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European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)

 

The VWI has been a member of an EU-sponsored research consortium since 2010. The main aim of EHRI – European Holocaust Research Infrastructure – is to develop lasting opportunities for networking. This is intended to foster innovative documentation methods and research guidelines for research infrastructures that have to date only been used on a national basis. The first phase of EHRI from 2010 to 2014 consisted of designing online tools by the consortium members, linking databases of scattered archives with Holocaust-relevant documents, and developing new research topics and questions.

 

This project, funded by twenty research institutions across twelve European states – Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and the United Kingdom – as well as Israel, was funded by a grant applied for in the framework of the seventh funding programme of the EU and granted a total of seven million Euros by the European Commission. Over its four-year duration, it created structures for an enduring network of European research and archive resources on the history of the Holocaust. The most important partners were Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), CEGES-SOMA (Brussels), King’s College London, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin and Munich, as well as NIOD – Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), which coordinated the entire project.

 

Within the framework of Work Package 2 of the project, the VWI developed a research initiative for Holocaust-relevant archives of Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe in collaboration with the Jewish Museum in Prague, the research centre at Terezín, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest, as well as the archive of the IKG in Vienna, and established infrastructure and networking tools for archival resources. In 2015, he project was extended for four more years.

 

In the framework of EHRI-2, the VWI explored the possibilities of expanding the infrastructures developed in EHRI-1 and of making them more sustainable, but also of ways to make scattered, smaller, hardly known collections that are nevertheless relevant to Holocaust research (more) accessible and to expand existing research infrastructure through digital platforms, repositories, and databases, as well as through online curricula, exhibitions, and presentations on specific research projects and/or case studies in Holocaust research.

 

The focus here was on topical questions regarding digital archival collections in Central Europe with a view toward discussing and developing organisational and legal guidelines and procedures for the transnationalisation of Holocaust research networks and archives, with an emphasis on local approaches and regional concerns regarding current usage of Holocaust sources. Such local approaches were to be connected with other projects from Central Europe in order to create a network by and for these initiatives transcending ethnic, linguistic, and/or national boundaries, which could thereby overcome previous impediments to opening up space for innovative approaches.

 

The institute was moreover connected to the EHRI fellowship programme and was thereby able to provide scholarly supervision to eight fellows over the duration of the project and to integrate them into the research activities of the institute.

 

EHRI-2, in the framework of which the VWI organised the workshops Transnational meets Local: Making Holocaust Research Projects and Infrastructures Sustainable by Using Digital Archives, Electronic Repositories, and Internet Platforms on Local and Regional Levels (19/20 November 2018) and “It Happened Here!” 
Digital and Shared: Holocaust History in Public Space” (1/2 April 2019), concluded in October 2019.

 

As of December 2019, a new three-year project, which will also be funded by the EU, will prepare the establishment of a European research consortium for Holocaust research in the framework of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).

 

The aim of this strategy to establish European research infrastructures is to overcome the boundaries that have arisen as a result of the fragmentation of isolated national research policies, to provide an opportunity to respond quickly to new research questions, and to advance knowledge-based technologies and their increased implementation.

 

In the framework of this project, the VWI will initially participate in the establishment of an Austrian Holocaust research infrastructure.

http://www.ehri-project.eu

 

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The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) is funded by:

 

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