Ten institutions in London, Frankfurt, Athens, Bologna, Budapest, Paris, Rome and Warsaw join forces to offer worldwide access to the treasures of European Jewish culture.

Judaica Europeana, a ground-breaking digital project has been awarded a major grant by the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme to provide multilingual access to Jewish culture collections through Europeana, Europe’s archives, libraries and museums online. It is one of only a dozen targeted projects co-funded by the EC for Europeana.

The Consortium of Judaica Europeana partners is led by the European Association for Jewish Culture in London and the Judaica Collection of the Goethe University Library in Frankfurt/Main. Project partners include the Alliance Israélite Universelle in cooperation with Paris Yiddish Centre – Medem Library, The British Library (London), Hungarian Jewish Archives (Budapest), Jewish Museum of Greece (Athens), Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (MiBAC, Rome), Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), Jewish Museum London and Amitié (Centre for Research and Innovation, Bologna). The Central Zionist Archive (Jerusalem) and Makash (Centre for ICT applications in education, culture and science, Jerusalem) are associate partners.

Judaica Europeana will begin by digitizing millions of pages and thousands of other items selected from the collections of its partner libraries, archives and museums. The next stage will be to aggregate other digital collections on Jews in European cities – wherever they may be. ‘Jewish culture has been predominantly text-based; it will be a particular challenge for us to bring in as much audio-visual material as possible’ said Lena Stanley-Clamp, the project’s manager and director of the European Association for Jewish Culture.

The target audiences for Judaica Europeana are university teachers and students, schools, cultural heritage professionals, cultural tourists and the general public.

More information is available on Judaica Europeana.

image: Jewish foxtrott from London (YouTube); recording: Eddie Harding’s Nightclub Boys – Yoi yoi, Mr Cohen, Piccadilly 1930 (UK)