Jewish history project launched to celebrate Warsaw Ghetto treasure
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
19.09.2017 12:00
The 71st anniversary of valuable historic documents being dug up at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto is to be marked on Tuesday with the launch of a new programme commemorating some of the ghetto's legends.
Part of the Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto undergo conservation work before being digitalised. Photo: Emanuel Ringleblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Between 1940 and 1942, Emanuel Ringelblum and other people living in the ghetto formed a group called Oneg Szabat and collected tens of thousands of pages documenting life in the ghetto in war-time Poland which came to be known as the Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The archives included more than 700 pages of reports, diaries and memoirs, nearly 400 folders of official documents, 120 academic papers, and dozens of pieces of literature, photographs and underground newspapers.
They were stored in ten metal boxes and buried in the ghetto and survived the war to be dug up on 19 September 1946.
To mark the anniversary, the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland launched a programme named after Oneg Szabat.
The programme aims to share the archives online and commemorate Ringelblum and the other people who helped him preserve the ghetto’s history.
The programme will see the launch of a permanent exhibition at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in November, the release of the archives in a 36-tome collection in English, and the digitalisation of the archives for publication online.
The programme will be funded through donations which can be made at the www.onegszabat.org website. (vb)