International experts debate how to link Holocaust archives

Experts and historians from the Czech Republic and abroad are meeting in Prague to debate how to better link archives and archival documents about the Holocaust which are currently dispersed around the globe. The experts are meeting for three days as part of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project (EHRI), which was launched last year in Brussels. The EU has allocated EUR 7 million for the four-year venture.

The aim of EHRI is to provide common ground for all researchers working on the issue of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. “The project is doing its best to make it easier to research sources of information stored in archives around the world. Some documents were destroyed by the Nazis,” Michal Frankl, the head of the Shoah History Department at the Jewish Museum in Prague, told the Czech Press Agency.

EHRI is one of the largest European projects in the fields of archival science and the humanities. The project is coordinated by the Netherlands Institute for Research of War, Holocaust and Genocide (NIOD). As many as 20 European archives and research institutions from 13 countries are participating, including the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Terezín Memorial, and Yad Vashem in Israel.

Frankl says the Jewish Museum in Prague, which is co-organizing the Prague meeting, contributed in a significant way to designing the project and formulating its aims. The museum is leading the part of the project focused on connecting various archival sources on the Terezín ghetto and Jewish communities in occupied Central Europe.