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Blavatnik Archive Veteran Oral History Project: WWII Russian Jewish Soldiers

Mon, December 17, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 1 Ballroom

Abstract

The Blavatnik Archive Digital Humanities Workshop Presentation will introduce the Archive’s new website, highlighting its modern Jewish history collections and the site’s web-based research capabilities. The Archive’s holdings total approximately 90,000 physical and native digital assets, including archival photographs, letters, documents, posters, postcards, periodicals, books, ephemera, and contemporary oral testimonies, with a special emphasis on the Jewish experience in Russia and the Soviet Union.

The Blavatnik Archive’s Veteran Oral History Project is comprised of nearly 1,200 contemporary video testimonies with Jewish veterans who fought in the Soviet armed forces and partisan units during WWII. The generation of Soviet Jewish veterans who fought in WWII bore witness to some of the greatest upheavals in 20th century Jewish and world history: the migration of Jewish shtetl life to an urban environment, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Holocaust and the war, and the mass migration of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora. As soldiers in the Soviet Red Army, they fought in WWII’s largest military force (30 million), as citizens of the country with the heaviest absolute losses (26 million). As Jews, members of a group targeted for genocide, they survived the Holocaust and contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany. They fought to protect their country and their people, and through incredible hardship, 500,000 Jewish soldiers ultimately marched to victory alongside their fellow Soviet patriots.

The video interviews are transcribed in Russian, translated to English, and indexed by geography and subject terms on story-based segments. Supplemented with digital documents from the veterans’ personal archives, the Project offers unique opportunities for new scholarship. In addition, curated content, combining strong visuals and engaging storytelling provide an engaging supplement to relevant classrooms.

The website is dynamically driven by the Archive’s item-based content management system. Multiple search options and filtering across all holdings formats are made possible by the system’s cataloging and deep metadata capture. Deep zoom function is enabled by the implementation of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) for the digital delivery of all image holdings. The website reflects the Archive’s commitment to open content access and high quality visual presentation.

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