The Digital Forum Central and Eastern Europe e.V. (DiFMOE, Munich) would like to refer to its current cooperation project, which is being carried out in cooperation with the Institute for German Culture and History in Southeastern Europe (IKGS), the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IFA, Stuttgart), the University and State Library Düsseldorf, the Bukovina Institute (Augsburg), the National Library of Israel (Jerusalem), the World Organization of Bukovina Jews (Ramat Gan, Israel), the Martin-Opitz-Library (Herne), the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS, Regensburg) and the Czernowitz Discussion Group.
The new collection consists of several parts. On the one hand, there are 16 historical newspapers that were produced in the former Austrian and then Romanian Bukovina in the interwar period, mainly under Jewish editorship in German and Yiddish. Liberal papers such as the “Czernowitzer Morgenblatt” or the “Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung” found their readership in broad circles of the German-speaking population groups, as they represented the interests of all national minorities in the new state. The “Tšernowitzer bleter”, the “Arbeter Tsaytung” or “Di frayhayt”, printed in Yiddish, on the other hand, reflect political, cultural and ideological internal Jewish discourses against the background of the ongoing curtailment of the basic rights of Jews by the Romanian government. With the “Czernowitzer Deutsche Tagespost”, a newspaper was also taken into account, which after 1933, in unison with and supported by Berlin, participated in the numerous anti-Semitic smear campaigns that ultimately resulted in the extermination of a large part of the Jewish population in Bukovina. “Die Stimme”, launched in 1944 by Elias Weinstein in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and still published in Israel today, became a printed information and communication platform for survivors after the Holocaust.
In addition to digitizing this periodical source corpus and putting it online, DiFMOE, in cooperation with the Czernowitz Discussion Group, the global virtual association of around 500 Jewish Bucovinian Holocaust survivors and their descendants, integrated selected parts of the group's own archive with valuable personal and family documents in the digital library. Within the Jüdisch-Deutsche Bukowina 1918+ collection, the around 1,000 objects can be viewed both in their entirety and sorted by the individual private collections of the members.
The German administrator of the Czernowitz Discussion Group, Edgar Hauster, made a special source available from his personal family archive: 122 letters from the correspondence of grandfather Elias Hauster with his son Julius Hauster (the second son Maximilian was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943) give the reader a profound impression of everyday life, of mental life, but above all of the great plight of the Romanian Holocaust survivors immediately after the end of the Second World War (1946-1949). For the best possible (scientific) use of the contents of the outstanding historical record "The Correspondence of Elias Hauster", the high-resolution scans of the handwritten letters were combined with the transcriptions, which were also elaborately created by Edgar Hauster, in a digitally created book and thus made full-text searchable.
Link to the collection:
Link to the detailed project description (in German):
https://www.difmoe.info/projekte/j%C3%BCdisch-deutsche-bukowina-1918/
The project is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Germany)