Consortium

The Jewish Historical Institute was created in 1947, as a continuation of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, operating under the Central Committee of Polish Jews. It has its headquarters at 5 Tłomackie Street in Warsaw, in the rebuilt building of the pre-war Institute of Judaic Studies and the Central Judaic Library. It created the Central Archive of Polish Jewry to make the documents available to researchers as soon as possible, established the Library, which took over the collection of the Central Jewish Library, and set about organizing a museum. It also began a search for further parts of the Ringelblum Archive and initiated the publication of a Jewish-language historical quarterly ‘Bleter far Geszichte’.
Nowadays, the Jewish Historical Institute is among the oldest research institutions in the world focused on the history of Eastern European Jews. Founded by Holocaust survivors immediately after WW2, the Institute stores one of the most significant collections worldwide, including seven million pages of diverse documents, books, photographs, works of art, objects, and Judaica. Among the most relevant collections is the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known as the Ringelblum Archive. Due to its unique value, the Ringelblum Archive became a part of the UNESCO Memory of the World list. The Institute’s mission is to preserve, digitalize, and make accessible historical materials from its collections. The Institute is not only a repository of documents related to the historical presence of Jews in Poland but also a center for academic research aimed at promoting knowledge about the history and culture of Polish Jews through its rich collections. It serves both as a custodian of the historical memory and as a vibrant cultural center, actively contributing to the development of historical consciousness.
The Jewish Historical Institute is also active in publishing, issuing both Polish books and translations from other languages.
The Jewish Historical Institute is the National Coordinator and Polish leader of the EHRI. Its goal is to coordinate cooperation with partner institutions, as well as to establish new relationships with major research and exhibition centers in Poland and around the world that focus on Jewish history and Holocaust remembrance.

The Polish Center for Holocaust Research was established in 2003, as a section of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. It groups researchers from different humanities disciplines: historians, literary scholars, sociologists and psychologists. Its aim is to carry out interdisciplinary research, combine different methodologies, overcome existing schemata in Holocaust narration, uncover various cognitive perspectives and points of view, demonstrate the variety and ambiguity of historical events. The Center is involved in a number of fields – academic, educational and publishing. The researchers are trying to fill the gaps in knowledge about Holocaust, discovering new topics and scientific approaches, thus sometimes dealing with difficult problems in the context of common memory.

The Philip Friedman Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Lodz was established in 2005. The Philip Friedman Center for Jewish Studies is an academic research department focused on the history of Jews during the Holocaust with a special interest in the history of the Lodz Ghetto. The main areas of the Center’s activity are comprehensive studies of the history of the Lodz ghetto and the wartime fate of Jewish communities in central Poland. Researchers affiliated with the Phillip Friedman Center actively participate in international scientific life and are members of interdisciplinary international research projects.