The EHRI Project

The Jewish Historical Institute cooperates with numerous renowned institutions dealing with Jewish history. One of the most important projects in this domain is EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure).

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure – European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EHRI-ERIC), inaugurated in 2025, is the first supranational organisation which unites institutions of key importance in the interdisciplinary domain of Holocaust documentation and research. Its goal is to provide consolidated access to scattered archival sources, promote innovative solutions in archival research and education, and protect shared European heritage for the sake of the generations to come.

Poland is one of the founding members of EHRI-ERIC. In line with the member duties within the infrastructure, Poland has established the National Node EHRI-PL, which is a consortium of three institutions engaged in multi-dimensional archival and scholarly research of the Holocaust: the Jewish Historical Institute (EHRI-PL coordinator), 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 Lodz.

In the years 2025–2027, the EHRI-PL Consortium will work on fulfilling the goals set by the EHRI-ERIC international research infrastructure in five strategic fields:

• broad international access to archival sources on the Holocaust; consolidating the collections of institutions with relevant holdings on the EHRI portal, including their digitisation and processing in line with the methods of digital humanities;
• initiating and strengthening cooperation between scholars from national and international centres, including setting out new research directions and methodological approaches, international exchange (scholarships, workshops, webinars, conferences), providing support to Holocaust researchers;
• processing and publishing research data and outcomes of Polish studies in EHRI online services (Geospatial Repository, Document Blog, Online Editions) in cooperation with other National Nodes;
• international cooperation within the EHRI-ERIC consortium through participation in the National Coordinators Committee and working groups;
• promoting the activities of EHRI-PL and EHRI-ERIC (debates, seminars).

The aim of these activities is to raise awareness of the EHRI network and its potential as a resource in academic and educational work, which will help build the social, cultural, and political repute of EHRI-ERIC.

***

SCHEDULED EHRI EVENTS:

16–17 June 2026, International Conference – “Documenting the Holocaust: Testimonies as Historical Evidence” 

The Collection of Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies held at the Jewish Historical Institute is a record of one the earliest initiatives aimed at discovering and documenting the experiences of people who lived through the Holocaust. It has since become one among many similar collections. Over the years, numerous institutions have engaged in projects of recording Survivors’ testimonies and recollections, creating a rich, complex resource.

The aim of the conference is to discuss testimonies as evidence in historical research by considering their potential and limitations, contexts of their creation, and subsequent use in science, education, and remembrance.

Find out more 

26 May 2026, Research Seminar: “Philip Friedman – Outline of an Intellectual Biography”, prof. Natalia Aleksiun

The author of the seminar will seek to reconstruct the intellectual biography of Philip Friedman as a social and economic historian. Friedman was a graduate of the University of Vienna, a representative of the milieu of Jewish historians in interwar Poland, and an educator. The starting point for the discussion will be an analysis of his position within the pre- and post-war intellectual network which shaped both his research methods and the directions of his historiographic considerations.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

28 April 2026, Research Seminar: “Between the Public and the Private: The First Postwar Exhibitions on the Holocaust in Poland”, dr Agata Pietrasik

19 April 1948 marked the grand opening of the Museum of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which comprised three exhibitions. One of them, titled Martyrology and Struggle, was curated by the Museum Director, Giza Frenkel, and was devoted to the history of the Holocaust in Poland.

The exhibition, based on trailblazing research carried out by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, displayed documents, photos, and artefacts collected at extermination sites, as well as maps and models created especially for the Museum. The goal was to reflect the scale of violence and destruction, but also to represent the victims’ perspective in a tangible way. Concomitantly, the exhibition constituted an act of resistance against the erasure and marginalisation of the Holocaust, a trend prevalent in the first years after the war.

The seminar presented those early exhibitions as a part of a broader set of initiatives – though often ephemeral – taken by the Jewish Historical Commission, including press conferences, presentations of archival materials, and local photo exhibitions. The lecture gave the audience an opportunity to reflect on the role of exhibitions as a tool of remembrance, documentation, and public communication of the experience of the Holocaust in the early post-war years.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

24 March 2026, Research Seminar: “‘Down with the Jews!!’ or What the Zakopane Microhistory Reveals”, dr Karolina Panz

Zakopane is a unique place on the map of Poland: a village in the Podhale region cut off from the world, surrounded by the “fairytale world of the Tatras”, which has become “the pearl of Poland and its lungs”, described in endless pieces of literature. Dr Karolina Panz is the first researcher to pay closer attention to the story of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust and were attacked and persecuted in Zakopane shortly after the war.

In order to understand why a Jewish orphanage operating in this idyllic though idealised small town would need guards and rifles on its verandas, dr Panz uncovered successive layers and elements of a history that turned out to be a project of “de-Judaising” Zakopane, promoted and carried out from the moment the town was “discovered”. This project involved members of nationwide cultural and political elites, local authorities, local activists, and the Gorals – local highlanders. In the seminar, the author discussed the slogans proclaimed, shouted, written, and debated in Zakopane’s salons in the 1930s and 1940s. She also talked about their authors, propagators, and the actions they undertook in the name of fighting the town’s alleged “Judaisation”, or in pursuit of the personal benefits that “de-Judaising” Zakopane offered during the Holocaust and immediately afterwards.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

24 February 2026, Research Seminar: “Transformations of Antisemitic Discourse – from the Gross Debate to the Gaza Debate”, dr Magdalena Nowicka-Franczak

The seminar was a critical attempt to position antisemitic discourse on the map of Polish public debate in the last quarter-century. Starting from the debate around Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross and the subsequent waves of discussions on the complicity of Poles in the Holocaust and ending with the new media normalisation of pseudo-folkloric types of stigmatisation of Jews, dr Magdalena Nowicka-Franczak demonstrated where the issue of antisemitism falls on the directional axis of public debate post-1989, revealing its so-called dynamic continuity. This concept refers to the concomitant pervasiveness and plasticity (sometimes subversiveness) of topoi, narrative-argumentative structures, and rhetorics based on group stereotypes.

Antisemitic discourse is produced in two models of public debate, which the author calls grand synthesis and small analysis. Although the latter consists in connecting elements of discourse from different orders, and the latter in separating conflicting interpretations with no heed to their profound causes, both in fact reject a critical perspective.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

27 January 2026, Research Seminar: “The Jewish Historical Institute as a Creator of Holocaust Memory. Mark–Datner–Tych”, dr Helena Datner, dr Stephan Stach, dr Tomasz Siewierski, moderator: prof. Andrzej Żbikowski

The Jewish Historical Institute plays a key role as an institutional creator of Holocaust memory through its scholarly, archival, and educational efforts. Since the first years after the war, it has served as a place for assembling testimonies, documents, and Survivor accounts, as well as a space for the reflection on the experience of the Holocaust in its Polish and European dimension.

Thanks to the activities of scholars who held the position of JHI Director – among them Bernard Mark, Szymon Datner, and Feliks Tych – the Institute was able to go beyond simply documenting the Holocaust and started to actively shape its social and cultural memory. It became a node connecting archives, science, and ethics of remembrance, thus creating a lasting framework for the perception of the Holocaust in Poland and abroad.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

16 December 2025, Research Seminar: “The YIVO Tradition in Relation to the Formation and Work of the Oneg Shabbat Group”, dr Eleonora Bergman

Around a dozen members of Oneg Shabbat had earlier been associated with the YIVO headquarters in Vilnius or with its branches in Warsaw, Łódź, and other cities. However, these people did not form a separate subunit within Oneg Shabbat. Ringelblum was one of the contributors to YIVO, and his cooperation with the institute influenced the methodology used by Oneg Shabbat in its work. Each of the remaining people associated with YIVO brought their own experiences to the table in pursuit of a common goal: to create a multidimensional scientific record of the life and death of Jews throughout occupied Poland. The seminar discussed their ties with YIVO and later contributions to the Underground Archive.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

25 November 2025, Research Seminar: “Poisoned Land: The Lives of Local Polish and Jewish Communities in the Shadow of Treblinka I and Treblinka II”, dr Michał Kowalski

Michał Kowalski’s PhD dissertation titled Poisoned Land, written in the years 2020–2025 and supervised by Bożena Szaynok, professor at the University of Wrocław, presents an in-depth analysis of the influence of Treblinka I and II on the local community and geographical space in Sokołów and Węgrów districts.

The author demonstrated how the operation of the two camps during the Second World War led to profound social, moral, and material decay among the people inhabiting the surrounding areas. At his seminar, dr Kowalski discussed the main outcomes of his research and the sources he used. He also presented selected hitherto unpublished archival materials and photos.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

28 October 2025, Research Seminar: “A Dreamed Appropriation: The Plunder of Jewish Property during the Anti-Semitic Campaign of 1967–68”, prof. Piotr Forecki

The wave of anti-Semitism unleashed in 1967–1968 was not limited to pervasive propaganda and various forms of harassment. It also engulfed the private property of thousands of Polish Jews who, emigrating to different parts of the world, were compelled to relinquish their material possessions or were dispossessed of them. The positions they vacated at their workplaces were likewise filled by others. Personal documents and interviews with Holocaust survivors and their children make it possible to examine yet another episode in the long history of the appropriation of Jewish property.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

9 October 2025, Research Seminar: “Holocaust Research after October 7, 2023: Changes, Continuities, Challenges”, prof. Barbara Engelking, prof. Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, prof. Michał Bilewicz, dr Kamil Kijek, dr Michał Trębacz

This event marked the inauguration of the National Node EHRI-PL.

Researchers from leading academic institutions discussed how the Hamas attack of October 2023 and the ensuing war in Gaza influenced – and continue to influence – Holocaust scholarship.

The conflict in the Middle East has arguably never before had such a significant impact on academic and museum communities. University protests, attempts to boycott Israeli scholars, and a decline in interest in Jewish studies are just some of the consequences of the ongoing war.

In the face of accusations against Israel concerning war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide, Holocaust scholars are under increasing moral pressure to take a public stance. Participants in the debate reflected on how the academic community is responding to these pressures. They also discussed the evolving role of research and cultural institutions, as well as the future of scholarship in light of global tensions and conflicts.

Watch the seminar on YouTube

***

More information on the project:
EHRI OFFICIAL WEBSITE
EHRI-PL WEBSITE