workshop took place on 15-17 May, when EHRI-UK teamed up with CLARIN - the research infrastructure for language as social and cultural data - for a combined EHRI-CLARIN workshop "Using Holocaust Testimonies as Research Data".

This new Document Blogpost, by Rachel Perry, presents Elżbieta Nadel’s recently discovered early post-war graphic work The Black Album. It describes the research information on the provenance, technique, and composition of the work.

In addition, a comparison of the album and its drawings with an earlier album, Images from Home (made in Lviv, 1942), by the same artist allows for an analysis of the Black Album’s tone, style, content, voice, and point of view. The post follows the album’s bending to the pressures of its time and its function after the war.

The EHRI Portal offers access to information on Holocaust-related archival material held in institutions across Europe and beyond. It is one of the main achievements of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. The EHRI Portal, an ever growing resource, now enables you to browse 418,164 archival descriptions in 807 institutions. It also has information on 2,234 archival institutions in 60 countries. 63 national reports provide an overview of the Second World War and Holocaust history as well as of the archival situation in the covered countries. It makes it hard to believe that this all started in 2010 with an Excel spreadsheet. Veerle Vanden Daelen and Herminio García-González are leading on data identification and integration into the EHRI Portal. Time to ask them how this works.

EHRI-3 General Partner Meeting | 30 May-1 June 2023, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel

Eleven years after the first ever big EHRI General Partner Meeting was held at Yad Vashem in Israel, the EHRI-3 project returned for another gathering of representatives of today’s 27 partner institutions. Around fifty people assembled at the Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies and were welcomed by co-Project Director Karel Berkhoff and a speech given by Dani Dayan, Chairman of Yad Vashem.

A conference of the Center for Jewish Studies of Graz University in cooperation with the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in the framework of EHRI-AT

December 11-12, 2023 | Graz, Austria | Deadline for submissions: 15 July 2023

Writing about the Holocaust has been shaped from the beginning by considerations of form, of the limits of language and the medium itself, and of the (im)possibilities of transmitting knowledge to future generations.

Is your organization working on innovative ways to secure the future of Holocaust remembrance? 

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has re-opened its grant program on 19 June 2023 and invites organizations to apply with projects that safeguard the record of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma, or counter distortion.

Have you ever needed to build a map of ghettos or camps for your research project? Analyse distances between them or trajectories walked by prisoners? Share your datasets with others in a reusable way?

The new EHRI Geospatial Repository aims to help researchers with these and similar challenges.

By providing access to data about Holocaust-related places and spaces, the EHRI Geospatial Repository facilitates research driven by spatial and geographic approaches. It builds on the spatial turn in the field of Holocaust Studies: Over the past years, the research in Holocaust geographies, as conducted by the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative and others, advanced new perspectives and methods. Thinking through place and space helps to formulate new questions and research projects.

EHRI Conference, 23 May 2023, Amsterdam

"It is time that Europe takes responsibility for the Holocaust"

The EHRI Conference Foundations for the Future, that took place in Amsterdam on 23 May, started with an impressive show of support. Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) Robbert Dijkgraaf, and Dutch State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS), Maarten van Ooijen, Christian Ehler, Member of the European Parliament and Marileen Dogterom, President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) had each recorded short video messages in which they addressed the audience and spoke of the need for a permanent European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), while congratulating the project for paving the way towards this goal.

Watch here all 4 Video Messages for EHRI