Virtual shtetl

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The Virtual Shtetl (Polish: Wirtualny Sztetl ) is an internet project of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw . The project was launched in 2009 and has set itself the goal of becoming one of the largest collections of knowledge on Polish-Jewish history. As part of a Web 2.0 solution , the project relies on the cooperation of users worldwide, which also means that many pages are only available as stubs. The project is currently available in Polish, English, Hebrew and, since autumn 2010, also in German.

Although the initiators describe the project itself as a collection on Polish-Jewish history or as a portal on Polish Jews, it also provides information on all of Jewish life in the eastern German regions, in which the Jews mostly have no relationship with the Polish state and Polish history and had an independent culture and history. In this context, the project name Virtual Shtetl also seems unusual, as shtetls were not widespread in this cultural area and Jews did not otherwise live in their own settlements.

description

The “Virtual Shtetl” is a portal about local Jewish history. Although it already contained a lot of information at the moment of opening, its future lies in the cooperation of many users in the context of Web 2.0 solutions. The result is a medium that takes on the role of building a bridge between the history of the Jewish-Polish cities and the contemporary world.

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews created this project at a time when construction of the building was still in progress. The virtual shtetl is a museum without walls and sees itself as a logical consequence of the initiative to build the museum. It doesn't want to be a place, but the community that creates it.

The virtual shtetl describes the history of the Polish Jews, which took place to a large extent in the small towns (Yiddish: shtetl ) in eastern Poland . The portal will contain information about history, but also about the present, about small towns and cities, but also about large cities. The portal covers the borders of today's Poland, but also those of pre-war Poland . The multilingual versions enable Polish Jews and their descendants, who are scattered around the world, to access information on the portal.

A complete picture of Polish-Jewish history and relations is to be achieved with the help of many institutions, organizations and private individuals. The richness of the topic means that the list of topics to be dealt with appears inexhaustible. A valuable source of information is, according to itself, the Polin portal, as well as the portal for the local population, jewish.org.pl. The virtual shtetl uses the experiences of the internet projects izrael.badacz.org and diapozytyw.pl ("Diapositive", website of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute) and it draws from the longstanding cooperation between the Museum for the History of Polish Jews and the Jewish Historical Center Institute .

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