Project puts spotlight on Jewish past
A HISTORY project has been launched to trace victims of the Holocaust with links to South Wales in order to tell their story.
The £60,000 project was given the goahead after the National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £54,200 to the Jewish History Association of South Wales (JHASW) to run the project.
The community heritage project includes research on the stories of people named at the Cardiff Reform Synagogue Memorial Tablet and will create a digital Cardiff Jewish heritage trail.
Project manager Kladija Erzen said: “We’re very grateful to receive financial support from Lottery players and the financial backing of our other supporters.”
A £1,000 donation was also made by Cardiff University; the rest was crowdfunded and donated by JHASW.
The project, which is due to run for 16 months, will also look at wider areas of South Wales, including identifying Jewish material stored with Rhondda Cynon Taff museums, as well as aiming to improve the existing records by adding new interpretations and digitising the material.
Stanley Soffa, JHASW secretary, said: “Preserving our Jewish heritage is important, it is not just buildings that we need to preserve but the stories of people who prayed in them.
“To everyone who contributed to our crowdfunding appeal I wish to give my personal thanks, as well as to all those who gave their considerable time and effort to make the first phase of our project such a great success, and I hope that they will continue to support us in these exciting times.”
The fourth part of the project will see heritage preservation toolkit built which will enable individuals and communities with no previous experience of heritage projects, to create high-quality digital outputs and make them available to as wide an audience as possible.