Inauguration of the EHRI Polish National Node

Poland is a founding member of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure-European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EHRI-ERIC). The EHRI Polish National Node (EHRI-PL) is composed of 3 institutions researching the Holocaust, with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute as a National Coordinator, which has a leading role, and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Philip Friedman Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Łódź as its partners. All of the institutions have participated in previous EHRI projects.

The EHRI Polish National Node helps with Holocaust research and supports EHRI’s goals by:

• providing international access to Holocaust-related archives and adding collections from institutions to the EHRI portal. This includes working on digitizing and processing materials using digital humanities methods, developing cooperation among researchers from national and international centers, exploring new research topics and methods, and organizing exchanges such as fellowships, workshops, and conferences.
• sharing research data and findings by Polish scholars through EHRI’s online services. It includes promoting EHRI activities through debates, seminars, and podcasts.

The Jewish Historical Institute is among the oldest research institutions in the world focused on the history of Eastern European Jews. Founded by Holocaust survivors immediately after WW2, the Institute stores one of most significant collections worldwide, including seven million pages of diverse documents, books, photographs, works of art, objects and Judaica. Among the most significant collections is the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known as the Ringelblum Archive. Due to its unique value, the Ringelblum Archive became a part of the UNESCO Memory of the World list. The Institute’s mission is to preserve, digitalize, and make historical materials from its collections accessible. It also aims to promote knowledge about the thousand-year Jewish presence in Poland through research based on its rich collections. It serves both as a repository of historical memory and a vibrant cultural center, actively contributing to the development of historical awareness.

The Polish Center for Holocaust Research groups include researchers from different humanities disciplines: historians, literary scholars, sociologists, and psychologists. It aims to carry out interdisciplinary research, combine different methodologies, overcome existing schemata in Holocaust narration, uncover various cognitive perspectives and points of view, and demonstrate the variety and ambiguity of historical events. The Center is involved in a number of fields – academic, educational and publishing.

The Philip Friedman Center for Jewish Studies is an academic research department focused on the history of Jews during the Holocaust with a special interest in the history of the Lodz Ghetto. The main areas of the Center’s activity are comprehensive studies of the history of the Lodz ghetto and the wartime fate of Jewish communities in the Lodz region of Poland. Researchers affiliated with the Phillip Friedman Center actively participate in international scientific life and are members of interdisciplinary, international research projects.