From 2009 to 2011, the Nevzlin Center initiated a major international digitization project, supported generously by the Nadav Fund and coordinated by Ilya Dvorkin.
The goal of the project was to digitize a collection of several thousand visual and audio items that had been housed in the archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of Jewish Studies and to make this extraordinary material available to researchers and the general public. The archive in St. Petersburg constitutes an extremely valuable collection that was assembled in, and from, Jewish communities throughout the former Soviet Union. It contains unique photographic and audio documentation. The St. Petersburg Institute has been our full partner throughout this project.
The collection contains the fruits of several research expeditions by Jewish activists from St. Petersburg (still Leningrad during the 1980s), conducted before and after the fall of the Soviet regime. At first the expeditions were a private undertaking, and later benefitted from the sponsorship of the Jewish University in St. Petersburg (presently St. Petersburg Institute of Judaic Studies). For the most part, these activists were not professional historians; rather, they were enthusiastic, educated young Soviet Jews motivated by a desire to document this quickly fading part of the Jewish past.
The expeditions documented aspects of Jewish communal life in Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Uzbekistan. In addition, the activists collected documentation on the life of the Jewish community in Petersburg starting from the end of the Soviet period into the post-Soviet era. The digitized collection includes approximately 7000 visual images, 170 hours of audio recordings and 74 hours of videotape.
Nevzlin Center has reached an agreement with the National Library of Israel and the St. Petersburg Institute of Judaic Studies to present the digitized collection on the National Library's website.
Samples from this extansive collections can be found below:
1) Early steps of the field studies of the heritage of Jewish communities on the territory of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, before the foundation of the St. Petersburg Jewish University (1986-1988):
Early steps photo gallery (please scroll down the gallery to see all the 59 photos).
2) Some photo samples from the several expeditions of the the St. Petersburg Jewish University (currently known as St. Petersburg Institute of Jewish Studies) from the years 1990 - 1998 to Ukraine and Lithuania.
1990-1998 photo gallery (please scroll down in order to view all the photos).
3) Photo samples from the Expedition to Central Asia in coperation with the Center for Jewish Art (HU).
Central Asia photo gallery (please scroll down in order to view all the photos).
4) Documentation of the life of the Jewish community in St. Petersburg starting from the end of the Soviet period into the post-Soviet era.