Jewish grain merchants talking in the town square in Słomniki, between 1918-1933, courtesy of the National Digital Archive
Started in 2009, Virtual Shtetl is the largest database of knowledge and resources on the culture and history of Polish Jews - it is a virtual museum and an encyclopedia, as well as a society that brings together thousands of active users
Table of contents:
What is a Shtetl?
Problems with Memory
The Virtual Shtetl in Belarus
Spoken History
Discoveries
Memory in Stone
Virtual Shtetl in the Phone
The Future
A New Opening
Virtual Shtetl is an exemplary success of internet service, which began from zero. It kicked off in June 2009 as the portal of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Musem of the History of Polish Jews Association. Its base was built thanks to previously existing archives and websites. The privately owned website Izrael Badacz / Israel Explorer agreed to offer data concerning the history and heritage of Jews in Poland. Data was also provided by the dictionary on the Diapozytyw website, run by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute; other institutions to provide input for the Virtual Shtetl were the Jewish Historical Institute and the National Digital Archive.
These resources made the beginning possible. Today’s Virtual Shtetl is first of all a social media, engaging private users, local activists and specialists in history, as well as professional editors. These users create the site's content: They share and update information about the former locations of synagogues or mikves, and upload pre-war photographs, testimonies and memoirs by elder inhabitants in Polish cities and towns who remember the multicultural era in their regions. The information is verified by the Shtetl team, with editors brushing up source texts and checking facts submitted by users.
The website has proved capable of bringing together the great potential of internet users, their interest in local history and the sense of responsibility for remaining traces of Poland’s Jewish past. Virtual Shtetl now comprises over 30,000 pages of information, 70,000 photographs, 901 video recordings and 115 audio streams in several languages. It boasts an average of 4,500 visits daily, with 2 million users to date.
What is a Shtetl?
In Yiddish, the word shtetl means "little town". In a broader sense, the term was also used to designate areas where Jews built communities. And this is the meaning the website has taken. Co-creator of the site Albert Stankowski, explains, "A shtetl is really a community that lives in a given place, and the Virtual Shtetl is a community people gathered around the idea of a mission of preserving memory".
Krzysztof Bielawski, coordinator of Virtual Shtetl, says:
In nearly all of Poland’s larger towns, with the exception of former German lands in Mazovia, Podlasie, Lubelszczyzna and the Świętokrzyskie regions, Jews were in fact the majority of the population. They frequently constituted 60 percent of the inhabitants, but the towns of Kołbiel and Izbica are examples of towns where they constituted 90 percent of the entire population. Jewish families also lived in small towns and villages, and many people are completely unaware of this fact.
Problems with Memory
Since its beginnings, the website aimed to cherish the knowledge about the very concrete rather than a phantasmatic presence of Jews on Polish lands. Stankowski comments further on the problems with memory:
Before 1989, very few historians in Poland researched the subject. 60 years after the war, I had more difficulty in tracing the marks left behind by Polish Jews than the archaeologists in Mexico or Peru who are penetrating the Amazon jungle in search of Aztec and Inca tombs. In Poland, half a century after the war, the last people who saw the world of Polish Jews are now passing away.
This archaeological comparison is no exaggeration, and expeditions that are organised by the website bear testimony to this fact. They are evocative exactly of an archaeologist’s work, in the attempts to trace Jewish past under the layers of new life, blended with forgetfulness and indifference. And researchers also require the skills of ethnologists and sociologists.
The Virtual Shtetl in Belarus
Krzysztof Bielawski said that over the past two years the Shtetl team has been travelling to Belarus, visiting a total of 100 towns. The expeditions were pioneering in their nature; the region had previously been terra incognita for the team. Bielawski comments that there are relatively few internet users in Belarus, which made it difficult to obtain information in this way. Much information is missing and, according to Bielawski, at times even Jews there are not well informed how many cemeteries exist in their vicinities. The expeditions made it possible to describe sites, take photographs and record interviews with local people, which were then published on the website.
Yet many undiscovered or little known themes still remain to be explored, Bielawski notes, including the fascinating history of old colonies founded by Jewish farmers. "We usually don’t associate Jews with farmers, but Jewish farmers existed and founded their colonies, such the Kolonia Izaaka, or Palestyna [Palestine] near Sokółka."
Spoken History
Talks with local people are published in the Relacje, wspomnienia / Reports, memoirs section of the website. At times they are released as transcriptions, and in other cases they are published as online video interviews. Bielawski explains
Out of necessity, historians write their studies in a very concrete manner. They employ numbers, dates, etc. But interviews with old people convey normal life, everyday interhuman relations. In these talks, it is emotions that come through.
Bielawski frequently conducts such interviews himself and says that they have a great potential of transmitting old relations. The nonverbal, emotional and ineffable communicates in these recordings, as one can witness in the example of a talk in Belarussian with a man from Chomsk, who was forced by the Germans to dig mass graves for murdered Jews.
These are the final years to meet people who experienced this reality first-hand. This fascinating field of spoken history shows us how different the perspectives of Poles, Jews and Belarussians are, and how different the opinions about the same reality.
Discoveries
The research expeditions conducted by Virtual Shtetl bore the fruit of fascinating discoveries. Krzysztof Bielawski recalls one:
Based on archive material we knew that before the war there were very many wooden matzvas on Jewish cemeteries. But they were very fragile and were completely destroyed. I was hoping to come across one some day, perhaps not on a cemetery, but in somebody’s attic.
He did come across not one, but more than fifty wooden matzvas in 2010, in a Belarussian cemetery in the town of Lenin, south of the capital of Minsk. It was a unique find in the research thus far, and possibly the only one of its kind in Europe. Thanks to the Shtetl expedition, it was possible to discover the wooden cemetery and document the wooden matzvas, and then to ensure their restoration and conservation by the Social Association for Protecting Heritage in Minsk.
During the same expedition, Bielawski discovered the matzva of one of his friend’s ancestors. He comments that "It is very important for people who visit this land. And I also frequently perceive these places not as heritage sites but as places where people are buried and where the living search for the graves of their ancestors. (...) These experiences are very constructive and I often see the meaning of my work in them."
Memory in Stone
The work of the Shtetl usually takes on more of a virtual character, and its workers sit by computers in a very real office. Work on the Memory in Stone project takes this form, and as part of the project users are encouraged to photograph forgotten Jewish matzvas and cemeteries and upload them on the site. A huge database of images is being created in this way, which is accesible to anyone, without the necessity of speaking Hebrew.
The project makes it possible to conduct genealogic studies, and allows users to see the and read Jewish matzvas that are thousands of kilometres away and also makes it possible for them to record matzvas in their neighbourhoods and share them with others.
Jewish cemeteries and their conservation are a very delicate issue, and a motif that seems be a symbol in the history of local communities’ relations with Jewish culture. As Bielawski says, a cemetery operating for a hundred years in an average-sized town should comprise several thousands matzvas, but those of today usual total under a hundred. Numerous cemeteries have disappeared altogether. The same is true in the case of synagogues, prayer homes, mikves and other sites - they are either gone, deterioriating or now serve other purposes.
Virtual Shtetl in the Phone
The website has also created an application for smartphones, which uses GPS to point to exact locations of objects or sites related to Jewish culture. Importantly, the application has a database of sites and objects that no longer exist or have changed their function. This virtual mapping and rectification of places that no longer exist is frequently the only possible means of commemoration. The software suggests a route, displays information and presents photographs from the past. In a sense, it reconstructs this past life in virutal form. Thanks to the research, curiosity and the internet, as Albert Stankowski says, the exact location of the synagogue in Kołobrzeg at the Baltic coast was recently established, and many more places continue to emerge.
Stankowski evokes an article that was published on the BBC website in 2012, in which the journalist David Shukman describes the search for his ancestors in a small Polish town. It is exemplary of how little remains of the centuries’-long presence of Jews in Poland: Not only have the places disappeared, there are also no commemorative plaques, statues or signs. Shukman also notes how much has changed in the Polish approach toward the Holocaust since the fall of communism, while interrogating how much of this change reaches people in Poland’s small towns. Shukman cites a city map with no trace of the abandoned former Jewish cemetery and no mention of the fact that today’s bank is located in a former synangogue.
It is the Virtual Shtetl’s job to reconstruct and make present this erased reality of the past.
The Future
The Shtetl closes a certain period of its development in 2013. For more than 3 years, it has been building its archives and database and playing out the role of the largest virtual museum in Poland. This year sees the opening of Europe’s largest, most technologically advanced museum of the history of Jews. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews will be located in the building nearing completion on the site of Warsaw’s former ghetto, in the district of Muranów. The official inauguration of the building and the educational programme is scheduled for April 2013, on the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 will see the opening of the Museum’s exhibition facilities.
This will also result in changes for Virtual Shtetl. The website, which has been conjured up at a very dynamic pace by a team of historians and amateurs, is now subject to verification and improvement conducted by editors and historians. The major challenge the website now faces is its professionalisation. Bielawski comments that the difficulty of the task is double - not only is history a minefield, but that is especially the case with Jewish history, which demands huge knowledge and sensibility.
After a few years exploring the regions of Belarus, although those resources are far from being exhausted, research takes on a new direction with expeditions to Ukraine. It contains areas that are poorly researched - a virgin land, according to Bielawski, who also points to blank spots that persist even on Poland's map.
Jewish life in prewar Poland was not limited to shtetls and the cities. Close to the Polish capital, towns such as Raszyn, Brwinów and Osieck don’t incite Jewish associations, yet they had been filled with small Jewish communities. These micro-societies also call for a documentation, along with entirely forgotten villages scattered across the nation. "We have a few, or perhaps just over ten years", Bielawski concludes, "to get to those villages and talk with their dwellers who may be the only ones to know. We have a lot of work ahead of us."
A New Opening
The Shtetl is now forming a special section devoted to documenting spoken history. Albert Stankowski reveals:
When the first guests will start to arrive at the Museum [of the History of Polish Jews], it will be a huge source of information for us. They will be immigrants, the descendants of Polish Jews, pre- and postwar Jews, as this history did not stop after 1945.
The specialists of the spoken-history section intend to conduct live interviews with people who will visit the new Museum, who may well bring unique knowledge with them.
Soon the Museum and Virtual Shtetl will also begin their cooperation with Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation, which has been conducting interviews with Holocaust survivors across the world for years. Fragments of these interviews pertinent to Shtetl materials are to be translated and published on the website.
Stankowski also plans to develop the section of relations with Poland’s neighbouring countries, as very few interviews with living witnesses of history have been conducted across Europe. The Shtetl will cooperate with the Shalom Foundation, which conducts a project entitled "On common land" - a series of competitions for junior-high school students, as part of which they will conduct interviews with their grandparents and great-grandparents. This form constitutes a significant, unconventional model for cultivating memory. Stankowski notes that depicting history through the fate of an individual is a new trend in historiographic studies, and a form that speaks very strongly to the subject.
Albert Stankowski dreams of making the Shtetl an exemplary and inspirational project for other European countries. It has played this role for Lithuania, which started its version, based on the Polish Virtual Shtetl, in 2012.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Virtual Shtetl Project
Warecka 4/6, 00-040 Warsaw
Tel +48 22 471 03 83
Fax +48 22 832 20 43
Author: Mikołaj Gliński. Translated by Paulina Schlosser