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Jewish German-Language Periodicals from Eastern Europe. Digitization and Documentation of Historical Newspapers, Almanacs and Pictorial Illustrations of East European Jews

Project Manager: Tillmann Tegeler
Project Editor: Albert Weber
Project duration: 7/2015–12/2017

The goal of this project, which is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media following a resolution by the German Bundestag, is to contribute to the sustainable retainment of the cultural heritage of German-speaking Jewish populations in Eastern Europe. For this purpose, an extensive collection of historical, German-language periodicals by Eastern European Jews with German and Yiddish mother tongues is being digitized and provided to scholars, teachers and the general public as free and unrestricted source material. After the digitization of the periodicals, all images included therein, such as drawings, depictions or photographs referring to the region's Jewish populations, will be separately recorded in a virtual image catalog and labeled by keywords. This shall ensure clear, visual access not only to the text materials but also to the self-presentation of historical Jewish minorities in Eastern Europe.

The 32 newspapers and 11 almanacs and yearbooks from the period from 1863 to 1940 with a total of 85,000 pages and image materials will be put online permanently on the portal of the Digital Forum Central and East Europe (DiFMOE). Duplicates of all digital copies will also be provided for free use to the Historical Jewish Press, the newspaper portal of the National Library of Israel, to Compact Memory, the research portal for Jewish studies, to the Martin Opitz Library's electronic reading room and to Austrian Newspapers Online (ANNO), the newspaper portal of the Austrian National Library, where they will be available online to a broad specialist audience. A further goal is the creation of an online bibliography of German-language Jewish periodicals from Eastern Europe that will be electronically published as the fourth volume of the currently three-volume Bibliographie deutschsprachiger Periodika aus dem östlichen Europa (Bibliography of German-Language Periodicals from Eastern Europe) at the DiFMOE. This bibliographic series has been created by Albert Weber as part of a previous project. It documents the German-language press landscape in East and Southeast Europe.

While working on the digitization and bibliographies, the project team is also identifying for possible digitization other, partly supplementary, collections of Jewish periodicals in libraries and archives in Germany and abroad. This work will lay the foundation for future projects on the culture and history of German-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe.

Blog posts on the project topic were published on Minorities Records.

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