Jewish Heritage Society

The Jewish Heritage Society opened in Moscow in 1989 to pursue the work that had been defined by the Russian-Jewish historians of the turn of the century. The Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Commission, established in St. Petersburg in 1908, launched a variety of projects aimed at gathering and publishing sources of Jewish history. Continued after 1917 for approximately twenty years, those projects brought important results which facilitated research of documentary materials by Western scholars throughout the 20th century. However, since the Chair of Jewish Culture of the Academy of Sciences in Kiev - the last Jewish scholarly institution in the Soviet Union - was closed by the authorities in 1948, there was no systematic research on Jewish history in Russia for some forty years. Nowadays a new generation of Russian scholars is once again developing an interest in Judaic studies, and starting from scratch. The main goal of the Society is to collect, preserve and share among scholars the "remnants of the remnants" - the documentary heritage of the Jewish past in the CIS and the Baltic states.

On-going projects and publications include:

• Preprints and Reprints series. Publication and distribution of important research articles, monographs, bibliographies and source studies which have not yet appeared in scholarly journals. The JHS Preprints series attracted attention of many Judaica scholars in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics. The Society also accepts previously published scholarly works for reprint publication.
• Depository of Sources for Jewish Scholars. Presently, the Depository includes: lists of files with sizable source material for Jewish history and surveys of those files - more than 1000 files from 80 archives; archival inventories of files of Jewish communities, organizations and individuals: politicians, public figures, scholars; copies of archival records; source studies, etc. These materials were prepared by archivists, librarians and the JHS members throughout the former USSR. The Depository is aimed to serve a source of material on Jewish history for scholars. The Society welcomes contributions of new material
• Jewish Archive Program. The main goal of the "Jewish Archive" program is to locate, describe, make available to scholars and to preserve for future generations the great amount of source material for Jewish history from state repositories of the CIS and the Baltic states and neglected collections in vanishing Jewish communities and synagogues. Much of this information is available on their Web site.
• JHS Information Bulletin. The society's quarterly bulletin includes current events and research in academic Judaic Studies, mostly devoted to research in Jewish History in Eastern Europe, including conferences, seminars, academic programs, exhibitions. The bulletin also includes academic Judaic studies on the Internet (Web sites, listservs, etc) and research institutions specializing in Judaic studies.

All JHS services and publications are free of charge.

Last updated:    July 1997

A print version of much of the information contained in this NIS Third Sector Organizations section can be found in the The Post-Soviet Handbook (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999).

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