Digitization

Digitization Department is responsible for presenting the resources of the Jewish Historical Institute in a digital version. Our digital repositories provide free and unlimited access to digitized collections dedicated to culture, history and art of Polish and European Jews.

Digitization is one of JHI’s key tasks: it allows for protecting the collections and for sharing them with internet users. The Digitization process at the institute has been taking place for years, to such important results as the Central Jewish Library (2014) and the Delet portal (2017). The Delet portal is still being developed, currently we’re working on adding an encyclopedic module.

The Central Jewish Library (CBJ) continues the mission of pre-World War II Central Judaistic Library. It contains magazines, books, historical prints, photographs and collections of artworks. CBJ stores all materials selected to be shared, which makes an open, vast collection of resources covering all aspects of history and culture of Jews in Poland and Europe and provides a useful tool for academics, historians, genealogists and researchers of Jewish culture and history.

The Delet portal (Hebrew for ‚door’) presents a selection of the most outstanding elements of the JHI and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute’s collections which have been digitized so far, which includes the entirety of the Ringelblum Archive. The portal is aimed at education, providing a diverse array of materials and workshops developed by academics and educators - a perfect starting point for everyone who is interested in Jewish culture but doesn’t have specialized knowledge. The Portal contains lessons, workshops and guided tours with key information on Jewish history and culture as well as lesser known details, trivia and the history of our collection. Interactive tools allow for creating and editing your own virtual education materials.

The most valuable collections

The CBJ and Delet collections include the Archive initiated by Emanuel Ringelblum and created by the Oneg Shabbat group in order to document the Holocaust. Due to its unique value, the Archive became a part of the UNESCO Memory of the World list. We also share artworks from Józef Sandel’s collection, one of the most important and most outstanding ones in terms of Polish Jewish art of the 19th and 20th century. Aside from that, we recommend albums which document the daily life and tradition of Polish Jews and contain unique photographs from pre- and postwar Poland, as well as our rich collection of Judaica.

The CBJ also contains a large section with Jewish press in Polish and Yiddish as well as archive materials, historical prints, manuscripts. We’d like to recommend especially the Ringelblum Archive Complete Edition (Polish), the Ringelblum Archive volumes translated into English and the History of Jews Quarterly.

Application

Our resources are available also in the Portal Delet application, compatible with Android and iOS systems. It offers a selection of documents, artworks and lessons. Currently, we are working on a new edition of the application.

Projects

We keep expanding our digital libraries with new materials and develop thanks to new digital humanities programs.

Norwegian and EOG grants

Delet II – the project is developed by the AJHI and JHI as a part of the Digital Culture program of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in order to share the pre-war photography archive of the Jewish Museum in Berlin – the „Berlinka” collection: https://delet.jhi.pl/pl/library/berlinka 

Virtual Encyclopedia of the Warsaw Ghetto – JHI’s interdisciplinary project planned for many years – a synthesis of all the works on the complete edition of the Ringelblum Archive.

Polish Judaistic Dictionary – edited and expanded new online version of a collective work, ed. by Zofia Borzymińska and Rafał Żebrowski. The project is available in the Beta version and will be expanded and updated within the coming years. 

Cooperation and partnerships

In order to popularise the public domain, we took part in the “Poużywaj sobie” (Use it) campaign organized by Pracownia Otwierania Kultury.

The Scientific and Academic Computer Network (NASK) has been our long-standing technological partner and software developer.

Our partner in developing our mobile application is Mysza Software (https://mysza.software/).